of all Goethe's works; but because it is the most popular, our author takes an opportunity to express his contempt for it. Count Egmont, which is here spoken highly of, seems to us a most insipid and preposterous composition. The effect of the pathos which is said to lie concealed in it, is utterly lost upon us. Nathan the Wise, by Lessing, is also a great favourite of Schlegel; because it is unintelligible except to the wise. As the French plays are composed of a tissue of commonplaces, the German plays of this stamp are a tissue of paradoxes, which have no foundation in nature or common opinion,-the pure offspring of the author's fantastic brain. For the same reason, Schiller's Wallenstein is here preferred to his Robbers. But we cannot so readily give up our old attachment to the Robbers. The first reading of that play is an event in every one's life, which is not to be forgotten.

Madame de Staël has very happily ridiculed this pedantic's taste in criticism.

By a singular vicissitude in taste, it has happened, that the Germans at first attacked our dramatic writers, as converting all their heroes into Frenchmen. They have, with reason, insisted on historic truth as necessary to contrast the colours, and give life to the poetry. But then, all at once, they have been weary of their own success in this way, and have produced abstract representations, in which the relations of mankind were expressed in a general manner, and in which time, place and circumstance, passed for nothing. In a drama of this kind by Goethe, the author calls the different characters the Duke, the King, the Father, the Daughter, &c., without any other designation.

Such a tragedy is only calculated to be acted in the palace of Odin, where the dead still continue their different occupations on earth; where the hunter, himself a shade, eagerly pursues the shade of a stag; and fantastic warriors combat together in the clouds. It should appear, that Goethe at one period conceived an absolute disgust to all interest in dramatic compositions. It was sometimes to

be met with in bad works; and he concluded, that it ought to be banished from good ones. Nevertheless, a man of superior mind ought not to disdain what gives universal pleasure; he cannot relinquish his resemblance with his kind, if he wishes to make others feel his own value. Granting that the tyranny of custom often introduces an artificial air into the best French tragedies, it cannot be denied that there is the same want of natural expression in the systematic and theoretical productions of the German muse. If exaggerated declamation is affected, there is a certain kind of intellectual calm which is not less so. It is a kind of arrogated

superiority over the affections of the soul, which may accord very well with philosophy, but is totally out of character in the dramatic art. Goethe's works are composed according to different principles and systems. In the Tasso and Iphigenia, he conceives of tragedy as a lofty relic of the monuments of antiquity. These works have all the beauty of form, the splendour and glossy smoothness of marble;-but they are as cold and as motionless.'

We have, we trust, said enough of this work, to recommend it to the reader: We ought to add, that the translation appears to be very respectable.

VOL. XXVII.]

COLERIDGE'S LAY SERMON

[December 1816.

THE privilege' (says a certain author) of talking, and even publishing nonsense, is necessary in a free state; but the more sparingly we make use of it, the better.' Mr. Coleridge has here availed himself of this privilege, but not sparingly. On the contrary, he has given full scope to his genius, and laid himself out in absurdity. In this his first Lay-sermon (for two others are to follow at graceful distances), we meet with an abundance of 'fancies and good-nights,' odd ends of verse, and sayings of philosophers; with the ricketty contents of his commonplace book, piled up and balancing one another in helpless confusion; but with not one word to the purpose, or on the subject. An attentive perusal of this Discourse is like watching the sails of a windmill: his thoughts and theories rise and disappear in the same manner. Clouds do not shift their places more rapidly, dreams do not drive one another out more unaccountably, than Mr. Coleridge's reasonings try in vain to chase his fancy's rolling speed.' His intended conclusions have always the start of his premises, and they keep it: while he himself plods anxiously between the two, something like a man travelling a long, tiresome road, between two stage coaches, the one of which is gone out of sight before, and the other never comes up with him; for Mr. Coleridge himself takes care of this; and if he finds himself in danger of being overtaken, and carried to his journey's end in a common vehicle, he immediately steps aside into some friendly covert, with the Metaphysical Muse, to prevent so unwelcome a catastrophe. In his weary quest of truth, he reminds us of the mendicant pilgrims that travellers meet in the Desert, with their faces always turned towards Mecca, but who contrive never to reach the shrine of the Prophet: and he treats his opinions, and his reasons for them, as lawyers do

their clients, and will never suffer them to come together lest they should join issue, and so put an end to his business. It is impossible, in short, we find, to describe this strange rhapsody, without falling a little into the style of it;—and, to do it complete justice, we must use its very words. Implicité, it is without the COPULA—it wants the possibility of every position, to which there exists any correspondence in reality.'

Our Lay-preacher, in order to qualify himself for the office of a guide to the blind, has not, of course, once thought of looking about for matters of fact, but very wisely draws a metaphysical bandage over his eyes, sits quietly down where he was, takes his nap, and talks in his sleep-but we really cannot say very wisely. He winks and mutters all unintelligible, and all impertinent things. Instead of inquiring into the distresses of the manufacturing or agricultural districts, he ascends to the orbits of the fixed stars, or else enters into the statistics of the garden plot under his window, and, like Falstaff, 'babbles of green fields: ' instead of the balance of the three estates, King, Lords, and Commons, he gives us a theory of the balance of the powers of the human mind, the Will, the Reason, and-the Understanding: instead of referring to the tythes or taxes, he quotes the Talmud; and illustrates the whole question of peace and war, by observing, that the ideal republic of Plato was, if he judges rightly, to "the history of the town of Man-Soul" what Plato was to John Bunyan :'- -a most safe and politic conclusion!

Mr. Coleridge is not one of those whom he calls alarmists by trade,' but rather, we imagine, what Spenser calls a gentle Husher, Vanity by name.' If he does not excite apprehension, by pointing out danger and difficulties where they do not exist, neither does he inspire confidence, by pointing out the means to prevent them where they do. We never indeed saw a work that could do less good or less harm; for it relates to no one object, that any one person can have in view. It tends to produce a complete interregnum of all opinions; an abeyance of the understanding; a suspension both of theory and practice; and is indeed a collection of doubts and mootpoints-all hindrances and no helps. An uncharitable critic might insinuate, that there was more quackery than folly in all this;—and it is certain, that our learned author talks as magnificently of his nostrums, as any advertising impostor of them all-and professes to be in possession of all sorts of morals, religions, and political panaceas, which he keeps to himself, and expects you to pay for the secret. He is always promising great things, in short, and performs nothing. The vagaries, whimsies, and pregnant throes of Joanna Southcote, were sober and rational, compared with Mr. Coleridge's

qualms and crude conceptions, and promised deliverance in this LaySermon. The true secret of all this, we suspect, is, that our author has not made up his own mind on any of the subjects of which he professes to treat, and on which he warns his readers against coming to any conclusion, without his especial assistance; by means of which, they may at last attain to 'that imperative and oracular form of the understanding,' of which he speaks as the form of reason itself in all things purely rational and moral.' In this state of voluntary selfdelusion, into which he has thrown himself, he mistakes hallucinations for truths, though he still has his misgivings, and dares not communicate them to others, except in distant hints, lest the spell should be broken, and the vision disappear. Plain sense and plain speaking would put an end to those thick-coming fancies,' that lull him to repose. It is in this sort of waking dream, this giddy maze of opinions, started, and left, and resumed this momentary pursuit of truths, as if they were butterflies—that Mr. Coleridge's pleasure, and, we believe, his chief faculty, lies. He has a thousand shadowy thoughts that rise before him, and hold each a glass, in which they point to others yet more dim and distant. He has a thousand selfcreated fancies that glitter and burst like bubbles. In the world of shadows, in the succession of bubbles, there is no preference but of the most shadowy, no attachment but to the shortest-lived. Mr. Coleridge accordingly has no principle but that of being governed entirely by his own caprice, indolence, or vanity; no opinion that any body else holds, or even he himself, for two moments together. His fancy is stronger than his reason; his apprehension greater than his comprehension. He perceives every thing, but the relations of things to one another. His ideas are as finely shaded as the rainbow of the moon upon the clouds, as evanescent, and as soon dissolved. The subtlety of his tact, the quickness and airiness of his invention, make him perceive every possible shade and view of a subject in its turn; but this readiness of lending his imagination to every thing, prevents him from weighing the force of any one, or retaining the most important in mind. It destroys the balance and momentum of his feelings; makes him unable to follow up a principle into its consequences, or maintain a truth in spite of opposition: it takes away all will to adhere to what is right, and reject what is wrong; and, with the will, the power to do it, at the expense of any thing difficult in thought, or irksome in feeling. The consequence is, that the general character of Mr. Coleridge's intellect, is a restless and yet listless dissipation, that yields to every impulse, and is stopped by every obstacle; an indifference to the greatest trifles, or the most important truths: or rather, a preference of the vapid to the solid, of

the possible to the actual, of the impossible to both; of theory to practice, of contradiction to reason, and of absurdity to common Perhaps it is well that he is so impracticable as he is; for whenever, by any accident, he comes to practice, he is dangerous in the extreme. Though his opinions are neutralized in the extreme levity of his understanding, we are sometimes tempted to suspect that they may be subjected to a more ignoble bias; for though he does not ply his oars very strenuously in following the tide of corruption, or set up his sails to catch the tainted breeze of popularity, he suffers his boat to drift along with the stream. We do not pretend to understand the philosophical principles of that anomalous production, the Friend;' but we remember that the practical measures which he there attempted to defend, were the expedition to Copenhagen, the expedition to Walcheren, and the assassination of Buonaparte, which, at the time Mr. Coleridge was getting that work into circulation, was a common topic of conversation, and a sort of forlorn hope in certain circles. A man who exercises an unlimited philosophical scepticism on questions of abstract right or wrong, may be of service to the progress of truth; but a writer who exercises this privilege, with a regular leaning to the side of power, is a very questionable sort of person. There is not much of this kind in the present Essay. It has no leaning any way. All the sentiments advanced in it are like the swan's down feather

'That stands upon the swell at full of tide,

And neither way inclines.'

We have here given a pretty strong opinion on the merits of this performance: and we proceed to make it good by extracts from the work itself; and it is just as well to begin with the beginning.

If our whole knowledge and information concerning the Bible had been confined to the one fact, of its immediate derivation from God, we should still presume that it contained rules and assistances for all conditions of men, under all circumstances; and therefore for communities no less than for individuals. The contents of every work must correspond to the character and designs of the workmaster; and the inference in the present case is too obvious to be overlooked, too plain to be resisted. It requires, indeed, all the might of superstition, to conceal from a man of common understanding, the further truth, that the interment of such a treasure, in a dead language, must needs be contrary to the intentions of the gracious Donor. Apostasy itself dared not question the premise: and, that the practical consequence did not follow, is conceivable only under a complete system of delusion, which, from the cradle to the