as the motto of his whole life. Besides the physical inertness which made him prefer speculation to action, talking to writing, there should also be mentioned among the causes of his comparatively small performance, the poverty which continually disturbed him and drove him to newspaper writing and other kinds of hack-work. "From circumstances," he wrote in 1821, "the main portion of my harvest is still on the ground, ripe indeed, and only waiting, a few for the sickle, but a large part only for the sheaving and carting and housing; but from all this I must turn away, must let them rot as they lie, and be as though they had never been, for I must go and gather blackberries and earth-nuts, or pick mushrooms and gild oak-apples for the palates and fancies of chance customers."

But while, from all these causes, Coleridge's prose writings are, as a whole, unsatisfactory, their importance in another way can hardly be overestimated. His thoughts live on in the impulses which they have awakened in other minds, and take on ever new forms and combinations, lost and scattered in the general mass of opinion which they have helped to create. It was in his suggestiveness that his great service to posterity resided. He was what J. S. Mill calls a "seminal mind," and his thinking had that power of stimulating thought in others which is the mark and the privilege of original genius. Many a man has owed to some pregnant saying of Coleridge's, if not the birth in himself of a new intellectual life, at least the starting of fruitful trains of reflection, which have modified his whole view of certain subjects. On everything that he left is set the seal of high mental authority. In the

ology, in philosophy, in political speculation and literary criticism, he set currents flowing which are flowing yet.

Talk was the medium through which Coleridge most strongly influenced his own and the younger generation. Wonderful things are told of his eloquent monologues by Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Talfourd, Carlyle, and indeed by all who had listened to him. "No talk in his century or any other could be more surprising," is the testimony of Carlyle, in his admiring but not altogether respectful report of the matter. At the house of Mr. Gillman, at Highgate, where Coleridge found an asylum during the last years of his life (1816-1834), he held a sort of philosophical salon, and was eagerly resorted to by "young, inquiring men," to whom he was as an oracle, "a kind of prophetic or magician character." Among these young seekers after truth were Edward Irving, Julius Hare, Arthur Hallam, F. D. Maurice, and many others, through whose writings the master's teaching became operative upon the general body of English opinion.

It is now time to consider briefly what the character and tendency of that teaching were in the various departments of literary criticism, politics, theology, and metaphysics. As a literary critic, if certain deductions be made in favor of his violent prejudice against the French nation, Coleridge is unsurpassed for fineness of insight and breadth of comprehension. His writings in this department are of more lasting interest than in any other, yet they are even less consecutive than his political and theological works. His critical opinions have to be gathered from scattered sources,

He was seldom capable of insulating a subject and treating it with firmness and fullness in a single essay. But his hints are weighty enough to have compelled all subsequent critics to think his thoughts over again. Modern English criticism goes back to Coleridge for its starting point, as German philosophy goes to Kant. He represented in theory, as in practice, the reaction against eighteenth century academicism, the Popean tradition in poetry, and the shallow maxims of pseudoclassicism, just as the Critical Philosophy represents the reaction against the dogmatism of Wolf. He revolutionized, for one thing, the traditional view of Shakspeare. He pointed out that what had been currently regarded as the accidental products of a wild and irregular genius in our great dramatist, were likewise the results of a profound art: that Shakspeare was correct" in a truer sense than Racine. He did this for the English public at the same time that Schlegel was doing it for the Germans, but in a great measure independently of Schlegel.*

*

Schlegel's lectures, Ueber Dramatische Kunst und Litteratur, were delivered at Vienna in the spring of 1808, and published in 1809. Coleridge's first series of lectures, on poetry and art, was delivered in the spring of 1808 before the Royal Institution. He claimed that in these lectures he had already anticipated the principles of Shakspearean criticism which he was afterward accused of borrowing from Schlegel. No reports of this first series of lectures exist. In 1811-12 he delivered a second course, of seventeen lectures, on Shakspeare and Milton, before the London Philosophical Society, seven of which were published in 1856 by Mr. J. Payne Collier, from shorthand notes taken at the time. In 1818 a third course of lectures, on a wide variety of literary topics, was given at a lecture room in Flower de Luce Court, near the Temple.

Coleridge's method in criticism is always psychological. In this, as in all other provinces of thought, he was still endeavoring to lay his groundwork in the philosophy of the mind. It must be acknowledged that this method is sometimes exasperating to the merely literary reader. It is going a good way back for a start when, in the Biographia Literaria, the author is led on from his history of the inception of the Lyrical Ballads, to pursue a chance hint as to the proportions of fancy and imagination in Wordsworth's poetry, through ten stricken chapters, in which he discusses the law of association of ideas, the Hartleian, Cartesian, and Kantian systems; throws in a chapter of digression and anecdotes, winds up with an analysis of the imagination or " esemplastic power," and finally, in Chapter XIV., brings round again to the Lyrical Ballads.

Coleridge, like Lamb, did much to revive an interest in the old English dramatists, poets, and humorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The

The fourth, fifth, and sixth of this series were devoted to Shakspeare and “comprised," as the prospectus announced, “the substance of Mr. Coleridge's former courses on the same subject, enlarged and varied by subsequent study and reflection." These were the lectures which, partly written out and partly in the shape of rough, preparatory notes, were published in the first and second volumes of the Literary Remains (1836). They contain a number of passages borrowed, in substance, from Schlegel's Dramatic Lectures, but engrafted with original matter of so high value that no harsher name than interpretation will fit such borrowing. Coleridge was certainly never guilty of intentional plagiarism, though his vague, forgetful habit of mind made him careless in his manner of acknowledging literary debts.

terminology of criticism is in his debt for many of those convenient distinctions, familiar to-day, but which he was among the first to introduce, or to enforce and illustrate the distinction between fancy and imagination, genius and talent, wit and humor, a copy and an imitation, etc. His definitions and apothegms are met with everywhere. "Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist." "Prose is words in their best order; poetry, the best words in the best order," and the like. Of equal authority are the numerous critical dicta scattered through his writings, e. g., that Hebrew poetry had sublimity, and Greek had not; that Shakspeare is sometimes coarse but never gross; that Othello was not naturally jealous, but Leontes, in the Winter's Tale, was; that Polonius was "the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed." Next to his notes on Shakspeare, the most important contributions of Coleridge to literary criticism are to be found in the chapters of the Biographia Literaria devoted to the discussion of Wordsworth's poetry and to the theory of poetic diction announced in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads ; and in particular, in Chapters IV., XIV.-XXII.: and in various passages scattered through his volume of Table Talk.*

*The Biographia Literaria (1817), was described by its author as a history of his literary life and opinions, and as a treatise on the true nature of poetic diction. Though without sequence or conclusion, the Biographia Literaria is, perhaps, that one among his prose books which lovers of Coleridge turn to oftenest and would miss most. It is exceedingly rich in thought, and its analysis of the principles of poetic composition is profound.

Coleridge's Table Talk (1835), consists of selections from notes