in 1817 is to the same effect, and helped by much the same arguments, as the appeal of Past and Present, or of the essay on Chartism.

In Coleridge's prose there are many interludes of different kinds, and of all degrees of value. Of these the account of his interview with Klopstock, in Satyrane's Letters (Biographia Literaria), is one of the most singular, through the contrast of its short phrases and its ironical reserve, with the voluble expression of the author's more habitual didactic moods.

It is seldom that the prose of Coleridge is decorated in any adventitious way. There are many illustrations, but rarely any that look as if they had been stuck on for effect. The argument in its course discovers its own illustrations: "the wheels take fire from the rapidity of their motion," to borrow a phrase that Coleridge himself had applied to his own youthful oratory (Letter to Sir George and Lady Beaumont, 1st October 1803), before he used it in his splendid acknowledgment of the genius of Dryden. There is evidence, however, that when he chose he could play lightly with the weapons of prose argument. The marginal gloss to the Ancient Mariner (1828) is one of his finest compositions, in an unfamiliar mood; a translation or transposition of his poem, for a purely artistic end, such as had never come within the view of the Watchman, or any other of the serious monitors of Church and State. The exercise was wholly different from that to which he was accustomed. It was not the evolution of an argument; it was minute work, piecemeal, following the lines of a composition already finished, giving no room for anything like his usual copious paragraphs of edification, compelling him to write for the mere beauty of writing.

In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.

Nowhere else in the works of Coleridge is the element of prose thus disengaged from matter. It is significant of Coleridge's spirit, that in his moral treatises he never relied on anything like the charm of this prose, to gain applause or acceptance for his doctrines. Whether he fought well or slackly, he was always a combatant in his prose essays, and never a vendor of merely

ornamental rhetoric. He never allowed himself to be tempted
by any attraction inconsistent with his purpose; his digressions
were always prompted by something in the matter, never by the
vanities of language; he used no rhetorical display except what
was immediately intended to support his ethical strategy. It is
this consistency that distinguishes his style, even in its most
intricate and florid passages, from all the varieties of ostentatious
literature.
W. P. KER.

THE PRIVILEGE OF GENIUS

BUT how shall I avert the scorn of those critics who laugh at the oldness of my topics, evil and good, necessity and arbitrement, immortality and the ultimate aim? By what shall I regain their favour? My themes must be new, a French constitution; a balloon; a change of ministry; a fresh batch of kings on the Continent, or of peers in our happier island; or who had the best of it of two parliamentary gladiators, and whose speech, on the subject of Europe bleeding at a thousand wounds, or our own country struggling for herself and all human nature was cheered by the greatest number of "laughs," "loud laughs,” and “very loud laughs": (which, carefully marked by italics, form most conspicuous and strange parentheses in the newspaper reports). Or if I must be philosophical, the last chemical discoveries, provided I do not trouble my reader with the principle which gives them their highest interest, and the character of intellectual grandeur to the discoverer; or the last shower of stones, and that they were supposed, by certain philosophers, to have been projected from some volcano in the moon, taking care, however, not to add any of the cramp reasons for this opinion! Something new, however, it must be, quite new and quite out of themselves! for whatever is within them, whatever is deep within them, must be as old as the first dawn of human reason. But to find no contradiction in the union of old and new, to contemplate the Ancient of Days with feelings as fresh as if they sprang forth at His own fiat, this characterises the minds that feel the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it! To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the child's sense of wonderment and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years has rendered familiar,

VOL. V

With sun and moon and stars throughout the year,
And man and woman-

G

this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent. And so to represent familiar objects as to awaken the minds of others to a like freshness of sensation concerning them (that constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily convalescence)—to the same modest questioning of a self-discovered and intelligent ignorance, which like the deep and massy foundations of a Roman bridge, forms half of the whole structure (prudens interrogatio dimidium scientiæ, says Lord Bacon)—this is the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation. Who has not, a thousand times, seen it snow upon water? Who has not seen it with a new feeling, since he has read Burns's comparison of sensual pleasure to

the snowfall in the river,

A moment white-then melts for ever!

In philosophy, equally as in poetry, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues the stalest and most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission. Extremes meet-a proverb, by the by, to collect and explain all the instances and exemplifications of which, would constitute and exhaust all philosophy. Truths, of all others the most awful and mysterious, yet being at the same time of universal interest, are too often considered as so true that they lose all the powers of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.

(From The Friend.)

THIS ENLIGHTENED AGE

WHEN I named this essay a sermon, I sought to prepare the inquirers after it for the absence of all the usual softenings suggested by worldly prudence, of all compromise between truth and courtesy. But not even as a sermon would I have addressed the present discourse to a promiscuous audience; and for this reason I likewise announced it in the title-page, as exclusively ad clerum; i.e. (in the old and wide sense of the word), to men of clerkly acquirements of whatever profession. I would that the greater part of our publications could be thus directed, each to

its appropriate class of readers. But this cannot be! For among other odd burs and kecksies, the misgrowth of our luxuriant activity, we have now a reading public-as strange a phrase, methinks, as ever forced a splenetic smile on the staid countenance of meditation; and yet no fiction! For our readers have, in good truth, multiplied exceedingly, and have waxed proud. It would require the intrepid accuracy of a Colquhoun to venture at the precise number of that vast company only, whose heads and hearts are dieted at the two public ordinaries of literature, the circulating libraries and the periodical press. But what is the result? Does the inward man thrive on this regimen? Alas! if the average health of the consumers may be judged of by the articles of largest consumption; if the secretions may be conjectured from the ingredients of the dishes that are found best suited to their palates; from all that I have seen, either of the banquet or the guests, I shall utter my profaccia with a desponding sigh. From a popular philosophy and a philosophic populace, Good Sense deliver us!

At present, however, I am to imagine for myself a very different audience. I appeal exclusively to men, from whose station and opportunities I may dare anticipate a respectable portion of that sound book-learnedness, into which our old public schools still continue to initiate their pupils. I appeal to men in whom I may hope to find, if not philosophy, yet occasional impulses at least to philosophic thought. And here, as far as my own experience extends, I can announce one favourable symptom. The notion of our measureless superiority in good sense to our ancestors, so general at the commencement of the French Revolution, and for some years before it, is out of fashion. We hear, at least, less of the jargon of this enlightened age. After fatiguing itself, as performer or spectator in the giddy figure-dance of political changes, Europe has seen the shallow foundations of its self-complacent faith give way; and among men of influence and property, we have now more reason to apprehend the stupor of despondence, than the extravagancies of hope, unsustained by experience or of self-confidence not bottomed on principle.

In this rank of life the danger lies, not in any tendency to innovation, but in the choice of the means for preventing it. And here my apprehensions point to two opposite errors; each of which deserves a separate notice. The first consists in a