be written, but there is good reason for believing that it is the best book that has been written, on poetry in the English tongue.

(2) Coleridge as a Talker.

Coleridge's talk resembles the movements of one of the heavenly bodies. It moves luminously on its way without impediment, without conflict. When Dr. Johnson talks, half our pleasure is due to our sense of conflict. His sentences are knobby sticks. We love him as a good man playing the bully even more than as a wise man talking common sense. He is one of the comic characters in literature. He belongs, in his eloquence, to the same company as Falstaff and Micawber. He was, to some extent, the invention of a Scottish humourist named Boswell. "Burke," we read in Coleridge's Table Talk, “said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in talking than writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life." Coleridge's conversation is not to the same extent a coloured expression of personality. He speaks out of the solitude of an oracle rather than struts upon the stage of good company, a master of repartees. At his best, he becomes the mouthpiece of universal wisdom, as when he says: "To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed." He can give us in a sentence the central truth of politics, reconciling what is good in Individualism with what is good in Socialism in a score or so of words:

That is the most excellent state of society in which the patriotism of the citizen ennobles, but does not merge, the individual energy of the man.

And he can give common sense as well as wisdom imaginative form, as in the sentence:

Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels of Error, lest you get your brains knocked out.

"I am, by the law of my nature, a reasoner," said Coleridge, and he explained that he did not mean by this

"an arguer." He was a discoverer of order, of laws, of causes, not a controversialist. He sought after principles, whether in politics or literature. He quarrelled with Gibbon because his Decline and Fall was "little else but a disguised collection of . . . splendid anecdotes" instead of a philosophic search for the ultimate causes of the ruin of the Roman Empire. Coleridge himself formulated these causes in sentences that are worth remembering at a time when we are debating whether the world of the future is to be a vast boxing ring of empires or a community of independent nations. He said:

The true key to the declension of the Roman Empire-which is not to be found in all Gibbon's immense work-may be stated in two words: the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.

One must not claim too much for Coleridge, however. He was a seer with his head among the stars, but he was also a human being with uneven gait, stumbling amid infirmities, prejudices, and unhappinesses. He himself boasted in a delightful sentence:

For one mercy I owe thanks beyond all utterance-that, with all my gastric and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like the head of a mountain in blue air and sunshine.

It is to be feared that Coleridge's "gastric and bowel distempers" had more effect on his head than he was aware of. Like other men, he often spoke out of a heart full of grievances. He uttered the bitterness of an unhappily married dyspeptic when he said: "The most happy marriage I can picture or image to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.” It is amusing to recall that one of the many books which he wished to write was "a book on the duties of women, more especially to their husbands." One feels, again, that in his defence of the egoism of the great reformers, he was apologizing for a vice of his own rather than making an impersonal statement of truth. "How can a tall man help thinking

of his size," he asked, when dwarfs are constantly standing on tiptoe beside him?" The personal note that occasionally breaks in upon the oracular rhythm of the Table Talk, however, is a virtue in literature, even if a lapse in philosophy. The crumbs of a great man's autobiography are no less precious than the crumbs of his wisdom. There are moods in which one prefers his egotism to his great thoughts. It is pleasant to hear Coleridge boasting: "The Ancient Mariner cannot be imitated, nor the poem Love. They may be excelled; they are not imitable." One is amused to know that he succeeded in offending Lamb on one occasion by illustrating "the cases of vast genius in proportion to talent and the predominance of talent in conjunction with genius in the persons of Lamb and himself." It is amusing, too, to find that, while Wordsworth regarded The Ancient Mariner as a dangerous drag on the popularity of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge looked on his poem as the feature that had sold the greatest number of the copies of the book. It is only fair to add that in taking this view he spoke not self-complacently, but humorously:

I was told by Longmans that the greater part of the Lyrical Ballads had been sold to seafaring men, who, having heard of the Ancient Mariner, concluded that it was a naval song-book, or, at all events, that it had some relation to nautical matters.

Of autobiographical confessions there are not so many in Table Talk as one would like. At the same time, there are one or two which throw light on the nature of Coleridge's imagination. We get an idea of one of the chief differences between the poetry of Coleridge and the poetry of Wordsworth when we read the confession :

I have the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim one of the relation of place. I remember the man or the tree, but where I saw them I mostly forget.

The nephew who collected Coleridge's talk declared that there was no man whom he would more readily have chosen as a guide in morals, but " I would not take him as a guide through streets or fields or earthly roads." The author

of Kubla Khan asserted still more strongly on another occasion his indifference to locality:

Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact but harmonious opposites in this-that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations, just as a bright pan of brass, when beaten, is said to attract the swarming bees; whereas, for myself, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson, I believe. I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features. Yet I receive as much pleasure in reading the account of the battle, in Herodotus, as anyone can. Charles Lamb wrote an essay on a man who lived in past time I thought of adding another to it on one who lived not in time at all, past, present, or future-but beside or collaterally.

Some of Coleridge's other memories are of a more trifling and amusing sort. He recalls, for instance, the occasion of his only flogging at school. He had gone to a shoemaker and asked to be taken on as an apprentice. The shoemaker, "being an honest man," had at once told the boy's master:

Bowyer asked me why I had made myself such a fool? to which I answered, that I had a great desire to be a shoemaker, and that I hated the thought of being a clergyman. "Why so?" said he. "Because, to tell you the truth, sir," said I, "I am an infidel!" For this, without more ado, Bowyer flogged me-wisely, as I thinksoundly, as I know. Any whining or sermonizing would have gratified my vanity, and confirmed me in my absurdity; as it was, I laughed at, and got heartily ashamed of, my folly.

Among the reminiscences of Coleridge no passage is more famous than that in which he relates how, as he was walking in a lane near Highgate one day, a "loose, slack, not well-dressed youth" was introduced to him:

So.

It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said: "Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!" "There is death in that hand," I said to when Keats was gone;

yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.

Another famous anecdote relates to the time at which Coleridge, like Wordsworth, carried the fires of the French Revolution about him into the peace of the West Country.

Speaking of a fellow-disciple of the liberty of those days, Coleridge afterwards said:

John Thelwall had something very good about him. We were once sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks, when I said to him: "Citizen John, this is a fine place to talk treason in!" "Nay! Citizen Samuel," replied he, "it is rather a place to make a man forget that there is any necessity for treason!"

Is there any prettier anecdote in literary history?

Besides the impersonal wisdom and the personal anecdotes of the Table Talk, however, there are a great number of opinions which show us Coleridge not as a seer, but as a "character "-a crusty gentleman, every whit as ready to express an antipathy as a principle. He shared Dr. Johnson's quarrel with the Scots, and said of them :

I have generally found a Scotchman with a little literature very disagreeable. He is a superficial German or a dull Frenchman. The Scotch will attribute merit to people of any nation rather than the English.

He had no love for Jews, or Dissenters, or Catholics, and anticipated Carlyle's hostility to the emancipation of the negroes. He raged against the Reform Bill, Catholic Emancipation, and the education of the poor in schools. He was indignant with Belgium for claiming national independence. One cannot read much of his talk about politics without amazement that so wise a man should have been so frequently a fool. At the same time, he generally remained an original fool. He never degenerated into a mere partisan. He might be deceived by reactionary ideals, but he was not taken in by reactionary leaders. He was no more capable than Shelley of mistaking Castlereagh for a great man, and he did not join in the glorification of Pitt. Like Dr. Johnson, he could be a Tory without feeling that it was necessary at all costs to bully Ireland. Coleridge, indeed, went so far as to wish to cut the last link with Ireland as the only means of saving England. Discussing the Irish question, he said:

I am quite sure that no dangers are to be feared by England from the disannexing and independence of Ireland at all comparable with