Title:   Biographia Literaria

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Author:   Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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Biographia Literaria

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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Table of Contents

Biographia Literaria ...........................................................................................................................................1

Samuel Taylor Coleridge.........................................................................................................................1

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Biographia Literaria

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

CHAPTER I 

CHAPTER II 

CHAPTER III 

CHAPTER IV 

CHAPTER V 

CHAPTER VI 

CHAPTER VII 

CHAPTER VIII 

CHAPTER IX 

CHAPTER X 

CHAPTER XI 

CHAPTER XII 

CHAPTER XIII  

CHAPTER I.

The motives of the present work—Reception of 

the Author’s first publication—The discipline 

of his taste at school—The effect of contem 

porary writers on youthful minds—Bowles’s 

sonnets—Comparison between the Poets before 

and since Mr. Pope.

IT has been my lot to have had my 

name introduced both in conversation, and in 

print, more frequently than I find it easy to 

explain, whether I consider the fewness, unim 

portance, and limited circulation of my writings, 

or the retirement and distance, in which I have 

lived, both from the literary and political world. 

Most often it has been connected with some 

charge, which I could not acknowledge, or 

some principle which I had never entertained. 

Nevertheless, had I had no other motive, or 

incitement, the reader would not have been 

troubled with this exculpation. What my ad 

ditional purposes were, will be seen in the fol 

lowing pages. It will be found, that the least 

of what I have written concerns myself per 

sonally. I have used the narration chiefly for 

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the purpose of giving a continuity to the work, 

in part for the sake of the miscellaneous reflec 

tions suggested to me by particular events, but 

still more as introductory to the statement of 

my principles in Politics, Religion, and Phi 

losophy, and the application of the rules, dedu 

ced from philosophical principles, to poetry and 

criticism. But of the objects, which I proposed 

to myself, it was not the least important to 

effect, as far as possible, a settlement of the 

long continued controversy concerning the true 

nature of poetic diction: and at the same time 

to define with the utmost impartiality the real

poetic character of the poet, by whose writings 

this controversy was first kindled, and has been 

since fuelled and fanned.

In 1794, when I had barely passed the verge 

of manhood, I published a small volume of 

juvenile poems. They were received with a 

degree of favor, which, young as I was, I well 

knew, was bestowed on them not so much for 

any positive merit, as because they were consi 

dered buds of hope, and promises of better 

works to come. The critics of that day, the 

most flattering, equally with the severest, 

concurred in objecting to them, obscurity, a general 

turgidness of diction, and a profusion of new 

coined double epithets.* The first is the fault 

which a writer is the least able to detect in 

his own compositions: and my mind was not 

then sufficiently disciplined to receive the au 

thority of others, as a substitute for my own 

conviction. Satisfied that the thoughts, such as 

they were, could not have been expressed other 

wise, or at least more perspicuously, I forgot 

to enquire, whether the thoughts themselves

The authority of Milton and Shakspeare may be use 

fully pointed out to young authors. In the Comus, and earlier 

Poems of Milton there is a superfluity of double epithets; 

while in the Paradise Lost we find very few, in the Paradise 

Regained scarce any. The same remark holds almost equally 

true, of the Love’s Labour Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Venus 

and Adonis, and Lucrece compared with the Lear, Macbeth, 

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Othello, and Hamlet of our great Dramatist. The rule for 

the admission of double epithets seems to be this: either 

that they should be already denizens of our Language, such 

as bloodstained, terrorstricken, selfapplauding: or when 

a new epithet, or one found in books only, is hazarded, that 

it, at least, be one word, not two words made one by mere 

virtue of the printer’s hyphen. A language which, like the 

English, is almost without cases, is indeed in its very genius 

unfitted for compounds. If a writer, every time a com 

pounded word suggests itself to him, would seek for some 

other mode of expressing the same sense, the chances are 

always greatly in favor of his finding a better word. "Tan 

quam scopulum sic vites insolens verbum," is the wise advice 

of Cæsar to the Roman Orators, and the precept applies 

with double force to the writers in our own language. But 

it must not be forgotten, that the same Cæesar wrote a gram 

matical treatise for the purpose of reforming the ordinary 

language by bringing it to a greater accordance with the 

principles of Logic or universal Grammar.

did not demand a degree of attention unsuitable 

to the nature and objects of poetry. This re 

mark however applies chiefly, though not ex 

clusively to the Religious Musings. The re 

mainder of the charge I admitted to its full 

extent, and not without sincere acknowledg 

ments to both my private and public censors 

for their friendly admonitions. In the after 

editions, I pruned the double epithets with no 

sparing hand, and used my best efforts to tame 

the swell and glitter both of thought and dic 

tion; though in truth, these parasite plants of 

youthful poetry had insinuated themselves into 

my longer poems with such intricacy of union, 

that I was often obliged to omit disentangling 

the weed, from the fear of snapping the flower. 

From that period to the date of the present 

work I have published nothing, with my name, 

which could by any possibility have come be 

fore the board of anonymous criticism. Even 

the three or four poems, printed with the works 

of a friend, as far as they were censured at all, 

were charged with the same or similar defects, 

though I am persuaded not with equal justice: 

with an EXCESS OF ORNAMENT, in addition to 

STRAINED AND ELABORATE DICTION. (Vide the

criticisms on the "Ancient Mariner," in the 

Monthly and Critical Reviews of the first volume 

of the Lyrical Ballads.) May I be permitted 

to add, that, even at the early period of my 

juvenile poems, I saw and admitted the superior 

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ity of an austerer, and more natural style, with 

an insight not less clear, than I at present pos 

sess. My judgment was stronger, than were 

my powers of realizing its dictates; and the 

faults of my language, though indeed partly 

owing to a wrong choice of subjects, and the 

desire of giving a poetic colouring to abstract 

and metaphysical truths in which a new world 

then seemed to open upon me, did yet, in part 

likewise, originate in unfeigned diffidence of my 

own comparative talent.—During several years 

of my youth and early manhood, I reverenced 

those, who had reintroduced the manly sim 

plicity of the Grecian, and of our own elder 

poets, with such enthusiasm, as made the hope 

seem presumptuous of writing successfully in 

the same style. Perhaps a similar process has 

happened to others; but my earliest poems 

were marked by an ease and simplicity, which 

I have studied, perhaps with inferior success, 

to impress on my later compositions.

At school I enjoyed the inestimable advan 

tage of a very sensible, though at the same 

time, a very severe master. He* early moulded 

my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to 

Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil,

*The Rev. James Bowyer, many years Head Master of 

the GrammarSchool, Christ Hospital.

and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated 

me to compare Lucretius, (in such extracts as 

I then read) Terence, and above all the chaster 

poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman 

poets of the, so called, silver and brazen ages; 

but with even those of the Augustan era: and 

on grounds of plain sense and universal logic 

to see and assert the superiority of the former, in 

the truth and nativeness, both of their thoughts 

and diction. At the same time that we were 

studying the Greek Tragic Poets, he made us 

read Shakspeare and Milton as lessons: and 

they were the lessons too, which required most 

time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape 

his censure. I learnt from him, that Poetry, 

even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of 

the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as 

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severe as that of science; and more difficult, 

because more subtle, more complex, and de 

pendent on more, and more fugitive causes. 

In the truly great poets, he would say, there is 

a reason assignable, not only for every word, 

but for the position of every word; and I well 

remember, that availing himself of the syno 

nimes to the Homer of Didymus, he made us 

attempt to show, with regard to each, why it 

would not have answered the same purpose; 

and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of 

the word in the original text.

In our own English compositions (at least for 

the last three years of our school education) 

he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or 

image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where 

the same sense might have been conveyed with 

equal force and dignity in plainer words. Lute, 

harp, and lyre, muse, muses, and inspirations, 

Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hipocrene, were all 

an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost 

hear him now, exclaiming" Harp? Harp? Lyre? 

Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? 

your Nurse’s daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? 

Oh ‘aye! the cloisterpump, I suppose!" Nay 

certain introductions, similies, and examples, 

were placed by name on a list of interdiction. 

Among the similies, there was, I remember, 

that of the Manchineel fruit, as suiting equally 

well with too many subjects; in which how 

ever it yielded the palm at once to the example 

of Alexander and Clytus, which was equally 

good and apt, whatever might be the theme. 

Was it ambition? Alexander and Clytus! 

Flattery? Alexander and Clytus!Anger ? 

Drunkenness? Pride? Friendship? Ingratitude? 

Late repentance? Still, still Alexander and 

Clytus! At length, the praises of agriculture 

having been exemplified in the sagacious obser 

vation, that had Alexander been holding the 

plough, he would not have run his friend Clytus 

through with a spear, this tried, and serviceable 

old friend was banished by public edict in 

secula seculorum. I have sometimes ventured to 

think, that a list of this kind, or an index expur 

gatorius of certain well known and ever return 

ing phrases, both introductory, and transitional, 

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including the large assortment of modest ego 

tisms, and flattering illeisms, &c. &c. might be 

hung up in our lawcourts, and both houses of 

parliament, with great advantage to the public, 

as an important saving of national time, an in 

calculable relief to his Majesty’s ministers, but 

above all, as insuring the thanks of country 

attornies, and their clients, who have private 

bills to carry through the house.

Be this as it may, there was one custom of 

our master’s, which I cannot pass over in si 

lence, because I think it imitable and worthy 

of imitation. He would often permit our theme 

exercises, under some pretext of want of time, 

to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to 

be looked over. Then placing the whole num 

ber abreast on his desk, he would ask the 

writer, why this or that sentence might not 

have found as appropriate a place under this or 

that other thesis: and if no satisfying answer 

could be returned, and two faults of the same 

kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable 

verdict followed, the exercise was torn up, and 

another on the same subject to be produced, 

in addition to the tasks of the day. The reader 

will, I trust, excuse this tribute of recollection 

to a man, whose severities, even now, not sel 

dom furnish the dreams, by which the blind 

fancy would fain interpret to the mind the pain 

ful sensations of distempered sleep; but neither 

lessen nor dim the deep sense of my moral and 

intellectual obligations. He sent us to the Uni 

versity excellent Latin and Greek scholars, and 

tolerable Hebraists. Yet our classical know 

ledge was the least of the good gifts, which we 

derived from his zealous and conscientious 

tutorage. He is now gone to his final reward, 

full of years, and full of honors, even of those 

honors, which were dearest to his heart, as 

gratefully bestowed by that school, and still 

binding him to the interests of that school, in 

which he had been himself educated, and to 

which during his whole life he was a dedicated 

thing.

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From causes, which this is not the place to 

investigate, no models of past times, however 

perfect, can have the same vivid effect on the 

youthful mind, as the productions of contem 

porary genius. The Discipline, my mind had 

undergone, "Ne falleretur rotundo sono et ver 

suum cursu, cincinnis et floribus; sed ut inspi 

ceret quidnam subesset, quæ sedes, quod firma 

mentum, quis fundus verbis; an figuræ essent 

mera ornatura et orationis fucus: vel sanguinis 

e materiæ ipsius corde effluentis rubor quidam 

nativus et incalescentia genuina;" removed all 

obstacles to the appreciation of excellence in 

style without diminishing my delight. That 

I was thus prepared for the perusal of Mr. 

Bowles’s sonnets and earlier poems, at once 

increased their influence, and my enthusiasm. 

The great works of past ages seem to a young 

man things of another race, in respect to which 

his faculties must remain passive and submiss, 

even as to the stars and mountains. But the 

writings of a contemporary, perhaps not many 

years elder than himself, surrounded by the 

same circumstances, and disciplined by the 

same manners, possess a reality for him, and 

inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a 

man. His very admiration is the wind which 

fans and feeds his hope. The poems themselves 

assume the properties of flesh and blood. To 

recite, to extol, to contend for them is but the 

payment of a debt due to one, who exists to 

receive it.

There are indeed modes of teaching which 

have produced, and are producing, youths of 

a very different stamp; modes of teaching, in 

comparison with which we have been called 

on to despise our great public schools, and 

universities

"In whose halls are hung 

Armoury of the invincible knights of old"—

modes, by which children are to be metamor 

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phosed into prodigies. And prodigies with a 

vengeance have I known thus produced! Pro 

digies of selfconceit, shallowness, arrogance, 

and infidelity! Instead of storing the memory, 

during the period when the memory is the 

predominant faculty, with facts for the after 

exercise of the judgement; and instead of 

awakening by the noblest models the fond and 

unmixed LOVE and ADMIRATION, which is the 

natural and graceful temper of early youth; 

these nurselings of improved pedagogy are taught 

to dispute and decide; to suspect all, but their 

own and their lecturer’s wisdom; and to hold 

nothing sacred from their contempt, but their 

own contemptible arrogance: boygraduates in 

all the technicals, and in all the dirty passions 

and impudence, of anonymous criticism. To 

such dispositions alone can the admonition of 

Pliny be requisite, "Neque enim debet operi 

"bus ejus obesse, quod vivit. An si inter eos, 

"quos nunquam vidimus, floruisset, non solum 

"libros ejus, verum etiam imagines conquire 

"remus, ejusdem nunc honor præsentis, et gratia 

"quasi satietate languescet? At hoc pravum, 

"malignumque est, non admirari hominem admi 

"ratione dignissimum, quia videre, complecti, 

"nec laudare tantum, verum etiam amare con 

"tingit." Plin. Epist. Lib. I.

I had just entered on my seventeenth year 

when the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in 

number, and just then published in a quarto 

pamphlet, were first made known and pre 

sented to me by a schoolfellow who had 

quitted us for the University, and who, during 

the whole time that he was in our first form 

(or in our school language a GRECIAN) had 

been my patron and protector. I refer to Dr. 

Middleton, the truly learned, and every way 

excellent Bishop of Calcutta:

"Qui laudibus amplis 

"Ingenium celebrare meum, calamumque solebat, 

"Calcar agens animo validum. Non omnia terræ 

"Obruta! Vivit amor, vivit dolor! Ora negatur 

"Dulcia conspicere; at flere et meminisse* relictum est." 

Petr. Ep. Lib. I. Ep. I.

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It was a double pleasure to me, and still 

remains a tender recollection, that I should 

have received from a friend so revered the first 

knowledge of a poet, by whose works, year 

after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted 

and inspired. My earliest acquaintances will 

not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness 

and impetuous zeal, with which I laboured to 

make proselytes, not only of my companions, 

but of all with whom I conversed, of whatever 

rank, and in whatever place. As my school

I am most happy to have the necessity of informing the 

reader, that since this passage was written, the report of 

Middleton’s death on his voyage to India has been proved 

erroneous. He lives and long may he live; for I dare pro 

phecy, that with his life only will his exertions for the tem 

poral and spiritual welfare of his fellow men be limited. 

finances did not permit me to purchase copies, 

I made, within less than a year, and an half, 

more than forty transcriptions, as the best pre 

sents I could offer to those, who had in any 

way won my regard. And with almost equal 

delight did I receive the three or four following 

publications of the same author.

Though I have seen and known enough of 

mankind to be well aware, that I shall perhaps 

stand alone in my creed, and that it will be 

well, if I subject myself to no worse charge 

than that of singularity; I am not therefore 

deterred from avowing, that I regard, and ever 

have regarded the obligations of intellect among 

the most sacred of the claims of gratitude. 

A valuable thought, or a particular train of 

thoughts, gives me additional pleasure, when 

I can safely refer and attribute it to the con 

versation or correspondence of another. My 

obligations to Mr. Bowles were indeed import 

ant, and for radical good. At a very premature 

age, even before my fifteenth year, I had be 

wildered myself in metaphysicks, and in theolo 

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gical controversy. Nothing else pleased me. 

History, and particular facts, lost all interest 

in my mind. Poetry (though for a schoolboy 

of that age, I was above par in English versi 

fication, and had already produced two or three 

compositions which, I may venture to say, with 

out reference to my age, were somewhat above 

mediocrity, and which had gained me more 

credit, than the sound, good sense of my old 

master was at all pleased with) poetry itself, 

yea novels and romances, became insipid to 

me. In my friendless wanderings on our leave* 

days, (for I was an orphan, and had scarce 

any connections in London) highly was I de 

lighted, if any passenger, especially if he were 

drest in black, would enter into conversation 

with me. For I soon found the means of di 

recting it to my favorite subjects

Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, 

Fix’d fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, 

And found no end in wandering mazes lost.

This preposterous pursuit was, beyond doubt, 

injurious, both to my natural powers, and to 

the progress of my education. It would per 

haps have been destructive, had it been con 

tinued; but from this I was auspiciously with 

drawn, partly indeed by an accidental intro 

duction to an amiable family, chiefly however, 

by the genial influence of a style of poetry, so 

tender, and yet so manly, so natural and real, 

and yet so dignified, and harmonious, as the 

sonnets, &c. of Mr. Bowles! Well were it for 

me perhaps, had I never relapsed into the same

The Christ Hospital phrase, not for holidays altogether, 

but for those on which the boys are permitted to go beyond 

the precincts of the school. 

mental disease; if I had continued to pluck 

the flower and reap the harvest from the cul 

tivated surface, instead of delving in the un 

wholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic 

depths. But if in after time I have sought a 

refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sen 

sibility in abstruse researches, which exercised 

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the strength and subtlety of the understanding 

without awakening the feelings of the heart; 

still there was a long and blessed interval, dur 

ing which my natural faculties were allowed 

to expand, and my original tendencies to deve 

lope themselves: my fancy, and the love of 

nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and 

sounds.

The second advantage, which I owe to my 

early perusal, and admiration of these poems 

(to which let me add, though known to me 

at a somewhat later period, the Lewsdon Hill 

of Mr. CROW) bears more immediately on my 

present subject. Among those with whom I 

conversed, there were, of course, very many 

who had formed their taste, and their notions 

of poetry, from the writings of Mr. Pope and 

his followers: or to speak more generally, in 

that school of French poetry, condensed and 

invigorated by English understanding, which 

had predominated from the last century. I 

was not blind to the merits of this school, yet 

as from inexperience of the world, and 

consequent want of sympathy with the general sub 

jects of these poems, they gave me little plea 

sure, I doubtless undervalued the kind, and 

with the presumption of youth withheld from 

its masters the legitimate name of poets. I 

saw, that the excellence of this kind consisted 

in just and acute observations on men and man 

ners in an artificial state of society, as its matter and 

substance: and in the logic of wit, con 

veyed in smooth and strong epigramatic cou 

plets, as its form. Even when the subject was 

addressed to the fancy, or the intellect, as in 

the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man; 

nay, when it was a consecutive narration, as in 

that astonishing product of matchless talent 

and ingenuity, Pope’s Translation of the Iliad; 

still a point was looked for at the end of each 

second line, and the whole was as it were a 

sorites, or, if I may exchange a logical for a 

grammatical metaphor, a conjunction disjunc

tive, of epigrams. Meantime the matter and 

diction seemed to me characterized not so much 

by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts translated 

into the language of poetry. On this last point, 

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I had occasion to render my own thoughts 

gradually more and more plain to myself, by 

frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin’s 

BOTANIC GARDEN, which, for some years, was 

greatly extolled, not only by the reading public 

in general, but even by those, whose genius 

and natural robustness of understanding ena 

bled them afterwards to act foremost in dis 

sipating these "painted mists" that occasionally 

rise from the marshes at the foot of Parnassus. 

During my first Cambridge vacation, I assisted 

a friend in a contribution for a literary society 

in Devonshire: and in this I remember to have 

compared Darwin’s work to the Russian pa 

lace of ice, glittering, cold and transitory. In 

the same essay too, I assigned sundry reasons, 

chiefly drawn from a comparison of passages in 

the Latin poets with the original Greek, from 

which they were borrowed, for the preference 

of Collins’s odes to those of Gray; and of the 

simile in Shakspeare

" How like a younker or a prodigal, 

"The skarfed bark puts from her native bay 

"Hugg’d and embraced by the strumpet wind! 

"How like a prodigal doth she return, 

"With overweather’d ribs and ragged sails, 

"Lean, rent, and beggar’d by the strumpet wind!"

to the imitation in the bard;

"Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows 

"While proudly riding o’er the azure realm 

"In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes, 

"YOUTH at the prow and PLEASURE at the helm, 

"Regardless of the sweeping whirlwinds sway, 

"That hush’d in grim repose, expects it’s evening prey."

(In which, by the bye, the words "realm" and 

" sway" are rhymes dearly purchased.) I pre 

ferred the original on the ground, that in the 

imitation it depended wholly in the composi 

tor’s putting, or not putting a small Capital, 

both in this, and in many other passages of the 

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same poet, whether the words should be person 

ifications, or mere abstracts. I mention this, 

because in referring various lines in Gray to 

their original in Shakspeare and Milton; and in 

the clear perception how completely all the 

propriety was lost in the transfer; I was, at 

that early period, led to a conjecture, which, 

many years afterwards was recalled to me from 

the same thought having been started in con 

versation, but far more ably, and developed 

more fully, by Mr. WORDSWORTH; namely, that 

this style of poetry, which I have characterised 

above, as translations of prose thoughts into 

poetic language, had been kept up by, if it did 

not wholly arise from, the custom of writing 

Latin verses, and the great importance at 

tached to these exercises, in our public schools. 

Whatever might have been the case in the fif 

teenth century, when the use of the Latin 

tongue was so general among learned men, that 

Erasmus is said to have forgotten his native 

language; yet in the present day it is not to be 

supposed, that a youth can think in Latin, or 

that he can have any other reliance on the force 

or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of 

the author from whence he has adopted them. 

Consequently he must first prepare his thoughts, 

and then pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or 

perhaps more compendiously from his* Gradus, 

halves and quarters of lines, in which to embody 

them.

I never object to a certain degree of disputa 

tiousness in a young man from the age of seven 

teen to that of four or five and twenty, provided 

I find him always arguing on one side of the 

question. The controversies, occasioned by my 

unfeigned zeal for the honor of a favorite con 

temporary, then known to me only by his works, 

were of great advantage in the formation and 

establishment of my taste and critical opinions. 

In my defence of the lines running into each 

other, instead of closing at each couplet; and 

of natural language, neither bookish, nor vulgar, 

neither redolent of the lamp, or of the kennel, 

such as I will remember thee; instead of the 

same thought tricked up in the ragfair finery of,

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Thy image on her wing 

Before my FANCY’S eye shall MEMORY bring,

I had continually to adduce the metre and

In the Nutricia of Politian there occurs this line:

" Pura coloratos interstrepit unda lapillos." 

Casting my eye on a University prizepoem, I met this line, 

" Lactea purpureos interstrepit unda lapillos."

Now look out in the Gradus for Purus, and you find as 

the first synonime, lacteus; for coloratus and the first sy 

nonime is purpureus. I mention this by way of elucidating 

one of the most ordinary processes in the ferrumination of 

these centos.

diction of the Greek Poets from Homer to 

Theocritus inclusive; and still more of our 

elder English poets from Chaucer to Milton. 

Nor was this all. But as it was my constant 

reply to authorities brought against me from 

later poets of great name, that no authority 

could avail in opposition to TRUTH, NATURE, 

LOGIC, and the LAWS of UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR; 

actuated too by my former passion for meta 

physical investigations; I labored at a solid 

foundation, on which permanently to ground 

my opinions, in the component faculties of the 

human mind itself, and their comparative dig 

nity and importance. According to the faculty 

or source, from which the pleasure given by 

any poem or passage was derived, I estimated 

the merit of such poem or passage. As the 

result of all my reading and meditation, I ab 

stracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them 

to comprize the conditions and criteria of poetic 

style; first, that not the poem which we have

read, but that to which we return, with the 

greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, 

and claims the name of essential poetry. Second, 

that whatever lines can be translated into other 

words of the same language, without dimi 

nution of their significance, either in sense, 

or association, or in any worthy feeling, are

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so far vicious in their diction. Be it however 

observed, that I excluded from the list of 

worthy feelings, the pleasure derived from mere 

novelty, in the reader, and the desire of ex 

citing wonderment at his powers in the author. 

Oftentimes since then, in perusing French tra 

gedies, I have fancied two marks of admiration 

at the end of each line, as hieroglyphics of the 

author’s own admiration at his own cleverness. 

Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a 

continuous undercurrent of feeling; it is every 

where present, but seldom any where as a se 

parate excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, 

that it would be scarcely more difficult to push 

a stone out from the pyramids with the bare 

hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a 

word, in Milton or Shakspeare, (in their most 

important works at least) without making the 

author say something else, or something worse, 

than he does say. One great distinction, I 

appeared to myself to see plainly, between, even 

the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and 

the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from 

DONNE to COWLEY, we find the most fan 

tastic outoftheway thoughts, but in the most 

pure and genuine mother English; in the latter, 

the most obvious thoughts, in language the 

most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder 

poets sacrificed the passion, and passionate 

flow of poetry, to the subtleties of intellect, and 

to the starts of wit; the moderns to the glare 

and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and 

heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious 

something, made up, half of image, and half of 

abstract* meaning. The one sacrificed the heart 

to the head; the other both heart and head to 

point and drapery.

The reader must make himself acquainted 

with the general style of composition that was 

at that time deemed poetry, in order to under 

stand and account for the effect produced on 

me by the SONNETS, the MONODY at MATLOCK, 

and the HOPE, of Mr. Bowles; for it is pecu 

liar to original genius to become less and less 

striking, in proportion to its success in improv 

ing the taste and judgement of its contempora 

ries. The poems of WEST indeed had the 

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merit of chaste and manly diction, but they 

were cold, and, if I may so express it, only

deadcoloured; while in the best of Warton’s 

there is a stiffness, which too often gives them 

the appearance of imitations from the Greek. 

Whatever relation therefore of cause or impulse 

Percy’s collection of Ballads may bear to the 

most popular poems of the present day; yet in 

the more sustained and elevated style, of the

I remember a ludicrous instance in the poem of a young

tradesman:

" No more will I endure love’s pleasing pain, 

Or round my heart’s leg tie his galling chain."

then living poets Bowles and Cowper* were, to 

the best of my knowledge, the first who com 

bined natural thoughts with natural diction; 

the first who reconciled the heart with the head.

It is true, as I have before mentioned, that 

from diffidence in my own powers, I for a short 

time adopted a laborious and florid diction, 

which I myself deemed, if not absolutely vici 

ous, yet of very inferior worth. Gradually, 

however, my practice conformed to my better 

judgement; and the compositions of my twenty 

fourth and twentyfifth year (ex. gr. the shorter 

blank verse poems, the lines which are now 

adopted in the introductory part of the VISION 

in the present collection in Mr. Southey’s Joan 

of Arc, 2nd book, 1st edition, and the Tragedy 

of REMORSE) are not more below my present 

ideal in respect of the general tissue of the style, 

than those of the latest date. Their faults were

Cowper’s task was published some time before the son 

nets of Mr. Bowles; but I was not familiar with it till many 

years afterwards. The vein of Satire which runs through 

that excellent poem, together with the sombre hue of its re 

ligious opinions, would probably, at that time, have pre 

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vented its laying any strong hold on my affections. The 

love of nature seems to have led Thompson to a chearful re 

ligion; and a gloomy religion to have led Cowper to a love 

of nature. The one would carry his fellowmen along with 

him into nature; the other flies to nature from his fellow 

men. In chastity of diction however, and the harmony of 

blank verse, Cowper leaves Thompson unmeasureably below 

him; yet still I feel the latter to have been the born poet. 

at least a remnant of the former leaven, and 

among the many who have done me the honor 

of putting my poems in the same class with 

those of my betters, the one or two, who have 

pretended to bring examples of affected sim 

plicity from my volume, have been able to ad 

duce but one instance, and that out of a copy 

of verses half ludicrous, half splenetic, which 

I intended, and had myself characterized, as 

sermoni propriora.

Every reform, however necessary, will by 

weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself 

will need reforming. The reader will excuse 

me for noticing, that I myself was the first to 

expose risu honesto the three sins of poetry, one 

or the other of which is the most likely to beset 

a young writer. So long ago as the publica 

tion of the second number of the monthly ma 

gazine, under the name of NEHEMIAH HIGGEN 

BOTTOM I contributed three sonnets, the first of 

which had for its object to excite a goodnatur 

ed laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism, and at 

the recurrence of favorite phrases, with the 

double defect of being at once trite, and licen 

tious. The second, on low, creeping language 

and thoughts, under the pretence of simplicity. 

And the third, the phrases of which were bor 

rowed entirely from my own poems, on the 

indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling 

language and imagery. The reader will find 

them in the note* below, and will I trust regard 

them as reprinted for biographical purposes, 

and not for their poetic merits. So general at

SONNET 1.

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PENSIVE at eve, on the hard world I mused,

And my poor heart was sad; so at the MOON 

I gazed, and sighed, and sighed; for ah how soon 

Eve saddens into night! mine eyes perused 

With tearful vacancy the dampy grass

That wept and glitter’d in the paly ray:

And I did pause me, on my lonely way 

And mused me, on the wretched ones that pass 

O’er the bleak heath of sorrow. But alas! 

Most of myself I thought! when it befel, 

That the soothe spirit of the breezy wood 

Breath’d in mine ear: "All this is very well 

But much of ONE thing, is for NO thing good." 

Oh my poor heart’s INEXPLICABLE SWELL!

SONNET II.

OH I do love thee, meek SIMPLICITY! 

For of thy lays the lulling simpleness 

Goes to my heart, and soothes each small distress, 

Distress tho’ small, yet haply great to me, 

‘Tis true on Lady Fortune’s gentlest pad 

I amble on; and yet I know not why 

So sad I am! but should a friend and I 

Frown, pout and part, then I am very sad. 

And then with sonnets and with sympathy 

My dreamy bosom’s mystic woes I pall; 

Now of my false friend plaining plaintively, 

Now raving at mankind in general; 

But whether sad or fierce, ‘tis simple all, 

All very simple, meek SIMPLICITY!

SONNET III.

AND this reft house is that, the which he built, 

Lamented Jack! and here his malt he pil’d, 

Cautious in vain! these rats, that squeak so wild, 

Squeak not unconscious of their father’s guilt. 

Did he not see her gleaming thro’ the glade! 

Belike ‘twas she, the maiden all forlorn. 

What tho’ she milk no cow with crumpled horn, 

Yet, aye she haunts the dale where erst she stray’d:*

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that time, and so decided was the opinion con 

cerning the characteristic vices of my style, that 

a celebrated physician (now, alas! no more) 

speaking of me in other respects with his usual 

kindness to a gentleman, who was about to 

meet me at a dinner party, could not however 

resist giving him a hint not to mention the

" House that Jack built" in my presence, for 

" that I was as sore as a boil about that sonnet ;" 

he not knowing, that I was myself the author 

of it.

*

And aye, beside her stalks her amarous knight! 

Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn, 

And thro’ those brogues, still tatter’d and betorn, 

His hindward charms glean an unearthly white. 

Ah! thus thro’ broken clouds at night’s high Noon 

Peeps in fair fragments forth the fullorb’d harvestmoon!

The following anecdote will not be wholly out of place 

here, and may perhaps amuse the reader. An amateur per 

former in verse expressed to a common friend, a strong de 

sire to be introduced to me, but hesitated in accepting my 

friend’s immediate offer, on the score that "he was, he must 

acknowledge the author of a confounded severe epigram on 

my ancient mariner, which had given me great pain. I as 

sured my friend that if the epigram was a good one, it would 

only increase my desire to become acquainted with the au 

thor, and begg’d to hear it recited: when, to my no less 

surprise than amusement, it proved to be one which I had 

myself some time before written and inserted in the Morning 

Post.

To the author of the Ancient Mariner.

Your poem must eternal be, 

Dearsir! it cannot fail, 

For ‘tis incomprehensible 

And without head or tail.

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CHAPTER II.

Supposed irritability of men of Genius—Brought 

to the test of Facts—Causes and Occasions of 

the charge—Its Injustice.

I have often thought, that it would be neither 

uninstructive nor unamusing to analyze, and 

bring forward into distinct consciousness, that 

complex feeling, with which readers in general 

take part against the author, in favor of the 

critic; and the readiness with which they apply 

to all poets the old sarcasm of Horace upon 

the scriblers of his time: "Genus irritabile 

vatum." A debility and dimness of the imagi 

native power, and a consequent necessity of 

reliance on the immediate impressions of the 

senses, do, we well know, render the mind 

liable to superstition and fanaticism. Having a 

deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, 

minds of this class seek in the crowd circum 

fana for a warmth in common, which they do 

not possess singly. Cold and phlegmatic in their 

own nature, like damp hay, they heat and in 

flame by coacervation; or like bees they be 

come restless and irritable through the increased 

temperature of collected multitudes. Hence 

the German word for fanaticism (such at least 

was its original import) is derived from the 

swarming of bees, namely, Schwärmen, Sch 

wärmerey. The passion being in an inverse 

proportion to the insight, that the more vivid, 

as this the less distinct; anger is the inevitable 

consequence. The absence of all foundation 

within their own minds for that, which they yet 

believe both true and indispensible for their 

safety and happiness, cannot but produce an 

uneasy state of feeling, an involuntary sense of 

fear from which nature has no means of res 

cuing herself but by anger. Experience informs 

us that the first defence of weak minds is to 

recriminate.

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" There’s no Philosopher but sees, 

That rage and fear are one disease, 

Tho’ that may burn, and this may freeze, 

They’re both alike the ague."

MAD OX.

But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists 

an endless power of combining and modifying 

them, the feelings and affections blend more 

easily and intimately with these ideal creations, 

than with the objects of the senses; the mind 

is affected by thoughts, rather than by things; 

and only then feels the requisite interest even 

for the most important events, and accidents, 

when by means of meditation they have passed 

into thoughts. The sanity of the mind is be 

tween superstition with fanaticism on the one 

hand; and enthusiasm with indifference and a 

diseased slowness to action on the other. For 

the conceptions of the mind may be so vivid 

and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to 

the realizing of them, which is strongest and 

most restless in those, who possess more than 

mere talent (or the faculty of appropriating 

and applying the knowledge of others) yet 

still want something of the creative, and self 

sufficing power of absolute Genius. For this 

reason therefore, they are men of commanding 

genius. While the former rest content between 

thought and reality, as it were in an intermun 

dium of which their own living spirit supplies 

the substance, and their imagination the ever 

varying form; the latter must impress their 

preconceptions on the world without, in order 

to present them back to their own view with 

the satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness, 

and individuality. These in tranquil times are 

formed to exhibit a perfect poem in palace or 

temple or landscapegarden; or a tale of ro 

mance in canals that join sea with sea, or in walls 

of rock, which shouldering back the billows 

imitate the power, and supply the benevolence 

of nature to sheltered navies; or in aqueducts 

that arching the wide vale from mountain to 

mountain give a Palmyra to the desert. But 

alas! in times of tumult they are the men des 

tined to come forth as the shaping spirit of Ruin. 

to destroy the wisdom of ages in order to 

substitute the fancies of a day, and to change 

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kings and kingdoms, as the wind shifts and 

shapes the clouds.† The records of biography 

seem to confirm this theory. The men of the 

greatest genius, as far as we can judge from 

their own works or from the accounts of their 

contemporaries, appear to have been of calm 

and tranquil temper, in all that related to them 

selves. In the inward assurance of permanent 

fame, they seem to have been either indifferent 

or resigned, with regard to immediate reputa 

tion. Through all the works of Chaucer there 

reigns a chearfulness, a manly hilarity, which 

makes it almost impossible to doubt a corres 

pondent habit of feeling in the author himself. 

Shakspeare’s evenness and sweetness of temper 

were almost proverbial in his own age. That 

this did not arise from ignorance of his own 

comparative greatness, we have abundant proof 

in his sonnets, which could scarcely have been

† "Of old things all are over old, 

Of good things none are good enough: 

We’ll show that we can help to frame 

A world of other stuff.

I too will have my kings, that take

From me the sign of life and death:

Kingdoms shall shift about, like clouds, 

Obedient to my breath."

WORDSWORTH’S ROB ROY.

known to Mr. Pope,* when he asserted, that 

our great bard "grew immortal in his own 

"despite." Speaking, of one whom he had cele 

brated, and contrasting the duration of his 

works with that of his personal existence,

Shakspeare adds:

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" Your name from hence immortal life shall have, 

Tho’ I once gone to all the world must die; 

The earth can yield me but a common grave, 

When you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie. 

Your monument shall be my gentle verse, 

Which eyes not yet created shall o’erread; 

And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,

When all the breathers of this world are dead:

You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen, 

Where breath most breathes, e’en in the mouth of men."

SONNET 81st.

I have taken the first that occurred; but Shaks 

peare’s readiness to praise his rivals, ore pleno, 

and the confidence of his own equality with

Mr. Pope was under the common error of his age, an 

error, far from being sufficiently exploded even at the pre 

sent day. It consists (as I explained at large, and proved in 

detail in my public lectures) in mistaking for the essentials of 

the Greek stage certain rules, which the wise poets imposed 

upon themselves, in order to render all the remaining parts 

of the drama consistent with those, that had been forced 

upon them by circumstances independent of their will; out 

of which circumstances the drama itself arose. The cir 

cumstances in the time of Shakspeare, which it was equally 

out of his power to alter, were different, and such as, in my 

opinion, allowed a far wider sphere, and a deeper and more 

human interest. Critics are too apt to forget, that rules are 

but means to an end; consequently where the ends are 

those whom he deem’d most worthy of his 

praise, are alike manifested in the 86th sonnet.

" Was it the proud full sail of his great verse 

Bound for the praise of alltooprecious you, 

That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse, 

Making their tomb, the womb wherein they grew ? 

Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write 

Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead? 

No, neither he, nor his compeers by night 

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Giving him aid, my verse astonished. 

He, nor that affable familiar ghost, 

Which nightly gulls him with intelligence, 

As victors of my silence cannot boast; 

I was not sick of any fear from thence! 

But when your countenance fill’d up his line, 

Then lack’d I matter, that enfeebled mine.

In Spencer indeed, we trace a mind consti 

tutionally tender, delicate, and, in comparison 

with his three great compeers, I had almost 

said, effeminate; and this additionally sad 

dened by the unjust persecution of Burleigh,

*different, the rules must he likewise so. We must have ascer 

tained what the end is, before we can determine what the 

rules ought to be. Judging under this impression, I did not 

hesitate to declare my full conviction, that the consummate 

judgement of Shakspeare, not only in the general construc 

tion, but in all the detail, of his dramas impressed me with 

greater wonder, than even the might of his genius, or the 

depth of his philosophy. The substance of these lectures I 

hope soon to publish ; and it is but a debt of justice to my 

self and my friends to notice, that the first course of lectures, 

which differed from the following courses only, by occa 

sionally varying the illustrations of the same thoughts, was 

addressed to very numerous, and I need not add, respect 

able audiences at the royal institution, before Mr. Schlegel 

gave his lectures on the same subjects at Vienna. 

and the severe calamities, which overwhelmed 

his latter days. These causes have diffused 

over all his compositions "a melancholy grace," 

and have drawn forth occasional strains, the 

more pathetic from their gentleness. But no 

where do we find the least trace of irritability, 

and still less of quarrelsome or affected con 

tempt of his censurers.

The same calmness, and even greater self 

possession, may be affirmed of Milton, as far 

as his poems, and poetic character are con 

cerned. He reserved his anger, for the enemies 

of religion, freedom, and his country. My 

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mind is not capable of forming a more august 

conception, than arises from the contempla 

tion of this great man in his latter days: poor, 

sick, old, blind, slandered, persecuted,

" Darkness before, and danger’s voice behind,"

in an age in which he was as little understood 

by the party, for whom, as by that, against 

whom he had contended; and among men be 

fore whom he strode so far as to dwarf him 

self by the distance; yet still listening to the 

music of his own thoughts, or if additionally 

cheered, yet cheered only by the prophetic 

faith of two or three solitary individuals, he did 

nevertheless

" Argue not 

Against Heaven’s hand or will, nor bate a jot 

Of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer’d 

Right onward."

From others only do we derive our knowledge 

that Milton, in his latter day, had his scorners 

and detractors; and even in his day of youth 

and hope, that he had enemies would have been 

unknown to us, had they not been likewise the 

enemies of his country.

I am well aware, that in advanced stages of 

literature, when there exist many and excellent 

models, a high degree of talent, combined with 

taste and judgement, and employed in works 

of imagination, will acquire for a man the name 

of a great genius; though even that analogon of 

genius, which, in certain states of society, may 

even render his writings more popular than the 

absolute reality could have done, would be 

sought for in vain in the mind and temper of the 

author himself. Yet even in instances of this 

kind, a close examination will often detect, that 

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the irritability, which has been attributed to the 

author’s genius as its cause, did really originate 

in an ill conformation of body, obtuse pain, or 

constitutional defect of pleasurable sensation. 

What is charged to the author, belongs to the 

man, who would probably have been still more 

impatient, but for the humanizing influences of 

the very pursuit, which yet bears the blame of 

his irritability.

How then are we to explain the easy cre 

dence generally given to this charge, if the 

charge itself be not, as we have endeavoured to 

show, supported by experience? This seems 

to me of no very difficult solution. In what 

ever country literature is widely diffused, there 

will be many who mistake an intense desire to 

possess the reputation of poetic genius, for the 

actual powers, and original tendencies which 

constitute it. But men, whose dearest wishes 

are fixed on objects wholly out of their own 

power, become in all cases more or less impa 

tient and prone to anger. Besides, though it 

may be paradoxical to assert, that a man can 

know one thing, and believe the opposite, yet 

assuredly, a vain person may have so habitu 

ally indulged the wish, and persevered in the 

attempt to appear, what he is not, as to become 

himself one of his own proselytes. Still, as this 

counterfeit and artificial persuasion must differ, 

even in the person’s own feelings, from a real 

sense of inward power, what can be more na 

tural, than that this difference should betray 

itself in suspicious and jealous irritability ? 

Even as the flowery sod, which covers a hol 

low, may be often detected by its shaking and 

trembling.

But, alas! the multitude of books, and the 

general diffusion of literature, have produced 

other, and more lamentable effects in the world 

of letters, and such as are abundant to explain, 

tho’ by no means to justify, the contempt with 

which the best grounded complaints of injured 

genius are rejected as frivolous, or entertained 

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as matter of merriment. In the days of Chaucer 

and Gower, our language might (with due al 

lowance for the imperfections of a simile) be 

compared to a wilderness of vocal reeds, from 

which the favorites only of Pan or Apollo 

could construct even the rude Syrinx; and 

from this the constructors alone could elicit 

strains of music. But now, partly by the la 

bours of successive poets, and in part by the 

more artificial state of society and social inter 

course, language, mechanized as it were into a 

barrelorgan, supplies at once both instrument 

and tune. Thus even the deaf may play, so as 

to delight the many. Sometimes (for it is with 

similies, as it is with jests at a wine table, one 

is sure to suggest another) I have attempted to 

illustrate the present state of our language, in 

its relation to literature, by a pressroom of 

larger and smaller stereotype pieces, which, 

in the present anglogallican fashion of uncon 

nected, epigrammatic periods, it requires but 

an ordinary portion of ingenuity to vary inde 

finitely, and yet still produce something, which, 

if not sense, will be so like it, as to do as well. 

Perhaps better: for it spares the reader the 

trouble of thinking; prevents vacancy, while it 

indulges indolence; and secures the memory 

from all danger of an intellectual plethora. 

Hence of all trades, literature at present 

demands the least talent or information; and, of 

all modes of literature, the manufacturing of 

poems. The difference indeed between these 

and the works of genius, is not less than be 

tween an egg, and an eggshell; yet at a distance 

they both look alike. Now it is no less re 

markable than true, with how little examina 

tion works of polite literature are commonly 

perused, not only by the mass of readers, but 

by men of first rate ability, till some accident 

or chance* discussion have roused their atten

In the course of my lectures, I had occasion to point out 

the almost faultless position and choice of words, in Mr. 

Pope’s original compositions, particularly in his satires and 

moral essays, for the purpose of comparing them with his 

translation of Homer, which, I do not stand alone in re 

garding as the main source of our pseudopoetic diction. 

And this, by the bye, is an additional confirmation of a re 

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mark made, I believe, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, that next to 

the man who formed and elevated the taste of the public, he 

that corrupted it, is commonly the greatest genius. Among 

other passages, I analyzed sentence by sentence, and almost 

word by word, the popular lines,

" As when the moon, resplendent lamp of light," &c.

much in the same way as has been since done, in an excellent 

article on Chalmers’s British Poets in the Quarterly Review. 

The impression on the audience in general was sudden and 

evident: and a number of enlightened and highly educated 

individuals, who at different times afterwards addressed me 

on the subject, expressed their wonder, that truth so ob 

vious should not have struck them before; but at the same 

time acknowledged (so much had they been accustomed, in 

reading poetry, to receive pleasure from the separate images 

and phrases successively, without asking themselves whether 

the collective meaning was sense or nonsense) that they might 

in all probability have read the same passage again twenty*

tion, and put them on their guard. And hence 

individuals below mediocrity not less in natural 

power than in acquired knowledge; nay, bung 

lers that had failed in the lowest mechanic 

crafts, and whose presumption is in due pro 

portion to their want of sense and sensibility; 

men, who being first scriblers from idleness and 

ignorance next become libellers from envy and 

malevolence; have been able to drive a suc 

cessful trade in the employment of the book 

sellers, nay have raised themselves into tempo 

rary name and reputation with the public at 

large, by that most powerful of all adulation,

times with undiminished admiration, and without once re 

flecting, that "asra thaeinen amphi selenen phainet ariprepea"

(i. e. the stars around, or near the full moon, shine pre 

eminently bright) conveys a just and happy image of a moon 

light sky: while it is difficult to determine whether in the 

lines,

"Around her throne the vivid planets roll, 

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And stars unnumber’d gild the glowing pole,"

the sense, or the diction be the more absurd. My answer 

was; that tho’ I had derived peculiar advantages from my 

school discipline, and tho’ my general theory of poetry was 

the same then as now, I had yet experienced the same sen 

sations myself, and felt almost as if I had been newly 

couched, when by Mr. Wordsworth’s conversation, I had 

been induced to reexamine with impartial strictness Grey’s 

celebrated elegy. I had long before detected the defects in 

" the Bard ;" but "the Elegy" I had considered as proof 

against all fair attacks; and to this day I cannot read either, 

without delight, and a portion of enthusiasm. At all events, 

whatever pleasure I may have lost by the clearer perception 

of the faults in certain passages, has been more than repaid 

to me, by the additional delight with which I read the 

remainder. 

the appeal to the bad and malignant passions 

of mankind.*But as it is the nature of scorn, 

envy, and all malignant propensities to require 

a quick change of objects, such writers are 

sure, sooner or later to awake from their dream 

of vanity to disappointment and neglect with 

embittered and envenomed feelings. Even

Especially "in this AGE OF PERSONALITY, this age of 

literary and political GOSSIPING, when the meanest insects 

are worshipped with a sort of Egyptian superstition, if only 

the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal 

malignity in the tail! When the most vapid satires have be 

come the objects of a keen public interest, purely from the 

number of contemporary characters named in the patch 

work notes (which possess, however, the comparative merit of 

being more poetical than the text) and because, to increase 

the stimulus, the author has sagaciously left his own name 

for whispers and conjectures! In an age, when even ser 

mons are published with a double appendix stuffed with

names—in a generation so transformed from the characteris 

tic reserve of Britons, that from the ephemeral sheet of a 

London newspaper, to the everlasting Scotch Professorial 

Quarto, almost every publication exhibits or flatters the 

epidemic distemper; that the very "last year’s rebuses" in 

the Ladies Diary, are answered in a serious elegy " on my 

father’s death" with the name and habitat of the elegiac 

Œdipus subscribed; and " other ingenious solutions were 

likewise given" to the said rebuses—not as heretofore by 

Crito, Philander, A, B, Y, &c. but by fifty or sixty plain 

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English sirnames at full length with their several places of 

abode! In an age, when a bashful Philalethes, or Phileleu 

theros is as rare on the titlepages, and among the signatures 

of our magazines, as a real name used to be in the days of 

our shy and noticeshunning grandfathers! When (more 

exquisite than all) I see an EPIC POEM (spirits of Maro and 

Mæonides make ready to welcome your new compeer!) 

advertised with the special recommendation, that the said 

EPIC POEM contains more than an hundred names of living persons." 

FRIEND No. 10. 

during their shortlived success, sensible in 

spite of themselves on what a shifting foundation it 

rested, they resent the mere refusal of praise, 

as a robbery, and at the justest censures kindle 

at once into violent and undisciplined abuse; 

till the acute disease changing into chronical, 

the more deadly as the less violent, they be 

come the fit instruments of literary detraction, 

and moral slander. They are then no longer to 

be questioned without exposing the complain 

ant to ridicule, because, forsooth, they are ano 

nymous critics, and authorised as "synodical 

individuals"* to speak of themselves plurali 

majestatico! As if literature formed a cast, like 

that of the PARAS in Hindostan, who, however 

maltreated, must not dare to deem themselves 

wronged! As if that, which in all other cases 

adds a deeper die to slander, the circumstance 

of its being anonymous, here acted only to 

make the slanderer inviolable! Thus, in part, 

from the accidental tempers of individuals (men 

of undoubted talent, but not men of genius) 

tempers rendered yet more irritable by their 

desire to appear men of genius; but still more 

effectively by the excesses of the mere counter 

feits both of talent and genius; the number 

too being so incomparably greater of those who 

are thought to be, than of those who really are

A phrase of Andrew Marvel’s. 

men of real genius; and in part from the natu 

ral, but not therefore the less partial and unjust 

distinction, made by the public itself between

literary, and all other property; I believe the 

prejudice to have arisen, which considers an 

unusual irascibility concerning the reception of 

its products as characteristic of genius. It 

might correct the moral feelings of a numerous 

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class of readers, to suppose a Review set on 

foot, the object of which was to criticise all the 

chief works presented to the public by our rib 

bonweavers, calicoprinters, cabinetmakers, 

and chinamanufacturers; a Review conducted 

in the same spirit, and which should take the 

same freedom with personal character, as our 

literary journals. They would scarcely, I think, 

deny their belief, not only that the "genus 

irritabile" would be found to include many 

other species besides that of bards; but that the 

irritability of trade would soon reduce the re 

sentments of poets into mere shadowfights 

skiomachias in the comparison. Or is wealth the 

only rational object of human interest? Or even 

if this were admitted, has the poet no property 

in his works? Or is it a rare, or culpable 

case, that he who serves at the altar of the 

muses, should be compelled to derive his main 

tenance from the altar, when too he has per 

haps deliberately abandoned the fairest pros 

pects of rank and opulence in order to devote 

himself, an entire and undistracted man, to the 

instruction or refinement of his fellowcitizens? 

Or should we pass by all higher objects and 

motives, all disinterested benevolence, and even 

that ambition of lasting praise which is at once 

the crutch and ornament, which at once sup 

ports and betrays, the infirmity of human vir 

tue; is the character and property of the in 

dividual, who labours for our intellectual plea 

sures, less entitled to a share of our fellow 

feeling, than that of the winemerchant or mil 

liner? Sensibility indeed, both quick and deep, 

is not only a characteristic feature, but may be 

deemed a component part, of genius. But it is 

no less an essential mark of true genius, that 

its sensibility is excited by any other cause 

more powerfully, than by its own personal 

interests; for this plain reason, that the man 

of genius lives most in the ideal world, in which 

the present is still constituted by the future 

or the past; and because his feelings have been 

habitually associated with thoughts and images, 

to the number, clearness, and vivacity of which 

the sensation of self is always in an inverse 

proportion. And yet, should he perchance 

have occasion to repel some false charge, or to 

rectify some erroneous censure, nothing is more 

common, than for the many to mistake the 

general liveliness of his manner and language

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whatever is the subject, for the effects of 

peculiar irritation from its accidental relation to 

himself.*

For myself, if from my own feelings, or from 

the less suspicious test of the observations of 

others, I had been made aware of any literary 

testiness or jealousy; I trust, that I should 

have been, however, neither silly or arrogant 

enough, to have burthened the imperfection on 

GENIUS. But an experience (and I should not 

need documents in abundance to prove my 

words, if I added) a tried experience of twenty 

years, has taught me, that the original sin of 

my character consists in a careless indifference 

to public opinion, and to the attacks of those 

who influence it; that praise and admiration

This is one instance among many of deception, by the 

telling the half of a fact, and omitting, the other half, when 

it is from their mutual counteraction and neutralization, 

that the whole truth arises, as a tertiam aliquid different 

from either. Thus in Dryden’s famous line "Great wit" 

(which here means genius) "to madness sure is near allied." 

Now as far as the profound sensibility, which is doubtless

one of the components of genius, were alone considered, 

single and unbalanced, it might be fairly described as expos 

ing the individual to a greater chance of mental derange 

ment; but then a more than usual rapidity of association, a 

more than usual power of passing from thought to thought, 

and image to image, is a component equally essential; and 

in the due modification of each by the other the GENIUS 

itself consists; so that it would be as just as fair to describe 

the earth, as in imminent danger of exorbitating, or of falling 

into the sun according as the assertor of the absurdity con 

fined his attention either to the projectile or to the attractive 

force exclusively. 

have become yearly,less and less desirable, 

except as marks of sympathy; nay that it is 

difficult and distressing to me, to think with 

any interest even about the sale and profit of 

my works, important, as in my present circum 

stances, such considerations must needs be. 

Yet it never occurred to me to believe or fancy, 

that the quantum of intellectual power be 

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stowed on me by nature or education was in 

any way connected with this habit of my feel 

ings; or that it needed any other parents or 

fosterers, than constitutional indolence, aggra 

vated into languor by illhealth; the accumulat 

ing embarrassments of procrastination; the 

mental cowardice, which is the inseparable 

companion of procrastination, and which makes 

us anxious to think and converse on any thing 

rather than on what concerns ourselves; in 

fine, all those close vexations, whether charge 

able on my faults or my fortunes which leave 

me but little grief to spare for evils compara 

tively, distant and alien.

Indignation at literary wrongs, I leave to 

men born under happier stars. I cannot afford 

it. But so far from condemning those who 

can, I deem it a writer’s duty, and think it 

creditable to his heart, to feel and express a 

resentment proportioned to the grossness of the 

provocation, and the importance of the object. 

There is no profession on earth, which requires 

an attention so early, so long, or so unintermit 

ting as that of poetry; and indeed as that of lite 

rary composition in general, if it be such, as at 

all satisfies the demands both of taste and of 

sound logic. How difficult and delicate a task 

even the mere mechanism of verse is, may be 

conjectured from the failure of those, who have 

attempted poetry late in life. Where then a 

man has, from his earliest youth, devoted his 

whole being to an object, which by the admis 

sion of all civilized nations in all ages is hono 

rable as a pursuit, and glorious as an attain 

ment; what of all that relates to himself and 

his family, if only we except his moral cha 

racter, can have fairer claims to his protection, 

or more authorise acts of selfdefence, than the 

elaborate products of his intellect, and intel 

lectual industry? Prudence itself would com 

mand us to show, even if defect or diversion of 

natural sensibility had prevented us from feel 

ing, a due interest and qualified anxiety for the 

offspring and representatives of our nobler being. 

I know it, alas! by woeful experience! I have 

laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this 

wilderness the world, with ostrich careless 

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ness and ostrich oblivion. The greater part 

indeed have been trod under foot, and are for 

gotten; but yet no small number have crept 

forth into life, some to furnish feathers for the 

caps of others, and still more to plume the 

shafts in the quivers of my enemies, of them 

that unprovoked have lain in wait against my 

soul.

" Sic vos, non vobis mellificatis, apes!"

An instance in confirmation of the Note, p. 39, occurs to 

me as I am correcting this sheet, with the FAITHFUL

SHEPHERDESS open before me. Mr. Seward first traces 

Fletcher’s lines;

" More souldiseases than e’er yet the hot 

"Sun bred thro’ his burnings, while the dog 

"Pursues the raging lion, throwing the fog 

"And deadly vapor from his angry breath, 

"Filling the lower world with plague and death."—

To Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar,

" The rampant lion hunts he fast 

"With dogs of noisome breath; 

"Whose baleful barking brings, in haste, 

"Pyne, plagues, and dreary death!"

He then takes occasion to introduce Homer’s simile of the 

sight of Achilles’ shield to Priam compared with the Dog 

Star, literally thus—

" For this indeed is most splendid, but it was made an 

"evil sign, and brings many a consuming disease to wretched 

"mortals." Nothing can be more simple as a description, or 

more accurate as a simile; which (says Mr. S.) is thus finely 

translated by Mr. Pope:

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" Terrific Glory! for his burning breath 

Taints the red air with fevers, plagues, and death!"

Now here (not to mention the tremendous bombast) the 

Dog Star, so called, is turned into a real Dog, a very odd 

Dog, a Fire, Fever, Plague, and deathbreathing, redair 

tainting Dog: and the whole visual likeness is lost, while the 

likeness in the effects is rendered absurd by the exaggeration. 

In Spencer and Fletcher the thought is justifiable; for the 

images are at least consistent, and it was the intention of the 

writers to mark the seasons by this allegory of visualized 

Puns.

CHAPTER III.

The author’s obligations to critics, and the proba 

ble occasion—Principles of modern criticism—

Mr. Southey’s works and character.

To anonymous critics in reviews, maga 

zines, and newsjournals of various name and 

rank, and to satirists with or without a name, 

in verse or prose, or in versetext aided by 

prosecomment, I do seriously believe and pro 

fess, that I owe full two thirds of whatever 

reputation and publicity I happen to possess. 

For when the name of an individual has oc 

curred so frequently, in so many works, for 

so great a length of time, the readers of these 

works (which with a shelf or two of BEAUTIES, 

ELEGANT EXTRACTS and ANAS, form ninetenths 

of the reading of the reading public*) cannot but

For as to the devotees of the circulating libraries, I dare 

not compliment their passtime, or rather killtime, with the 

name of reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day 

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dreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes 

for itself nothing but laziness and a little mawkish sensibi 

lity; while the whole materiel and imagery of the doze is 

supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura ma 

nufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes, 

reflects and transmits the moving phantasms of one man’s*

be familiar with the name, without distinctly 

remembering whether it was introduced for 

an eulogy or for censure. And this becomes 

the more likely, if (as I believe) the habit of 

perusing periodical works may be properly 

added to Averrhoe’s* catalogue of ANTIMNE 

MONICS, or weakeners of the memory. But 

where this has not been the case, yet the reader

*delirium, so as to people the barrenness of an hundred other 

brains afflicted with the same trance or suspension of all 

common sense and all definite purpose. We should there 

fore transfer this species of amusement, (if indeed those can 

be said to retire a musis, who were never in their company, 

or relaxation be attributable to those, whose bows are never 

bent) from the genus, reading, to that comprehensive class 

characterized by the power of reconciling the two contrary 

yet coexisting propensities of human nature, namely; indul 

gence of sloth, and hatred of vacancy. In addition to novels 

and tales of chivalry in prose or rhyme, (by which last I 

mean neither rhythm nor metre) this genus comprizes as its 

species, gaming, swinging, or swaying on a chair or gate; 

spitting over a bridge; smoking; snufftaking; tete a tete 

quarrels after dinner between husband and wife; conning 

word by word all the advertisements of the daily advertizer 

in a public house on a rainy day, &c. &c. &c.

*Ex. gr. Pediculos e capillis excerptos in arenam jacere 

incontusos; eating of unripe fruit; gazing on the clouds, and 

(in genere) on moveable things suspended in the air; riding 

among a multitude of camels; frequent laughter; listening 

to a series of jests and humourous anecdotes, as when (so to 

modernise the learned Saracen’s meaning) one man’s droll 

story of an Irishman inevitably occasions another’s droll story 

of a Scotchman, which again by the same sort of conjunction 

disjunctive leads to some etourderie of a Welchman, and 

that again to some sly hit of a Yorkshireman; the habit of 

reading tombstones in churchyards, &c. By the bye, this 

catalogue strange as it may appear, is not insusceptible of a 

sound pcychological commentary. 

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will be apt to suspect, that there must be 

something more than usually strong and exten 

sive in a reputation, that could either require or 

stand so merciless and longcontinued a can 

nonading. Without any feeling of anger there 

fore (for which indeed, on my own account, I 

have no pretext) I may yet be allowed to ex 

press some degree of surprize, that after having 

run the critical gauntlet for a certain class of 

faults which I had, nothing having come before 

the judgementseat in the interim, I should, 

year after year, quarter after quarter, month 

after month (not to mention sundry petty pe 

riodicals of still quicker revolution, "or weekly 

or diurnal") have been for at least 17 years 

consecutively dragged forth by them into the 

foremost ranks of the proscribed, and forced to 

abide the brunt of abuse, for faults directly 

opposite, and which I certainly had not. How 

shall I explain this?

Whatever may have been the case with others, 

I certainly cannot attribute this persecution to 

personal dislike, or to envy, or to feelings of 

vindictive animosity. Not to the former, for,

with the exception of a very few who are my 

intimate friends, and were so before thencty were 

known as authors, I have had little other ac 

quaintance with literary characters, than what 

may be implied in an accidental introduction, 

or casual meeting in a mixt company. And, 

as far as words and looks can be trusted, I 

must believe that, even in these instances, I had 

excited no unfriendly disposition.* Neither by

Some years ago, a gentleman, the chief writer and con 

ductor of a celebrated review, distinguished by its hostility 

to Mr. Southey, spent a day or two at Keswick. That he 

was, without diminution on this account, treated with every 

hospitable attention by Mr. Southey and myself, I trust I 

need not say. But one thing I may venture to notice; that 

at no period of my life do I remember to have received so 

many, and such high coloured compliments in so short a space 

of time. He was likewise circumstantially informed by what 

series of accidents it had happened, that Mr. Wordsworth, 

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Mr. Southey, and I had become neighbours; and how ut 

terly unfounded was the supposition, that we considered 

ourselves, as belonging to any common school, but that of 

good sense confirmed by the longestablished models of the 

best times of Greece, Rome, Italy, and England; and still 

more groundless the notion, that Mr. Southey (for as to my 

self I have published so little, and that little, of so little im 

portance, as to make it almost ludicrous to mention my name 

at all) could have been concerned in the formation of a poetic 

sect with Mr. Wordsworth, when so many of his works had 

been published not only previously to any acquaintance be 

tween them; but before Mr. Wordsworth himself had written 

any thing but in a diction ornate, and uniformly sustain 

ed; when too the slightest examination will make it evident, that 

between those and the after writings of Mr. Southey, there 

exists no other difference than that of a progressive degree 

of excellence from progressive developement of power, and 

progressive facility from habit and increase of experience. 

Yet among the first articles which this man wrote after his 

return from Keswick, we were characterized as "the School 

of whining and hypochondriacal poets that haunt the Lakes."

In reply to a letter from the same gentleman, in which he

had asked me, whether I was in earnest in preferring the 

style of Hooker to that of Dr. Johnson; and Jeremy Taylor 

to Burke; I stated, somewhat at large, the comparative ex 

cellences and defects which characterized our best prose 

writers, from the reformation, to the first half of Charles 

nd; and that of those who had flourished during the present 

reign, and the preceding one. About twelve months 

letter, or in conversation, have I ever had dis 

pute or controversy beyond the common social 

interchange of opinions. Nay, where I had 

reason to suppose my convictions fundament 

ally different, it has been my habit, and I may 

add, the impulse of my nature, to assign the 

grounds of my belief, rather than the belief 

itself; and not to express dissent, till I could

*afterwards, a review appeared on the same subject, in the con 

cluding paragraph of which the reviewer asserts, that his 

chief motive for entering into the discussion was to separate 

a rational and qualified admiration of our elder writers, from 

the indiscriminate enthusiasm of a recent school, who praised 

what they did not understand, and caracatured what they 

were unable to imitate, And, that no doubt might be left 

concerning the persons alluded to, the writer annexes the 

names of Miss BAILIE, W. SOUTHEY, WORDSWORTH and 

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COLERIDGE. For that which follows, I have only earsay 

evidence; but yet such as demands my belief; viz. that on 

being questioned concerning this apparently wanton attack, 

more especially with reference to Miss Bailie, the writer had 

stated as his motives, that this lady when at Edinburgh had 

declined a proposal of introducing him to her; that Mr. 

Southey had written against him; and Mr. Wordsworth had 

talked contemptuously of him; but that as to Coleridge he 

had noticed him merely because the names of Southey and 

Wordsworth and Coleridge always went together. But if 

it were worth while to mix together, as ingredients, half the 

anecdotes which I either myself know to be true, or which 

I have received from men incapable of intentional falsehood, 

concerning the characters, qualifications, and motives of our 

anonymous critics, whose decisions are oracles for our read 

ing public; I might safely borrow the words of the apocry 

phal Daniel; "Give me leave, O SOVEREIGN PUBLIC, and I 

shall slay this dragon without sword or staff." For the com 

pound would be as the "Pitch, and fat, and hair, which 

Daniel took, and did seethe them together, and made lumps 

thereof, and put into the dragon’s mouth, and so the dragon 

burst in sunder; and Daniel said LO; THESE ARE THE 

GODS YE WORSHIP."

establish some points of complete sympathy, 

some grounds common to both sides, from 

which to commence its explanation.

Still less can I place these attacks to the 

charge of envy. The few pages, which I have 

published, are of too distant a date; and the 

extent of their sale a proof too conclusive 

against their having been popular at any time; 

to render probable, I had almost said possible, 

the excitement of envy on their account; and 

the man who should envy me on any other, 

verily he must be envymad!

Lastly, with as little semblance of reason, 

could I suspect any animosity towards me from 

vindictive feelings as the cause. I have before 

said, that my acquaintance with literary men 

has been limited and distant; and that I have 

had neither dispute nor controversy. From 

my first entrance into life, I have, with few and 

short intervals, lived either abroad or in retire 

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ment. My different essays on subjects of na 

tional interest, published at different times, first 

in the Morning Post and then in the Courier, 

with my courses of lectures on the principles of 

criticism as applied to Shakspeare and Milton, 

constitute my whole publicity; the only occa 

sions on which I could offend any member of 

the republic of letters. With one solitary ex 

ception in which my words were first mis 

stated and then wantonly applied to an 

individual, I could never learn, that I had excited the 

displeasure of any among my literary contem 

poraries. Having announced my intention to 

give a course of lectures on the characteristic 

merits and defects of English poetry in its dif 

ferent æras; first, from Chaucer to Milton; 

second, from Dryden inclusive to Thompson; 

and third, from Cowper to the present day; I 

changed my plan, and confined my disquisition 

to the two former æras, that I might furnish no 

possible pretext for the unthinking to miscon 

strue, or the malignant to misapply my words, 

and having stampt their own meaning on them, 

to pass them as current coin in the marts of 

garrulity or detraction.

Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent 

minds as robberies of the deserving; and it is 

too true, and too frequent, that Bacon, Har 

rington, Machiavel, and Spinosa, are not read, 

because Hume, Condilliac, and Voltaire are. 

But in promiscuous company no prudent man 

will oppugn the merits of a contemporary in 

his own supposed department; contenting him 

self with praising in his turn those whom he 

deems excellent. If I should ever deem it my 

duty at all to oppose the pretensions of indivi 

duals, I would oppose them in books which 

could be weighed and answered, in which I 

could evolve the whole of my reasons and feel 

ings, with their requisite limits and 

modifications; not in irrecoverable conversation, where 

however strong the reasons might be, the feel 

ings that prompted them would assuredly be 

attributed by some one or other to envy and 

discontent. Besides I well know, and I trust, 

have acted on that knowledge, that it must be 

the ignorant and injudicious who extol the 

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unworthy; and the eulogies of critics without 

taste or judgement are the natural reward of 

authors without feeling or genius. "Sint uni 

cuique sua premia."

How then, dismissing, as I do, these three 

causes, am I to account for attacks, the long 

continuance and inveteracy of which it would 

require all three to explain. The solution may 

seem to have been given, or at least suggested, 

in a note to a preceding page. I was in habits 

of intimacy with Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. 

Southey! This, however, transfers, rather than 

removes, the difficulty. Be it, that by an un 

conscionable extension of the old adage, "nos 

citur a socio" my literary friends are never 

under the waterfall of criticism, but I must be 

wet through with the spray; yet how came the 

torrent to descend upon them ?

First then, with regard to Mr. Southey. I 

well remember the general reception of his 

earlier publications: viz. the poems published 

with Mr. Lovell under the names of Moschus 

and Bion; the two volumes of poems under his 

own name, and the Joan of Arc. The censures 

of the critics by profession are extant, and may 

be easily referred to:careless lines, inequality 

in the merit of the different poems, and (in the 

lighter works) a prediliction for the strange and 

whimsical; in short, such faults as might have 

been anticipated in a young and rapid writer, 

were indeed sufficiently enforced. Nor was 

there at that time wanting a party spirit to 

aggravate the defects of a poet, who with all 

the courage of uncorrupted youth had avowed 

his zeal for a cause, which he deemed that of 

liberty, and his abhorrence of oppression by 

whatever name consecrated. But it was as 

little objected by others, as dreamt of by the 

poet himself, that he preferred careless and 

prosaic lines on rule and of forethought, or in 

deed that he pretended to any other art or 

theory of poetic diction, besides that which we 

may all learn from Horace, Quintilian, the ad 

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mirable dialogue de Causis Corruptæ Eloquen 

tiæ, or Strada’s Prolusions; if indeed natural 

good sense and the early study of the best 

models in his own language had not infused 

the same maxims more securely, and, if I may 

venture the expression, more vitally. All that 

could have been fairly deduced was, that in his 

taste and estimation of writers Mr. Southey 

agreed far more with Warton, thall with John 

son. Nor do I mean to deny, that at all times 

Mr. Southey was of the same mind with Sir 

Philip Sidney in preferring an excellent ballad 

in the humblest style of poetry to twenty in 

different poems that strutted in the highest. 

And by what have his works, published since 

then, been characterized, each more strikingly 

than the preceding, but by greater splendor, a 

deeper pathos, profounder reflections, and a 

more sustained dignity of language and of 

metre? Distant may the period be, but when 

ever the time shall come, when all his works 

shall be collected by some editor worthy to be 

his biographer, I trust that an excerpta of all 

the passages, in which his writings, name, and 

character have been attacked, from the pamph 

lets and periodical works of the last twenty 

years, may be an accompaniment. Yet that it 

would prove medicinal in after times, I dare 

not hope; for as long as there are readers to 

be delighted with calumny, there will be found 

reviewers to calumniate. And such readers 

will become in all probability more numerous, 

in proportion as a still greater diffusion of lite 

rature shall produce an increase of sciolists; 

and sciolism bring with it petulance and pre 

sumption. In times of old, books were as reli 

gious oracles; as literature advanced, they next 

became venerable preceptors; they then de 

scended to the rank of instructive friends; and 

as their numbers increased, they sunk still 

lower to that of entertaining companions; and 

at present they seem degraded into culprits to 

hold up their hands at the bar of every self 

elected, yet not the less peremptory, judge, 

who chuses to write from humour or interest, 

from enmity or arrogance, and to abide the 

decision (in the words of Jeremy Taylor) "of 

him that reads in malice, or him that reads after 

dinner."

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The same gradual retrograde movement may 

be traced, in the relation which the authors 

themselves have assumed towards their readers. 

From the lofty address of Bacon: "these are 

"the meditations of Francis of Verulam, which 

"that posterity should be possessed of, he deemed

"their interest :" or from dedication to Monarch 

or Pontiff, in which the honor given was as 

serted in equipoise to the patronage acknow 

leged from PINDAR’S

ep alloi

si dalloi megaloi. to deschaton koru 

phoutai basileusi. meketi 

Paptaine porsion. 

Eie se te touton 

Upsou chronon patein, eme 

Te tossade nikarorois 

Omilein, prophanton sorian kad El

 

lanas eonta panta. 

OLYMP. OD. I.

Poets and Philosophers, rendered diffident 

by their very number, addressed themselves to 

"learned readers ;" then, aimed to conciliate 

the graces of "the candid reader ;" till, the critic 

still rising as the author sunk, the amateurs of 

literature collectively were erected into a muni 

cipality of judges, and addressed as THE TOWN! 

And now finally, all men being supposed able 

to read, and all readers able to judge, the mul 

titudinous PUBLIC, shaped into personal unity 

by the magic of abstraction, sits nominal des 

pot on the throne of criticism. But, alas! as 

in other despotisms, it but echoes the decisions 

of its invisible ministers, whose intellectual 

claims to the guardianship of the muses seem, 

for the greater part, analogous to the phy 

sical qualifications which adapt their oriental 

brethren for the superintendance of the Harem. 

Thus it is said, that St. Nepomuc was installed 

the guardian of bridges because he had fallen 

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over one, and sunk out of sight; thus too St. 

Cecilia is said to have been first propitiated by 

musicians, because having failed in her own 

attempts, she had taken a dislike to the art, 

and all its successful professors. But I shall 

probably have occasion hereafter to deliver my 

convictions more at large concerning this state 

of things, and its influences on taste, genius 

and morality.

In the "Thalaba" the "Madoc" and still 

more evidently in the unique* "Cid," the 

"Kehama," and as last, so best, the "Don 

"Roderick;" Southey has given abundant proof,

"se cogitässe quám sit magnum dare aliquid 

"in manus hominum: nec persuadere sibi posse, 

"non sæpe tractandum quod placere et semper 

"et omnibus cupiat." Plin. Ep. Lib. 7. Ep. 17. 

But on the other hand I guess, that Mr. Southey 

was quite unable to comprehend, wherein could 

consist the crime or mischief of printing half a 

dozen or more playful poems; or to speak 

more generally, compositions which would be 

enjoyed or passed over, according as the taste 

and humour of the reader might chance to be; 

provided they contained nothing immoral. In 

the present age "perituræ parcere chartæ" is 

emphatically an unreasonable demand. The 

merest trifle, he ever sent abroad, had tenfold 

better claims to its ink and paper, than all the 

silly criticisms, which prove no more, than that

I have ventured to call it "unique ;" not only because I 

know no work of the kind in our language (if we except a 

few chapters of the old translation of Froissart) none, which 

uniting the charms of romance and history, keeps the imagi 

nation so constantly on the wing, and yet leaves so much for 

after reflection; but likewise, and chiefly, because it is a 

compilation, which in the various excellencies of translation, 

selection, and arrangement, required and proves greater ge 

nius in the compiler, as living in the present state of society, 

than in the original composers. 

the critic was not one of those, for whom the 

trifle was written; and than all the grave ex 

hortations to a greater reverence for the public. 

As if the passive page of a book, by having an 

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epigram or doggrel tale impressed on it, in 

stantly assumed at once locomotive power and 

a sort of ubiquity, so as to flutter and buz in 

the ear of the public to the sore annoyance of 

the said mysterious personage. But what gives 

an additional and more ludicrous absurdity to 

these lamentations is the curious fact, that if in 

a volume of poetry the critic should find poem 

or passage which he deems more especially 

worthless, he is sure to select and reprint it in 

the review; by which, on his own grounds, he 

wastes as much more paper than the author, as 

the copies of a fashionable review are more 

numerous than those of the original book; in 

some, and those the most prominent instances, 

as ten thousand to five hundred. I know 

nothing that surpasses the vileness of deciding 

on the merits of a poet or painter (not by cha 

racteristic defects; for where there is genius,

these always point to his characteristic beauties; 

but) by accidental failures or faulty passages; 

except the impudence of defending it, as the 

proper duty, and most instructive part, of cri 

ticism. Omit or pass slightly over, the ex 

pression, grace, and grouping of Raphael’s

figures; but ridicule in detail the 

knittingneedles and broomtwigs, that are to represent 

trees in his back grounds; and never let him 

hear the last of his gallipots! Admit, that 

the Allegro and Penseroso of Milton are not 

without merit; but repay yourself for this con 

cession, by reprinting at length the two poems 

on the University Carrier! As a fair specimen 

of his sonnets, quote " a Book was writ of late 

called Tetrachordon ;" and as characteristic of 

his rhythm and metre cite his literal translation 

of the first and second psalm! In order to 

justify yourself, you need only assert, that had 

you dwelt chiefly on the beauties and excel 

lencies of the poet, the admiration of these 

might seduce the attention of future writers 

from the objects of their love and wonder, to 

an imitation of the few poems and passages in 

which the poet was most unlike himself.

But till reviews are conducted on far other 

principles, and with far other motives; till in 

the place of arbitrary dictation and petulant 

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sneers, the reviewers support their decisions by

reference to fixed canons of criticism, previ

ously established and deduced from the nature 

of man; reflecting minds will pronounce it ar 

rogance in them thus to announce themselves 

to men of letters, as the guides of their taste 

and judgment. To the purchaser and mere 

reader it is, at all events, an injustice. He 

who tells me that there are defects in a new 

work, tells me nothing which I should not 

have taken for granted without his information. 

But he, who points out and elucidates the 

beauties of an original work, does indeed give 

me interesting information, such as experience 

would not have authorised me in anticipating. 

And as to compositions which the authors 

themselves announce with "Hæc ipsi novimus 

esse nihil," why should we judge by a dif 

ferent rule two printed works, only because 

the one author was alive, and the other in his 

grave? What literary man has not regretted 

the prudery of Spratt in refusing to let his friend 

Cowley appear in his slippers and dressing 

gown? I am not perhaps the only one who 

has derived an innocent amusement from the 

riddles, conundrums, trisyllable lines, &c. &c. 

of Swift and his correspondents, in hours of 

languor when to have read his more finished 

works would have been useless to myself, and, 

in some sort, an act of injustice to the author. 

But I am at a loss to conceive by what perver 

sity of judgement, these relaxations of his genius 

could be employed to diminish his fame as the 

writer of "Gulliver’s travels," and the "Tale 

of a Tub." Had Mr. Southey written twice as 

many poems of inferior merit, or partial inte 

rest, as have enlivened the journals of the day, 

they would have added to his honour with 

good and wise men, not merely or principally 

as proving the versatility of his talents, but as 

evidences of the purity of that mind, which even 

in its levities never wrote a line, which it need 

regret on any moral account.

I have in imagination transferred to the future 

biographer the duty of contrasting Southey’s 

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fixed and wellearned fame, with the abuse and 

indefatigable hostility of his anonymous critics 

from his early youth to his ripest manhood. 

But I cannot think so ill of human nature as not 

to believe, that these critics have already taken 

shame to themselves, whether they consider the 

object of their abuse in his moral or his literary 

character. For reflect but on the variety and 

extent of his acquirements! He stands second 

to no man, either as an historian or as a biblio 

grapher; and when I regard him, as a popular 

essayist, (for the articles of his compositions in 

the reviews are for the greater part essays on 

subjects of deep or curious interest rather than 

criticisms on particular works*) I look in 

vain for any writer, who has conveyed so much 

information, from so many and such recondite 

sources, with so many just and original reflec 

tions, in a style so lively and poignant, yet so 

uniformly classical and perspicuous; no one in 

short who has combined so much wisdom with

See the articles on Methodism, in the Quarterly Review; 

the small volume on the New System of Education, &c. 

so much wit; so much truth and knowledge 

with so much life and fancy. His prose is 

always intelligible and always entertaining. In 

poetry he has attempted almost every species 

of composition known before, and he has added 

new ones; and if we except the highest lyric, 

(in which how few, how very few even of the 

greatest minds have been fortunate) he has 

attempted every species successfully: from 

the political song of the day, thrown off in 

the playful overflow of honest joy and pa 

triotic exultation, to the wild ballad ;* from 

epistolary ease and graceful narrative, to the 

austere and impetuous moral declamation; from 

the pastoral claims and wild streaming lights of 

the "Thalaba," in which sentiment and imagery 

have given permanence even to the excitement 

of curiosity; and from the full blaze of the 

"Kehama," (a gallery of finished pictures in 

one splendid fancy piece, in which, notwith 

standing, the moral grandeur rises gradually 

above the brilliance of the colouring and the 

boldness and novelty of the machinery) to the 

more sober beauties of the "Madoc;" and 

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lastly, from the Madoc to his "Roderic," in 

which, retaining all his former excellencies of a 

poet eminently inventive and picturesque, he has

See the incomparable "Return to Moscow," and the 

"Old Woman of Berkeley." 

surpassed himself in language and metre, in 

the construction of the whole, and in the splen 

dor of particular passages.

Here then shall I conclude? No! The cha 

racters of the deceased, like the encomia on 

tombstones, as they are described with religious 

tenderness, so are they read, with allowing sym 

pathy indeed, but yet with rational deduction. 

There are men, who deserve a higher record; 

men with whose characters it is the interest of 

their contemporaries, no less than that of poste 

rity, to be made acquainted; while it is yet pos 

sible for impartial censure, and even for quick 

sighted envy, to crossexamine the tale without 

offence to the courtesies of humanity; and while 

the eulogist detected in exaggeration or false 

hood must pay the full penalty of his baseness 

in the contempt which brands the convicted flat 

terer. Publicly has Mr. Southey been reviled 

by men, who (I would feign hope for the honor 

of human nature) hurled firebrands against a 

figure of their own imagination, publicly have 

his talents been depreciated, his principles de 

nounced; as publicly do I therefore, who have 

known him intimately, deem it my duty to leave 

recorded, that it is SOUTHEY’S almost unexam 

pled felicity, to possess the best gifts of talent and 

genius free from all their characteristic defects. 

To those who remember the state of our public 

schools and universities some twenty years past, 

it will appear no ordinary praise in any man to 

have passed from innocence into virtue, not only 

free from all vicious habit, but unstained by 

one act of intemperance, or the degradations 

akin to intemperance. That scheme of head, 

heart, and habitual demeanour, which in his 

early manhood, and first controversial writings, 

Milton, claiming the privilege of selfdefence, 

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asserts of himself, and challenges his calumnia 

tors to disprove; this will his schoolmates, his 

fellowcollegians, and his maturer friends, with 

a confidence proportioned to the intimacy of their 

knowledge, bear witness to, as again realized 

in the life of Robert Southey. But still more 

striking to those, who by biography or by their 

own experience are familiar with the general 

habits of genius, will appear the poet’s match 

less industry and perseverance in his pursuits; 

the worthiness and dignity of those pursuits; 

his generous submission to tasks of transitory 

interest, or such as his genius alone could make 

otherwise; and that having thus more than sa 

tisfied the claims of affection or prudence, he 

should yet have made for himself time and 

power, to achieve more, and in more various de 

partments than almost any other writer has done, 

though employed wholly on subjects of his own 

choice and ambition. But as Southey possesses, 

and is not possessed by, his genius, even so is 

he the master even of his virtues. The regular 

and methodical tenor of his daily labours, which 

would be deemed rare in the most mechanical 

pursuits, and might be envied by the mere man 

of business, loses all semblance of formality in 

the dignified simplicity of his manners, in the 

spring and healthful chearfulness of his spirits. 

Always employed, his friends find him always 

at leisure. No less punctual in trifles, than 

stedfast in the performance of highest duties, he 

inflicts none of those small pains and discom 

forts which irregular men scatter about them 

and which in the aggregate so often become 

formidable obstacles both to happiness and 

utility; while on the contrary he bestows all the 

pleasures, and inspires all that ease of mind on 

those around him or connected with him, which 

perfect consistency, and (if such a word might 

be framed) absolute reliability, equally in small 

as in great concerns, cannot but inspire and 

bestow: when this too is softened without 

being weakened by kindness and gentleness. 

I know few men who so well deserve the cha 

racter which an antient attributes to Marcus 

Cato, namely, that he was likest virtue, in as 

much as he seemed to act aright, not in obedi 

ence to any law or outward motive, but by the 

necessity of a happy nature, which could not 

act otherwise. As son, brother, husband, father, 

master, friend, he moves with firm yet light

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steps, alike unostentatious, and alike exem. 

plary. As a writer, he has uniformly made his 

talents subservient to the best interests of huma 

nity, of public virtue, and domestic piety; his 

cause has ever been the cause of pure religion 

and of liberty, of national independence and of 

national illumination. When future critics shall 

weigh out his guerdon of praise and censure, it 

will be Southey the poet only, that will supply 

them with the scanty materials for the latter. 

They will likewise not fail to record, that as no 

man was ever a more constant friend, never had 

poet more friends and honorers among the good 

of all parties; and that quacks in education, 

quacks in politics, and quacks in criticism were 

his only enemies.*

It is not easy to estimate the effects which the example 

of a young man as highly distinguished for strict purity of 

disposition and conduct, as for intellectual power and lite 

rary acquirements, may produce on those of the same age 

with himself, especially on those of similar pursuits and con 

genial minds. For many years, my opportunities of inter 

course with Mr. Southey have been rare, and at long inter 

vals; but I dwell with unabated pleasure on the strong and 

sudden, yet I trust not fleeting influence, which my moral 

being underwent on my acquaintance with him at Oxford, 

whither I had gone at the commencement of our Cambridge 

vacation on a visit to an old schoolfellow. Not indeed on 

my moral or religious principles, for they had never been 

contaminated; but in awakening the sense of the duty and 

dignity of making my actions accord with those principles, 

both in word and deed. The irregularities only not univer 

sal among the young men of my standing, which I always

knew to be wrong, I then learnt to feel as degrading; learnt 

to know that an opposite conduct, which was at that time 

considered by us as the easy virtue of cold and selfish pru 

dence, might originate in the noblest emotions, in views the*

CHAPTER IV.

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The lyrical ballads with the preface—Mr. Words 

worth’s earlier poems—On fancy and imagi 

nation—The investigation of the distinction 

important to the fine arts.

I have wandered far from the object in view, 

but as I fancied to myself readers who would 

respect the feelings that had tempted me from

*most disinterested and imaginative. It is not however from 

grateful recollections only, that I have been impelled thus to 

leave these, my deliberate sentiments on record; but in some 

sense as a debt of justice to the man, whose name has been so 

often connected with mine, for evil to which he is a stranger. 

As a specimen I subjoin part of a note, from "the Beauties 

of the Antijacobin," in which, having previously informed 

the public that I had been dishonor’d at Cambridge for 

preaching deism, at a time when for my youthful ardor in 

defence of christianity, I was decried as a bigot by the pro 

selytes of French Phi (or to speak more truly, Psi) losophy, 

the writer concludes with these words "since this time he 

has left his native country, commenced citizen of the world, 

left his poor children fatherless, and his wife destitute. Ex 

his disce, his friends, LAMB and SOUTHEY. "With severest 

truth it may be asserted, that it would not be easy to select 

two men more exemplary in their domestic affections, than 

those whose names were thus printed at full length as in the 

same rank of morals with a denounced infidel and fugitive, 

who had left his children fatherless and his wife destitute! 

Is it surprising, that many good men remained longer than 

perhaps they otherwise would have done, adverse to a party, 

which encouraged and openly rewarded the authors of such 

atrocious calumnies! Qualis es, nescio; sed per quales 

agis, scio et doleo. 

the main road; so I dare calculate on not a 

few, who will warmly sympathize with them. 

At present it will be sufficient for my purpose, 

if I have proved, that Mr. Southey’s writings 

no more than my own, furnished the original 

occasion to this fiction of a new school of poetry, 

and of clamors against its supposed founders 

and proselytes.

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As little do I believe that "Mr. WORDS 

WORTH’S Lyrical Ballads" were in themselves the 

cause. I speak exclusively of the two volumes 

so entitled. A careful and repeated examina 

tion of these confirms me in the belief, that the 

omission of less than an hundred lines would 

have precluded ninetenths of the criticism on 

this work. I hazard this declaration, however, 

on the supposition, that the reader had taken it 

up, as he would have done any other collection 

of poems purporting to derive their subjects or 

interests from the incidents of domestic or or 

dinary life, intermingled with higher strains of 

meditation which the poet utters in his own 

person and character; with the proviso, that 

they were perused without knowledge of, or

reference to, the author’s peculiar opinions, and

that the reader had not had his attention previ 

ously directed to those peculiarities. In these, 

as was actually the case with Mr. Southey’s 

earlier works, the lines and passages which 

might have offended the general taste, would 

have been considered as mere inequalities, and 

attributed to inattention, not to perversity of 

judgement. The men of business who had 

passed their lives chiefly in cities, and who 

might therefore be expected to derive the high 

est pleasure from acute notices of men and 

manners conveyed in easy, yet correct and 

pointed language; and all those who, reading 

but little poetry, are most stimulated with that 

species of it, which seems most distant from 

prose, would probably have passed by the 

volume altogether. Others more catholic in 

their taste, and yet habituated to be most pleas 

ed when most excited, would have contented 

themselves with deciding, that the author had 

been successful in proportion to the elevation 

of his style and subject. Not a few perhaps, 

might by their admiration of "the lines written 

near Tintern Abbey," those "left upon a Seat 

under a Yew Tree," the "old Cumberland beg 

gar," and "Ruth," have been gradually led to 

peruse with kindred feeling the "Brothers," the 

"Hart leap well," and whatever other poems in 

that collection may be described as holding a 

middle place between those written in the high 

est and those in the humblest style; as for 

instance between the "Tintern Abbey," and 

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"the Thorn," or the "Simon Lee." Should 

their taste submit to no further change, and 

sill remain unreconciled to the colloquial 

phrases, or the imitations of them, that are, 

more or less, scattered through the class last 

mentioned; yet even from the small number of 

the latter, they would have deemed them but 

an inconsiderable subtraction from the merit of 

the whole work; or, what is sometimes not 

unpleasing in the publication of a new writer, 

as serving to ascertain the natural tendency, 

and consequently the proper direction of the 

author’s genius.

In the critical remarks therefore, prefixed 

and annexed to the "Lyrical Ballads," I be 

lieve, that we may safely rest, as the true 

origin of the unexampled opposition which 

Mr. Wordsworth’s writings have been since 

doomed to encounter. The humbler passages 

in the poems themselves were dwelt on and 

cited to justify the rejection of the theory. 

What in and for themselves would have been 

either forgotten or forgiven as imperfections, or 

at least comparative failures, provoked direct 

hostility when announced as intentional, as 

the result of choice after full deliberation. 

Thus the poems, admitted by all as excellent, 

joined with those which had pleased the far

greater number, though they formed twothirds 

of the whole work, instead of being deemed (as 

in all right they should have been, even if we 

take for granted that the reader judged aright) 

an atonement for the few exceptions, gave wind 

and fuel to the animosity against both the poems 

and the poet. In all perplexity there is a por 

tion of fear, which predisposes the mind to 

anger. Not able to deny that the author pos 

sessed both genius and a powerful intellect, 

they felt very positive, but were not quite certain, 

that he might not be in the right, and they 

themselves in the wrong; an unquiet state of 

mind, which seeks alleviation by quarrelling 

with the occasion of it, and by wondering at the 

perverseness of the man, who had written a long 

and argumentative essay to persuade them, that

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" Fair is foul, and foul is fair ;"

in other words, that they had been all their lives 

admiring without judgement, and were now 

about to censure without reason.*

In opinions of long continuance, and in which we had 

never before been molested by a single doubt, to be sud 

denly convinced of an error, is almost like being convicted of 

a fault. There is a state of mind, which is the direct anti 

thesis of that, which takes place when we make a bull. The 

bull namely consists in the bringing together two incompa 

patible thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense, of 

their connection. The psychological condition, or that 

which constitutes the possibility of this state, being such 

disproportionate vividness of two distant thoughts, as extin 

guishes or obscures the consciousness of the intermediate 

images or conceptious or wholly abstracts the attention 

from them. Thus in the well known bull, "I was a fine 

child, but they changed me ;" the first conception expressed 

in the word" I," is that of personal identity—Ego contem 

plans: the second expressed in the word "me," is the visual 

image or object by which the mind represents to itself its 

past condition, or rather, its personal identity under the 

form in which it imagined itself previously to have existed,*

That this conjecture is not wide from the 

mark, I am induced to believe from the notice 

able fact, which I can state on my own know 

ledge, that the same general censure should 

have been grounded almost by each different 

person on some different poem. Among those, 

whose candour and judgement I estimate highly, 

I distinctly remember six who expressed their 

objections to the "Lyrical Ballads" almost in 

the same words, and altogether to the same 

purport, at the same time admitting, that se 

veral of the poems had given them great plea 

sure; and, strange as it might seem, the com 

position which one had cited as execrable,

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*Ego contemplatus. Now the change of one visual image for 

another involves in itself no absurdity, and becomes absurd 

only by its immediate juxtaposition with the first thought, 

which is rendered possible by the whole attention being suc 

cessively absorbed in each singly, so as not to notice the in 

terjacent notion, "changed" which by its incongruity with 

the first thought, "I," constitutes the bull. Add only, that 

this process is facilitated by the circumstance of the words

"I," and "me," being sometimes equivalent, and sometimes 

having a distinct meaning; sometimes, namely, signifying 

the act of selfconsciousness, sometimes the external image 

in and by which the mind represents that act to itself, the 

result and symbol of its individuality. Now suppose the 

direct contrary state, and you will have a distinct sense of 

the connection between two conceptions, without that sen 

sation of such connection which is supplied by habit. The 

man feels, as if he were standing on his head, though he can 

not but see, that he is truly standing on his feet. This, as a 

painful sensation, will of course have a tendency to associate 

itself with the person who occasions it; even as persons, who 

have been by painful means restored from derangement, are 

known to feel an involuntary dislike towards their physician. 

another had quoted as his favorite. I am 

indeed convinced in my own mind, that could 

the same experiment have been tried with these 

volumes, as was made in the well known story 

of the picture, the result would have been the 

same; the parts which had been covered by the 

number of the black spots on the one day, 

would be found equally albo lapide notatæ on 

the succeeding.

However this may be, it is assuredly hard 

and unjust to fix the attention on a few separate 

and insulated poems with as much aversion, as 

if they had been so many plaguespots on the 

whole work, instead of passing them over in 

silence, as so much blank paper, or leaves of 

bookseller’s catalogue; especially, as no one 

pretends to have found immorality or indeli 

cacy; and the poems therefore, at the worst, 

could only be regarded as so many light or 

inferior coins in a roleau of gold, not as so much 

alloy in a weight of bullion. A friend whose

talentsI hold in the highest respect, but whose

judgement and strong sound sense I have had 

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almost continued occasion to revere, making 

the usual complaints to me concerning both the 

style and subjects of Mr. Wordsworth’s minor 

poems; I admitted that there were some few 

of the tales and incidents, in which I could not 

myself find a sufficient cause for their having 

been recorded in metre. I mentioned the "Alice 

Fell" as an instance; "nay," replied my friend 

with more than usual quickness of manner, 

" I cannot agree with you there! that I own

does seem to me a remarkably pleasing poem." 

In the "Lyrical Ballads" (for my experience 

does not enable me to extend the remark equally 

unqualified to the two subsequent volumes) I 

have heard at different times, and from different 

individuals every single poem extolled and re 

probated, with the exception of those of loftier 

kind, which as was before observed, seem to 

have won universal praise. This fact of itself 

would have made me diffident in my censures, 

had not a still stronger ground been furnished 

by the strange contrast of the heat and long 

continuance of the opposition, with the nature 

of the faults stated as justifying it. The seduc 

tive faults, the dulcia vitia of Cowley, Marini, 

or Darwin might reasonably be thought capable 

of corrupting the public judgement for half a 

century, and require a twenty years war, cam 

paign after campaign, in order to dethrone the 

usurper and reestablish the legitimate taste. 

But that a downright simpleness, under the 

affectation of simplicity, prosaic words in feeble 

metre, silly thoughts in childish phrases, and 

a preference of mean, degrading, or at best 

trivial associations and characters, should suc 

ceed in forming a school of imitators, a com 

pany of almost religious admirers, and this too 

among young men of ardent minds, liberal 

education, and not

"with academic laurels unbestowed ;"

and that this bare and bald counterfeit of poetry, 

which is characterized as below criticism, should 

for nearly twenty years have wellnigh engrossed 

criticism, as the main, if not the only, butt of 

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review, magazine, pamphlets, poem, and para 

graph;this is indeed matter of wonder! Of 

yet greater is it, that the contest should still 

continue as* undecided as that between

Without however the apprehensions attributed to the

Pagan reformer of the poetic republic. If we may judge 

from the preface to the recent collection of his poems, Mr. 

W. would have answered with Xanthias—

Su d ouk edeisas ton psophon ton rematon, 

Kai tas apeilas; XAN. ouma Di, oud ephrontisa.

And here let me dare hint to the authors of the numerous 

parodies, and pretended imitations of Mr. Wordsworth’s 

style, that at once to conceal and convey wit and wisdom in 

the semblance of folly and dulness, as is done in the clowns 

and fools, nay even in the Dogberry, of our Shakespear, is 

doubtless a proof of genius, or at all events, of satiric talent; 

but that the attempt to ridicule a silly and childish poem, 

by writing another still sillier and still more childish, can 

only prove (if it prove any thing at all) that the parodist is a 

still greater blockhead than the original writer, and what is 

far worse, a malignant coxcomb to boot. The talent for 

mimicry seems strongest where the human race are most de 

graded. The poor, naked, half human savages of New Hol 

land were found excellent mimics: and in civilized society, 

minds of the very lowest stamp alone satirize by copying. 

At least the difference, which must blend with and balance 

the likeness, in order to constitute a just imitation, existing 

here merely in caricature, detracts from the libeller’s heart, 

without adding an iota to the credit of his understanding. 

Bacchus and the frogs in Aristophanes; when the 

former descended to the realms of the departed 

to bring back the spirit of the old and genuine 

poesy.

Choros Batrachon; Dionusos

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Ch. brekekekex, koax, koax !

D. all exoloisd auto koax. 

ouden gar esi, e koax. 

oimozet : ou moi melei.

Ch. alla men kekraxomesda 

goposon e pharugx an emon 

chandane di emeras 

brekekekex, koax, koax!

D. touto gar ou nikesete.

Ch. oude men emas su oantos.

D. oude men umeis ge de me 

oudepote kekraxomai gar 

kan me dei di emeras, 

eos an umon epikratesoo to Koax!

Ch. brekekekex, KOAX, KOAX!

During the last year of my residence at Cam 

bridge, I became acquainted with Mr. Words 

worth’s first publication entitled "Descriptive 

Sketches;" and seldom, if ever, was the emer 

gence of an original poetic genius above the 

literary horizon more evidently announced. In 

the form, style, and manner of the whole poem, 

and in the structure of the particular lines and 

periods, there is an harshness and acerbity 

connected and combined with words and images 

all aglow, which might recall those products 

of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blos 

soms rise out of the hard and thorny rind and 

shell, within which the rich fruit was elaborat 

ing. The language was not only peculiar and 

strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as 

by its own impatient strength; while the no 

velty and struggling crowd of images acting in 

conjunction with the difficulties of the style, 

demanded always a greater closeness of atten 

tion, than poetry, (at all events, than descrip 

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tive poetry) has a right to claim. It not seldom 

therefore justified the complaint of obscurity. 

In the following extract I have sometimes fan 

cied, that I saw an emblem of the poem itself, 

and of the author’s genius as it was then 

displayed.

"’Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour, 

All day the floods a deepening murmur pour;

The sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight:

Dark is the region as with coming night; 

And yet what frequent bursts of overpowering light! 

Triumphant on the bosom of the storm, 

Glances the fireclad eagle’s wheeling form; 

Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine 

The woodcrowned cliffs that o’er the lake recline; 

Wide o’er the Alps a hundred streams unfold, 

At once to pillars turn’d that flame with gold; 

Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun 

The West, that burns like one dilated sun, 

Where in a mighty crucible expire 

The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire."

The poetic PSYCHE in its process to full 

developement, undergoes as many changes as 

its Greek namesake, the* butterfly. And it is 

remarkable how soon genius clears and puri 

fies itself from the faults and errors of its earliest 

products; faults which, in its earliest compo 

sitions, are the more obtrusive and confluent, 

because as heterogeneous elements, which had 

only a temporary use, they constitute the very 

ferment, by which themselves are carried off. 

Or we may compare them to some diseases, 

which must work on the humours, and be 

thrown out on the surface, in order to secure 

the patient from their future recurrence. I 

was in my twentyfourth year, when I had the 

happiness of knowing Mr. Wordsworth per 

sonally, and while memory lasts, I shall hardly 

forget the sudden effect produced on my mind, 

by his recitation of a manuscript poem, which

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The fact, that in Greek Psyche is the common name for the soul, and the butterfly, is thus alluded to in the

following stanza from an unpublished poem of the author: 

" The butterfly the ancient Grecians made 

The soul’s fair emblem, and its only name—

But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade 

Of mortal life! For in this earthly frame 

Our’s is the reptile’s lot, much toil, much blame, 

Manifold motions making little speed, 

And to deform and kill the things, whereon we feed."

S.T.C.

still remains unpublished, but of which the 

stanza, and tone of style, were the same as 

those of the "Female Vagrant" as originally 

printed in the first volume of the "Lyrical 

Ballads." There was here, no mark of strained 

thought, or forced diction, no crowd or turbu 

lence of imagery, and, as the poet hath him 

self well described in his lines "on revisiting 

the Wye," manly reflection, and human as 

sociations had given both variety, and an ad 

ditional interest to natural objects, which in 

the passion and appetite of the first love they had 

seemed to him neither to need or permit. The 

occasional obscurities, which had risen from an 

imperfect controul over the resources of his na 

tive language, had almost wholly disappeared, 

together with that worse defect of arbitary and 

illogical phrases, at once hackneyed, and fan 

tastic, which hold so distinguished a place in 

the technique of ordinary poetry, and will, more 

or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest 

genius, unless the attention has been specifically 

directed to their worthlessness and incongruity.* 

I did not perceive any thing particular in the 

mere style of the poem alluded to during its 

recitation, except indeed such difference as was

Mr. Wordsworth, even in his two earliest "the Evening 

Walk and the Descriptive Sketches," is more free from this 

latter defect than most of the young poets his 

not separable from the thought and manner; 

and the Spencerian stanza, which always, more 

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or less, recalls to the reader’s mind Spencer’s 

own style, would doubtless have authorized in 

my then opinion a more frequent descent to the 

phrases of ordinary life, than could without an ill 

effect have been hazarded in the heroic couplet. 

It was not however the freedom from false taste, 

whether as to common defects, or to those more 

properly his own, which made so unusual an 

impression on my feelings immediately, and 

subsequently on my judgement. It was the 

union of deep feeling with profound thought; 

the fine balance of truth in observing with the 

imaginative faculty in modifying the objects 

observed; and above all the original gift of 

spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with

*contemporaries. It may however be exemplified, together with the 

harsh and obscure construction, in which he more often 

offended, in the following lines:

" ‘Mid stormy vapours ever driving by, 

Where ospreys, cormorants, and herons cry; 

Where hardly given the hopeless waste to cheer, 

Denied the bread of life the foodful ear, 

Dwindles the pear on autumn’s latest spray, 

And apple sickens pale in summer’s ray;

Ev’n here content has fixed her smiling reign 

With independence, child of high disdain."

I hope, I need not say, that I have quoted these lines for no 

other purpose than to make my meaning fully understood. 

It is to be regretted that Mr. Wordsworth has not repub 

lished these two poems entire. 

it the depth and height of the ideal world 

around forms, incidents, and situations, of 

which, for the common view, custom had be 

dimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle 

and the dew drops. "To find no contradic 

tion in the union of old and new; to contemplate 

the ANCIENT of days and all his works with 

feelings as fresh, as if all had then sprang forth 

at the first creative fiat; characterizes the mind 

that feels the riddle of the world, and may 

help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of 

childhood into the powers of manhood; to 

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combine the child’s sense of wonder and no 

velty with the appearances, which every day 

for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar;

"With sun and moon and stars throughout the year, 

And man and woman ;"

this is the character and privilege of genius, 

and one of the marks which distinguish genius 

from talents. And therefore is it the prime 

merit of genius and its most unequivocal mode 

of manifestation, so to represent familiar objects 

as to awaken in the minds of others a kin 

dred feeling concerning them and that freshness 

of sensation which is the constant accompani 

ment of mental, no less than of bodily, conva 

lescence. Who has not a thousand times seen 

snow fall on water? Who has not watched it 

with a new feeling, from the time that he has 

read Burn’s comparison of sensual pleasure

"To snow that falls upon a river 

A moment white—then gone for ever! "

In poems, equally as in philosophic disqui 

sitions, genius produces the strongest impres 

sions of novelty, while it rescues the most 

admitted truths from the impotence caused by 

the very circumstance of their universal admis 

sion. Truths of all others the most awful and 

mysterious, yet being at the same time of uni 

versal interest, are too often considered as so 

true, that they lose all the life and efficiency of 

truth, and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the 

soul, side by side, with the most despised and ex 

ploded errors." THE FRIEND,* page 76, No. 5.

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This excellence, which in all Mr. Words 

worth’s writings is more or less predominant, 

and which constitutes the character of his mind, 

I no sooner felt, than I sought to understand. 

Repeated meditations led me first to suspect, 

(and a more intimate analysis of the human fa 

culties, their appropriate marks, functions, and 

effects matured my conjecture into full convic 

tion) that fancy and imagination were two dis 

tinct and widely different faculties, instead of 

being, according to the general belief, either 

two names with one meaning, or at furthest, 

the lower and higher degree of one and the

As "the Friend" was printed on stampt sheets, and sent 

only by the post to a very limited number of subscribers, the 

author has felt less objection to quote from it, though a work 

of his own. To the public at large indeed it is the same as 

a volume in manuscript. 

same power. It is not, I own, easy to con 

ceive a more opposite translation of the Greek 

Phantasia, than the Latin Imaginatio; but 

it is equally true that in all societies there 

exists an instinct of growth, a certain collec 

tive, unconscious good sense working progres 

sively to desynonymize* those words originally 

of the same meaning, which the conflux of 

dialects had supplied to the more homogeneous 

languages, as the Greek and German: and

This is effected either by giving to the one word a gene 

ral, and to the other an exclusive use; as "to put on the 

back" and "to indorse;" or by an actual distinction of 

meanings as "naturalist," and "physician;" or by difference 

of relation as "I" and "Me;" (each of which the rustics of 

our different provinces still use in all the cases singular of 

the first personal pronoun). Even the mere difference, or 

corruption, in the pronunciation of the same word, if it have 

become general, will produce a new word with a distinct 

signification; thus "property" and "propriety;" the latter 

of which, even to the time of Charles II. was the written 

word for all the senses of both. Thus too "mister" and 

" master" both hasty pronounciations of the same word 

" magister," " mistress," and "miss," "if," and "give," 

&c. &c. There is a sort of minim immortal among the ani 

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malcula infusoria which has not naturally either birth, or 

death, absolute beginning, or absolute end: for at a certain 

period a small point appears on its back, which deepens and 

lengthens till the creature divides into two, and the same 

process recommences in each of the halves now become inte 

gral. This may be a fanciful, but it is by no means a bad 

emblem of the formation of words, and may facilitate the 

conception, how immense a nomenclature may be organized 

from a few simple sounds by rational beings in a social state. 

For each new application, or excitement of the same sound, 

will call forth a different sensation, which cannot but affect 

the pronunciation. The after recollection of the sound, 

without the same vivid sensation, will modify it still further; 

till at length all trace of the original likeness is worn away. 

which the same cause, joined with accidents of 

translation from original works of different 

countries, occasion in mixt languages like our 

own. The first and most important point to be 

proved is, that two conceptions perfectly dis 

tinct are confused under one and the same 

word, and (this done) to appropriate that word 

exclusively to one meaning, and the synonyme 

(should there be one) to the other. But if (as 

will be often the case in the arts and sciences) 

no synonyme exists, we must either invent or 

borrow a word. In the present instance the 

appropriation had already begun, and been 

legitimated in the derivative adjective: Milton 

had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful 

mind. If therefore I should succeed in estab 

lishing the actual existences of two faculties 

generally different, the nomenclature would be 

at once determined. To the faculty by which 

I had characterized Milton, we should confine 

the term imagination; while the other would 

be contradistinguished as fancy. Now were it 

once fully ascertained, that this division is no 

less grounded in nature, than that of delirium 

from mania, or Otway’s

" Lutes, lobsters, seas of milk, and ships of amber,"

from Shakespear’s

" What! have his daughters brought him to this pass ?"

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or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements; 

the theory of the fine arts, and of poetry in 

particular, could not, I thought, but derive some 

additional and important light. It would in its 

immediate effects furnish a torch of guidance 

to the philosophical critic; and ultimately to 

the poet himself. In energetic minds, truth 

soon changes by domestication into power; and 

from directing in the discrimination and ap 

praisal of the product, becomes influencive in 

the production. To admire on principle, is the 

only way to imitate without loss of originality.

It has been already hinted, that metaphysics 

and psychology have long been my hobbyhorse. 

But to have a hobbyhorse, and to be vain of 

it, are so commonly found together, that they 

pass almost for the same. I trust therefore, 

that there will be more good humour than con 

tempt, in the smile with which the reader chas 

tises my selfcomplacency, if I confess myself 

uncertain, whether the satisfaction from the per 

ception of a truth new to myself may not have 

been rendered more poignant by the conceit, 

that it would be equally so to the public. 

There was a time, certainly, in which I took 

some little credit to myself, in the belief that I 

had been the first of my countrymen, who had 

pointed out the diverse meaning of which the 

two terms were capable, and analyzed the fa 

culties to which they should be appropriated. 

Mr. W. Taylor’s recent volume of synonimes I 

have not yet seen;* but his specification of the 

terms in question has been clearly shown to be 

both insufficient and erroneous by Mr. Words 

worth in the preface added to the late collection 

of his "Lyrical Ballads and other poems." 

The explanation which Mr. Wordsworth has 

himself given, will be found to differ from mine,

I ought to have added, with the exception of a single 

sheet which I accidentally met with at the printers. Even 

from this scanty specimen, I found it impossible to doubt the 

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talent, or not to admire the ingenuity of the author. That 

his distinctions were for the greater part unsatisfactory to 

my mind, proves nothing, against their accuracy; but it may 

possibly be serviceable to him in case of a second edition, if 

I take this opportunity of suggesting the query; whether he 

may not have been occasionally misled, by having assumed, 

as to me he appeared to have done, the nonexistence of any 

absolute synonimes in our language? Now I cannot but 

think, that there are many which remain for our posterity to 

distinguish and appropriate, and which I regard as so much 

reversionary wealth in our mothertongue. When two dis 

tinct meanings are confounded under one or more words, 

(and such must be the case, as sure as our knowledge is pro 

gressive and of course imperfect) erroneous consequences 

will be drawn, and what is true in one sense of the word, will 

be affirmed as true in toto. Men of research startled by the 

consequences, seek in the things themselves (whether in or 

out of the mind) for a knowledge of the fact, and having dis 

covered the difference, remove the equivocation either by the 

substitution of a new word, or by the appropriation of one 

of the two or more words, that had before been used pro 

miscuously. When this distinction has been so naturalized 

and of such general currency, that the language itself does 

as it were think for us (like the sliding rule which is the me 

chanics safe substitute for arithmetical knowledge) we then 

say, that it is evident to common sense. Common sense, there 

fore, differs in different ages. What was born and christened 

in the schools passes by degrees into the world at large, and 

becomes the property of the market and the teatable. At 

least I can discover no other meaning of the term, common* 

chiefly perhaps, as our objects are different. It 

could scarcely indeed happen otherwise, from 

the advantage I have enjoyed of frequent con 

versation with him on a subject to which a poem 

of his own first directed my attention, and my 

conclusions concerning which, he had made 

more lucid to myself by many happy instances 

drawn from the operation of natural objects on 

the mind. But it was Mr. Wordsworth’s pur 

pose to consider the influences of fancy and 

imagination as they are manifested in poetry, 

and from the different effects to conclude their 

diversity in kind; while it is my object to 

investigate the seminal principle, and then from 

the kind to deduce the degree. My friend has 

drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with 

their poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, 

and even the roots as far as they lift themselves 

above ground, and are visible to the naked eye 

of our common consciousness.

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Yet even in this attempt I am aware, that I 

shall be obliged to draw more largely on the

*sense, if it is to convey any specific difference from sense 

and, judgement in genere, and where it is not used scho 

lastically for the universal reason. Thus in the reign of 

Charles II. the philosophic world was called to arms by the 

moral sophisms of Hobbs, and the ablest writers exerted 

themselves in the detection of an error, which a schoolboy 

would now be able to confute by the mere recollection, that 

compulsion and obligation conveyed two ideas perfectly dis 

parate, and that what appertained to the one, had been 

falsely transferred to the other by a mere confusion of terms. 

reader’s attention, than so immethodical a mis 

cellany can authorize; when in such a work

(the Ecclesiastical Policy) of such a mind as 

Hooker’s, the judicious author, though no less 

admirable for the perspicuity than for the port 

and dignity of his language; and though he 

wrote for men of learning in a learned age; saw 

nevertheless occasion to anticipate and guard 

against "complaints of obscurity," as often as 

he was to trace his subject "to the highest 

wellspring and fountain." Which, (continues 

he) "because men are not accustomed to, the 

pains we take are more needful a great deal, 

than acceptable; and the matters we handle, 

seem by reason of newness (till the mind grow 

better acquainted with them) dark and intri 

cate." I would gladly therefore spare both 

myself and others this labor, if I knew how 

without it to present an intelligible statement 

of my poetic creed; not as my opinions, which 

weigh for nothing, but as deductions from 

established premises conveyed in such a form, 

as is calculated either to effect a fundamental 

conviction, or to receive a fundamental confu 

tation. If I may dare once more adopt the 

words of Hooker, "they, unto whom we shall 

"seem tedious, are in no wise injured by us, 

"because it is in their own hands to spare that 

"labour, which they are not willing to endure."

Those at least, let me be permitted to add, 

who have taken so much pains to render me 

ridiculous for a perversion of taste, and have 

supported the charge by attributing strange 

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notions to me on no other authority than their 

own conjectures, owe it to themselves as well 

as to me not to refuse their attention to my own 

statement of the theory, which I do acknow 

ledge; or shrink from the trouble of examining 

the grounds on which I rest it, or the argu 

ments which I offer in its justification.

CHAPTER V.

On the law of association—Its history traced 

from Aristotle to Hartley.

There have been men in all ages, who have 

been impelled as by an instinct to propose their 

own nature as a problem, and who devote their 

attempts to its solution. The first step was to 

construct a table of distinctions, which they 

seem to have formed on the principle of the 

absence or presence of the WILL. Our various 

sensations, perceptions, and movements were 

classed as active or passive, or as media par 

taking of both. A still finer distinction was 

soon established between the voluntary and the 

spontaneous. In our perceptions we seem to 

ourselves merely passive to an external power, 

whether as a mirror reflecting the landscape, or 

as a blank canvas on which some unknown 

hand paints it. For it is worthy of notice, that 

the latter, or the system of idealism may be 

traced to sources equally remote with the 

former, or materialism; and Berkeley can boast 

an ancestry at least as venerable as Gassendi or 

Hobbs. These conjectures, however, 

concerning the mode in which our perceptions origin 

ated, could not alter the natural difference of 

things and thoughts. In the former, the cause 

appeared wholly external, while in the latter, 

sometimes our will interfered as the producing 

or determining cause, and sometimes our na 

ture seemed to act by a mechanism of its own, 

without any conscious effort of the will, or even 

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against it. Our inward experiences were thus 

arranged in three separate classes, the passive 

sense, or what the schoolmen call the merely 

receptive quality of the mind; the voluntary, 

and the spontaneous, which holds the middle 

place between both. But it is not in human 

nature to meditate on any mode of action, 

without enquiring after the law that governs 

it; and in the explanation of the spontaneous 

movements of our being, the metaphysician 

took the lead of the anatomist and natural 

philosopher. In Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and 

India the analysis of the mind had reached its 

noon and manhood, while experimental re 

search was still in its dawn and infancy. For 

many, very many centuries, it has been difficult 

to advance a new truth, or even a new error, 

in the philosophy of the intellect or morals. 

With regard, however, to the laws that direct 

the spontaneous movements of thought and the 

principle of their intellectual mechanism there 

exists, it has been asserted, an important 

exception most honorable to the moderns, and in 

the merit of which our own country claims the 

largest share. Sir James Mackintosh (who 

amid the variety of his talents and attainments 

is not of less repute for the depth and accuracy 

of his philosophical enquiries, than for the elo 

quence with which he is said to render their most 

difficult results perspicuous, and the driest at 

tractive) affirmed in the lectures, delivered by 

him at Lincoln’s Inn Hall, that the law of 

association as established in the contempora 

neity of the original impressions, formed the 

basis of all true psychology; and any ontolo 

gical or metaphysical science not contained in 

such (i. e. empirical) phsychology was but a 

web of abstractions and generalizations. Of 

this prolific truth, of this great fundamental law, 

he declared HOBBS to have been the original

discoverer, while its full application to the whole 

intellectual system we owe to David Hartley; 

who stood in the same relation to Hobbs as 

Newton to Kepler; the law of association being 

that to the mind, which gravitation is to matter.

Of the former clause in this assertion, as it 

respects the comparative merits of the ancient 

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metaphysicians, including their commentators, 

the schoolmen, and of the modern French and 

British philosophers from Hobbs to Hume, 

Hartley and Condeliac, this is not the place to 

speak. So wide indeed is the chasm between 

this gentleman’s philosophical creed and mine, 

that so far from being able to join hands, we 

could scarce make our voices intelligible to 

each other: and to bridge it over, would require 

more time, skill and power than I believe myself 

to possess. But the latter clause involves for 

the greater part a mere question of fact and 

history, and the accuracy of the statement is 

to be tried by documents rather than reasoning.

First then, I deny Hobbs’s claim in toto: for 

he had been anticipated by Des Cartes whose 

work "De Methodo" preceded Hobbs’s "De 

Natura Humana," by more than a year. But

what is of much more importance, Hobbs 

builds nothing on the principle which he had 

announced. He does not even announce it, as 

differing in any respect from the general laws of 

material motion and impact: nor was it, indeed, 

possible for him so to do, compatibly with his 

system, which was exclusively material and 

mechanical. Far otherwise is it with Des 

Cartes; greatly as he too in his after writings 

(and still more egregiously his followers De la 

Forge, and others) obscured the truth by their 

attempts to explain it on the theory of nervous 

fluids, and material configurations. But in his 

interesting work "De Methodo," Des Cartes 

relates the circumstance which first led him to 

meditate on this subject, and which since then 

has been often noticed and employed as an 

instance and illustration of the law. A child 

who with its eyes bandaged had lost several of 

his fingers by amputation, continued to com 

plain for many days successively of pains, now 

in his joint and now in that of the very fingers 

which had been cut off. Des Cartes was led 

by this incident to reflect on the uncertainty 

with which we attribute any particular place 

to any inward pain or uneasiness, and pro 

ceeded after long consideration to establish it 

as a general law; that contemporaneous im 

pressions, whether images or sensations, recal 

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each other mechanically. On this principle, as 

a ground work, he built up the whole system 

of human language, as one continued process 

of association. He showed, in what sense not 

only general terms, but generic images (under 

the name of abstract ideas) actually existed, 

and in what consists their nature and power. 

As one word may become the general exponent 

of many, so by association a simple image 

may represent a whole class. But in truth 

Hobbs himself makes no claims to any disco 

very, and introduces this law of association, or 

(in his own language) discursûs mentalis, as an 

admitted fact, in the solution alone of which, this 

by causes purely physiological, he arrogates any 

originality. His system is briefly this; when 

ever the senses are impinged on by external ob 

jects, whether by the rays of light reflected 

from them, or by effluxes of their finer parti 

cles, there results a correspondent motion of 

the innermost and subtlest organs. This motion 

constitutes a representation, and there remains 

an impression of the same, or a certain disposi 

tion to repeat the same motion. Whenever we 

feel several objects at the same time, the impres 

sions that are left (or in the language of Mr. 

Hume, the ideas) are linked together. When 

ever therefore any one of the movements, which 

constitute a complex impression, are renewed 

through the senses, the others succeed mecha 

nically. It follows of necessity therefore that 

Hobbs, as well as Hartley and all others who 

derive association from the connection and 

interdependence of the supposed matter, the 

movements of which constitute our thoughts,

must have reduced all its forms to the one law 

of time. But even the merit of announcing this 

law with philosophic precision cannot be fairly 

conceded to him. For the objects of any two 

ideas* need not have coexisted in the same

I here use the word "idea" in Mr. Hume’s sense on ac 

count of its general currency among the English metaphysi 

cians; though against my own judgement, for I believe that 

the vague use of this word has been the cause of much error 

and more confusion. The word,Idea, in its original sense 

as used by Pindar, Aristophanes, and in the gospel of 

Matthew, represented the visual abstraction of a distant ob 

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ject, when we see the whole without distinguishing its parts. 

Plato adopted it as a technical term, and as the antithesis to 

Eidola, or sensuous images; the transient and perishable* 

sensation in order to become mutually associa 

ble. The same result will follow when one 

only of the two ideas has been represented by 

the senses, and the other by the memory.

Long however before either Hobbs or Des 

Cartes the law of association had been defined,

*emblems, or mental words, of ideas. The ideas themselves he 

considered as mysterious powers, living, seminal, formative, 

and exempt from time. In this sense the word became the pro 

perty of the Platonic school; and it seldom occurs in Aristotle, 

without some such phrase annexed to it, as according to Plato, 

or as Plato says. Our English writers to the end of Charles 

nd’s reign, or somewhat later, employed it either in the origi 

nal sense, or platonically, or in a sense nearly correspondent 

to our present use of the substantive, Ideal, always however 

opposing it, more or less, to image, whether of present or ab 

sent objects. The reader will not be displeased with the 

following interesting exemplification from Bishop Jeremy 

Taylor. "St. Lewis the King sent Ivo Bishop of Chartres 

on an embassy, and he told, that he met a grave and stately 

matron on the way with a censor of fire in one hand, and a 

vessel of water in the other; and observing her to have a 

melancholy, religious, and phantastic deportment and look, he 

asked her what those symbols meant, and what she meant to 

do with her fire and water; she answered, my purpose is with 

the fire to burn paradise, and with my water to quench the 

flames of hell, that men may serve God purely for the love 

of God. But we rarely meet with such spirits which love 

virtue so metaphysically as to abstract her from all sensible 

compositions, and love the purity of the idea." Des Cartes 

having introduced into his philosophy the fanciful hypothesis 

of material ideas, or certain configurations of the brain, 

which were as so many moulds to the influxes of the external 

world; Mr. Lock adopted the term, but extended its signi 

fication to whatever is the immediate object of the minds 

attention or consciousness. Mr. Hume distinguishing those 

representations which are accompanied with a sense of a 

present object, from those reproduced by the mind itself, 

designated the former by impressions, and confined the word

idea to the latter. 

and its important functions set forth by Me 

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lanchthon, Ammerbach, and Ludovicus Vives; 

more especially by the last. Phantasia, it is to 

be noticed, is employed by Vives to express 

the mental power of comprehension, or the

active function of the mind; and imaginatio for 

the receptivity (vis receptiva) of impressions, 

or for the passive perception. The power of 

combination he appropriates to the former: 

" quæ singula et simpliciter acceperat imagi 

natio, ea conjungit et disjungit phantasia." And 

the law by which the thoughts are spontane 

ously presented follows thus; "quæ simul sunt 

"a phantasia comprehensa si alterutrum occur 

"rat, solet secum alterum representare." To 

time therefore he subordinates all the other 

exciting causes of association. The soul pro 

ceeds "a causa ad effectum, ab hoc ad instru 

"mentum, a parte ad totum ;" thence to the 

place, from place to person, and from this to 

whatever preceded or followed, all as being 

parts of a total impression, each of which may 

recal the other. The apparent springs "Saltus 

"vel transitus etiam longissimos," he explains by 

the same thought having been a component 

part of two or more total impressions. Thus

" ex Scipione venio in cogitationem potentiæ 

"Turcicæ proper victorias ejus in eâ parte Asiæ 

"in qua regnabat Antiochus."

But from Vives I pass at once to the source 

of his doctrines, and (as far as we can judge 

from the remains yet extant of Greek philoso 

phy) as to the first, so to the fullest and most 

perfect enunciation of the associative principle, 

viz. to the writings of Aristotle; and of these 

principally to the books "De Anima," "De 

Memoria," and that which is entitled in the 

old translations "Parva Naturalia." In as 

much as later writers have either deviated from, 

or added to his doctrines, they appear to me 

to have introduced either error or groundless 

supposition.

In the first place it is to be observed, that 

Aristotle’s positions on this subject are unmixed 

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with fiction. The wise Stagyrite speaks of no 

successive particles propagating motion like 

billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or 

animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational 

solids are thawed down, and distilled, or fil 

trated by ascension, into living and intelligent 

fluids, that etch and reetch engravings on the 

brain, (as the followers of Des Cartes, and the 

humoral pathologists in general ;) nor of an 

oscillating ether which was to effect the same 

service for the nerves of the brain considered 

as solid fibres, as the animal spirits perform for 

them under the notion of hollow tubes (as 

Hartley teaches)nor finally, (with yet more 

recent dreamers) of chemical compositions by 

elective affinity, or of an electric light at once 

the immediate object and the ultimate organ of 

inward vision, which rises to the brain like an 

Aurora Borealis, and there disporting in various 

shapes (as the balance of plus and minus, or ne 

gative and positive, is destroyed or reestablish 

ed) images out both past and present. Aristotle 

delivers a just theory without pretending to an 

hypothesis; or in other words a comprehen 

sive survey of the different facts, and of their 

relations to each other without supposition, 

i. e. a fact placed under a number of facts, as 

their common support and explanation; tho’ 

in the majority of instances these hypotheses 

or suppositions better deserve the name of 

Upopoieseis, or suffictions. He uses indeed the 

word Kineseis, to express what we call represen 

tations or ideas, but he carefully distinguishes 

them from material motion, designating the 

latter always by annexing the wordsEn topo, or 

kata topon. On the contrary in his treatise "De 

Anima," he excludes place and motion from 

all the operations of thought, whether repre 

sentations or volitions, as attributes utterly and 

absurdly heterogeneous.

The general law of association, or more ac 

curately, the common condition under which all 

exciting causes act, and in which they may be 

generalized, according to Aristotle is this. Ideas 

by having been together acquire a power of 

recalling each other; or every partial 

representation awakes the total representation of which 

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it had been a part. In the practical determina 

tion of this common principle to particular 

recollections, he admits five agents or occasion 

ing causes: 1st, connection in time, whether 

simultaneous, preceding or successive; 2nd, 

vicinity or connection in space; 3rd, interde 

pendence or necessary connection, as cause and 

effect; 4th, likeness; and 5th, contrast. As an 

additional solution of the occasional seeming 

chasms in the continuity of reproduction he 

proves, that movements or ideas possessing one 

or the other of these five characters had passed 

through the mind as intermediate links, suffici 

ently clear to recal other parts of the same total 

impressions with which they had coexisted, 

though not vivid enough to excite that degree 

of attention which is requisite for distinct re 

collection, or as we may aptly express it, after 

consciousness. In association then consists the 

whole mechanism of the reproduction of im 

pressions, in the Aristolelian Pcychology. It 

is the universal law of the passive fancy and

mechanical memory; that which supplies to all 

other faculties their objects, to all thought the 

elements of its materials.

In consulting the excellent commentary of 

St. Thomas Aquinas on the Parva Naturalia of 

Aristotle, I was struck at once with its close 

resemblance to Hume’s essay on association. 

The main thoughts were the same in both, the

order of the thoughts was the same, and even 

the illustrations differed only by Hume’s occa 

sional substitution of more modern examples. 

I mentioned the circumstance to several of my 

literary acquaintances, who admitted the close 

ness of the resemblance, and that it seemed too 

great to be explained by mere coincidence; but 

they thought it improbable that Hume should 

have held the pages of the angelic Doctor worth 

turning over. But some time after Mr. Payne, of 

the King’s mews, shewed Sir James Mackin 

tosh some odd volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas, 

partly perhaps from having heard that Sir James 

(then Mr.) Mackintosh had in his lectures past 

a high encomium on this canonized philosopher, 

but chiefly from the fact, that the volumes had 

belonged to Mr. Hume, and had here and there 

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marginal marks and notes of reference in his 

own hand writing. Among these volumes was 

that which contains the Parva Naturalia, in the 

old latin version, swathed and swaddled in the 

commentary afore mentioned!

It remains then for me, first to state wherein 

Hartley differs from Aristotle; then, to exhibit 

the grounds of my conviction, that he differed 

only to err; and next as the result, to shew, 

by what influences of the choice and judgment 

the associative power becomes either memory 

or fancy; and, in conclusion, to appropriate 

the remaining offices of the mind to the reason, 

and the imagination. With my best efforts to 

be as perspicuous as the nature of language 

will permit on such a subject, I earnestly soli 

cit the good wishes and friendly patience of 

my readers, while I thus go "sounding on my 

dim and perilous way."

CHAPTER VI.

That Hartley’s system, as far as it differs from 

that of Aristotle, is neither tenable in theory, 

nor founded in facts.

Of Hartley’s hypothetical vibrations in his 

hypothetical oscillating ether of the nerves, 

which is the first and most obvious distinction 

between his system and that of Aristotle, I 

shall say little. This, with all other similar 

attempts to render that an object of the sight 

which has no relation to sight, has been alrea 

dy sufficiently exposed by the younger Reima 

rus, Maasse, &c. as outraging the very axioms 

of mechanics in a scheme, the merit of which 

consists in its being mechanical. Whether any 

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other philosophy be possible, but the mechani 

cal; and again, whether the mechanical system 

can have any claim to be called philosophy; 

are questions for another place. It is, how 

ever, certain, that as long as we deny the for 

mer, and affirm the latter, we must bewilder 

ourselves, whenever we would pierce into the

adyta of causation; and all that laborious con 

jecture can do, is to fill up the gaps of fancy. 

Under that despotism of the eye (the 

emancipation from which Pythagoras by his numeral, 

and Plato by his musical, symbols, and both 

by geometric discipline, aimed at, as the first 

propaidentikon of the mind)under this strong 

sensuous influence, we are restless because 

invisible things are not the objects of vision; 

and metaphysical systems, for the most part, 

become popular, not for their truth, but in 

proportion as they attribute to causes a suscep 

tibility of being seen, if only our visual organs 

were sufficiently powerful.

From a hundred possible confutations let one 

suffice. According to this system the idea or 

vibration a from the external object A becomes 

associable with the idea or vibration m from 

the external object M, because the oscillation 

a propagated itself so as to reproduce the 

oscillation m. But the original impression 

from M was essentially different from the im 

pression A: unless therefore different causes 

may produce the same effect, the vibration a 

could never produce the vibration m: and this 

therefore could never be the means, by which

a and m are associated. To understand this, 

the attentive reader need only be reminded, 

that the ideas are themselves, in Hartley’s sys 

tem, nothing more than their appropriate con 

figurative vibrations. It is a mere delusion of 

the fancy to conceive the preexistence of the 

ideas, in any chain of association, as so many 

differently colored billiardballs in contact, so 

that when an object, the billiardstick, strikes 

the first or white ball, the same motion propa 

gates itself through the red, green, blue, black, 

&c. and sets the whole in motion. No! we 

must suppose the very same force, which con 

stitutes the white ball, to constitute the red or 

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black; or the idea of a circle to constitute the 

idea of a triangle; which is impossible.

But it may be said, that, by the sensations 

from the objects A and M, the nerves have ac 

quired a disposition to the vibrations a and m, 

and therefore a need only be repeated in order 

to reproduce m. Now we will grant, for a 

moment, the possibility of such a disposition 

in a material nerve, which yet seems scarcely 

less absurd than to say, that a weathercock 

had acquired a habit of turning to the east, 

from the wind having been so long in that quar 

ter: for if it be replied, that we must take in 

the circumstance of life, what then becomes of 

the mechanical philosophy? And what is the

nerve, but the flint which the wag placed in 

the pot as the first ingredient of his stonebroth, 

requiring only salt, turnips and mutton, for the 

remainder! But if we waive this, and presup 

pose the actual existence of such a disposition; 

two cases are possible. Either, every idea has 

its own nerve and correspondent oscillation, or 

this is not the case. If the latter be the truth, 

we should gain nothing by these dispositions; 

for then, every nerve having several disposi 

tions, when the motion of any other nerve is 

propagated into it, there will be no ground or 

cause present, why exactly the oscillation m 

should arise, rather than any other to which it 

was equally predisposed. But if we take the 

former, and let every idea have a nerve of its 

own, then every nerve must be capable of pro 

pagating its motion into many other nerves; and 

again, there is no reason assignable, why the 

vibration m should arise, rather than any other 

ad libitum.

It is fashionable to smile at Hartley’s vibra 

tions and vibratiuncles; and his work has been

reedited by Priestley, with the omission of the

material hypothesis. But Hartley was too 

great a man, too coherent a thinker, for this to 

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have been done, either consistently or to any 

wise purpose. For all other parts of his sys 

tem, as far as they are peculiar to that system, 

once removed from their mechanical basis, not 

only lose their main support, but the very mo 

tive which led to their adoption. Thus the 

principle of contemporaneity, which Aristotle 

had made the common condition of all the laws 

of association, Hartley was constrained to re 

present as being itself the sole law. For to 

what law can the action of material atoms be 

subject, but that of proximity in place? And to 

what law can their motions be subjected, but 

that of time? Again, from this results inevita 

bly, that the will, the reason, the judgment, 

and the understanding, instead of being the de 

termining causes of association, must needs be 

represented as its creatures, and among its me 

chanical effects. Conceive, for instance, a broad 

stream, winding through a mountainous coun 

try with an indefinite number of currents, vary 

ing and running into each other according as 

the gusts chance to blow from the opening of 

the mountains. The temporary union of seve 

ral currents in one, so as to form the main cur 

rent of the moment, would present an accurate 

image of Hartley’s theory of the will.

Had this been really the case, the consequence 

would have been, that our whole life would be 

divided between the despotism of outward im 

pressions, and that of senseless and passive me 

mory. Take his law in its highest abstraction 

and most philosophical form, viz. that every par 

tial representation recalls the total representa 

tion of which it was a part; and the law be 

comes nugatory, were it only from its universa 

lity. In practice it would indeed be mere law 

lessness. Consider, how immense must be the 

sphere of a total impression from the top of St. 

Paul’s church; and how rapid and continuous 

the series of such total impressions. If therefore 

we suppose the absence of all interference of 

the will, reason, and judgement, one or other 

of two consequences must result. Either the 

ideas (or relicts of such impression) will exactly 

imitate the order of the impression itself, which 

would be absolute delirium: or any one part

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of that impression might recal any other part, 

and (as from the law of continuity, there must 

exist in every total impression some one or 

more parts, which are components of some 

other following total impression, and so on ad 

infinitum) any part of any impression might 

recal any part of any other, without a cause 

present to determine what it should be. For 

to bring in the will, or reason, as causes of their 

own cause, that is, as at once causes and effects, 

can satisfy those only who in their pretended 

evidences of a God having first demanded or 

ganization, as the sole cause and ground of 

intellect, will then coolly demand the preexist 

ence of intellect, as the cause and groundwork 

of organization. There is in truth but one state 

to which this theory applies at all, namely, that 

of complete lightheadedness; and even to this 

it applies but partially, because the will, and 

reason are perhaps never wholly suspended.

A case of this kind occurred in a Catholic 

town in Germany a year or two before my 

arrival at Göttingen, and had not then ceased 

to be a frequent subject of conversation. A 

young woman of four or five and twenty, who 

could neither read, nor write, was seized with 

a nervous fever; during which, according to the 

asseverations of all the priests and monks of 

the neighbourhood, she became possessed, and, 

as it appeared, by a very learned devil. She 

continued incessantly talking Latin, Greek, and 

Hebrew, in very pompous tones and with most 

distinct enunciation. This possession was ren 

dered more probable by the known fact, that 

she was or had been an heretic. Voltaire hu 

mourously advises the devil to decline all ac 

quaintance with medical men; and it would 

have been more to his reputation, if he had 

taken this advice in the present instance. The 

case had attracted the particular attention of a 

young physician, and by his statement many 

eminent physiologists and psychologists visited 

the town, and crossexamined the case on the 

spot. Sheets full of her ravings were taken 

down from her own mouth, and were found to 

consist of sentences, coherent and intelligible 

each for itself, but with little or no connection 

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with each other. Of the Hebrew, a small por 

tion only could be traced to the Bible; the 

remainder seemed to be in the rabinical dialect. 

All trick or conspiracy was out of the question. 

Not only had the young woman ever been an 

harmless, simple creature; but she was evidently 

labouring under a nervous fever. In the town, 

in which she had been resident for many years 

as a servant in different families, no solution 

presented itself. The young physician, how 

ever, determined to trace her past life step by 

step; for the patient herself was incapable of 

returning a rational answer. He at length suc 

ceeded in discovering the place, where her pa 

rents had lived: travelled thither, found them 

dead, but an uncle surviving; and from him 

learnt, that the patient had been charitably 

taken by an old protestant pastor at nine years 

old, and had remained with him some years, 

even till the old man’s death. Of this pastor 

the uncle knew nothing, but that he was a very 

good man. With great difficulty, and after 

much search, our young medical philosopher 

discovered a niece of the pastor’s, who had 

lived with him as his housekeeper, and had 

inherited his effects. She remembered the girl; 

related, that her venerable uncle had been too 

indulgent, and could not bear to hear the girl 

scolded; that she was willing to have kept her, 

but that after her patron’s death, the girl her 

self refused to stay. Anxious enquiries were 

then, of course, made concerning the pastor’s 

habits; and the solution of the phenomenon 

was soon obtained. For it appeared, that it 

had been the old man’s custom, for years, to 

walk up and down a passage of his house into 

which the kitchen door opened, and to read to 

himself with a loud voice, out of his favorite 

books. A considerable number of these were 

still in the niece’s possession. She added, that 

he was a very learned man and a great Hebraist. 

Among the books were found a collection of 

rabbinical writings, together with several of the 

Greek and Latin fathers; and the physician 

succeeded in identifying so many passages with 

those taken down at the young woman’s bed 

side, that no doubt could remain in any rational 

mind concerning the true origin of the impres 

sions made on her nervous system.

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This authenticated case furnishes both proof 

and instance, that reliques of sensation may 

exist for an indefinite time in a latent state, 

in the very same order in which they were 

originally impressed; and as we cannot ration 

ally suppose the feverish state of the brain to 

act in any other way than as a stimulus, this 

fact (and it would not be difficult to adduce 

several of the same kind) contributes to make it 

even probable, that all thoughts are in them 

selves imperishable; and, that if the intelligent 

faculty should be rendered more comprehen 

sive, it would require only a different and ap 

portioned organization, the body celestial instead 

of the body terrestrial, to bring before every 

human soul the collective experience of its

whole past existence. And this, this, perchance, 

is the dread book of judgement, in whose mys 

terious hieroglyphics every idle word is 

recorded! Yea, in the very nature of a living 

spirit, it may be more possible that heaven and 

earth should pass away, than that a single act, 

a single thought, should be loosened or lost 

from that living chain of causes, to all whose 

links, conscious or unconscious, the freewill, 

our only absolute self; is coextensive and co 

present. But not now dare I longer discourse 

of this, waiting for a loftier mood, and a nobler 

subject, warned from within and from without, 

that it is profanation to speak of these mysteries*

tois medepote phantasdeisin, os kalon to tes dikaiosunes kai

sophrosunes prosopon, kai os oute esperos oute eoos outo kala. 

Ton lar oronta pros to oromenon suggenes kai omoion poies 

amenon dei epiballein te ea ou gar an papote eiden Ophthal 

mos elion elioeides me gegenemenos, oude to Kalon an ide 

psuche me kale genomene. PLOTINUS.

*"To those to whose imagination it has never been presented, 

how beautiful is the countenance of justice and wisdom; and 

that neither the morning nor the evening star are so fair. 

For in order to direct the view aright, it behoves that the 

beholder should have made himself congenerous and similar 

to the object beheld. Never could the eye have beheld the 

sun, had not its own essence been soliform," (i. e. precon 

figured to light by a similarity of essence with that of light) 

"neither can a soul not beautiful attain to an intuition of 

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beauty."

CHAPTER VII.

Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian 

theory—Of the original mistake or equivoca 

tion which procured admission for the theory—

Memoria Technica.

We will pass by the utter incompatibility of 

such a law (if law it may be called, which would 

itself be the slave of chances) with even that

appearance of rationality forced upon us by the 

outward phænomena of human conduct, ab 

stracted from our own consciousness. We will 

agree to forget this for the moment, in order to 

fix our attention on that subordination of final 

to efficient causes in the human being, which 

flows of necessity from the assumption, that 

the will, and with the will all acts of thought 

and attention, are parts and products of this 

blind mechanism, instead of being distinct pow 

ers, whose function it is to controul, determine, 

and modify the phantasma chaos of association. 

The soul becomes a mere ens logicum; for as 

a real separable being, it would be more worth 

less and ludicrous, than the Grimalkins in the 

Catharpsichord, described in the Spectator. 

For these did form a part of the process; but 

in Hartley’s scheme the soul is present only to 

be pinched or stroked, while the very squeals 

or purring are produced by an agency wholly 

independent and alien. It involves all the dif 

ficulties, all the incomprehensibility (if it be 

not indeed,os emoige dokei, the absurdity) of in 

tercommunion between substances that have 

no one property in common, without any of the 

convenient consequences that bribed the judge 

ment to the admission of the dualistic hypothe 

sis. Accordingly, this caput mortuum of the 

Hartleian process has been rejected by his fol 

lowers, and the consciousness considered as a 

result, as a tune, the common product of the 

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breeze and the harp: tho’ this again is the mere 

remotion of one absurdity to make way for 

another, equally preposterous. For what is 

harmony but a mode of relation, the very esse 

of which is percipi? An ens rationale, which 

presupposes the power, that by perceiving 

creates it? The razor’s edge becomes a saw 

to the armed vision; and the delicious melo 

dies of Purcell or Cimarosa might be disjointed 

stammerings to a hearer, whose partition of 

time should be a thousand times subtler than 

ours. But this obstacle too let us imagine our 

selves to have surmounted, and "at one bound 

high overleap all bound!" Yet according to this 

hypothesis the disquisition, to which I am at 

present soliciting the reader’s attention, may 

be as truly said to be written by Saint Paul’s 

church, as by me: for it is the mere motion of 

my muscles and nerves; and these again are 

set in motion from external causes equally pas 

sive, which external causes stand themselves 

in interdependent connection with every thing 

that exists or has existed. Thus the whole 

universe cooperates to produce the minutest 

stroke of every letter, save only that I myself, 

and I alone, have nothing to do with it, but 

merely the causeless and effectless beholding of 

it when it is done. Yet scarcely can it be 

called a beholding; for it is neither an act 

nor an effect; but an impossible creation of a

somethingnothing out of its very contrary! It 

is the mere quicksilver plating behind a looking 

glass; and in this alone consists the poor 

worthless I! The sum total of my moral and 

intellectual intercourse dissolved into its ele 

ments are reduced to extension, motion, degrees 

of velocity, and those diminished copies of con 

figurative motion, which form what we call 

notions, and notions of notions. Of such phi 

losophy well might Butler say—

"The metaphysics but a puppet motion 

"That goes with screws, the notion of a notion; 

"The copy of a copy and lame draught

"Unnaturally taken from a thought:

"That counterfeits all pantomimic tricks, 

"And turns the eyes, like an old crucifix; 

"That counterchanges whatsoe’er it calls 

"B’ another name, and makes it true or false; 

"Turns truth to falsehood, falsehood into truth, 

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"By virtue of the Babylonian’s tooth."

MISCELLANEOUS THOUGHTS.

The inventor of the watch did not in reality 

invent it; he only look’d on, while the blind 

causes, the only true artists, were unfolding 

themselves. So must it have been too with 

my friend ALLSTON, when he sketched his pic 

ture of the dead man revived by the bones of 

the prophet Elijah. So must it have been with 

Mr. SOUTHEY and LORD BYRON, when the one 

fancied himself composing his "RODERICK," 

and the other his "CHILD HAROLD." The 

same must hold good of all systems of philoso 

phy; of all arts, governments, wars by sea and 

by land; in short, of all things that ever have 

been or that ever will be produced. For ac 

cording to this system it is not the affections 

and passions that are at work, in as far as they 

areI sensations or thoughts. We only fancy, that 

we act from rational resolves, or prudent mo 

tives, or from impulses of anger, love, or gene 

rosity. In all these cases the real agent is a 

somethingnothingeverything, which does all 

of which we know, and knows nothing of all 

that itself does.

The existence of an infinite spirit, of an intel 

ligent and holy will, must on this system be 

mere articulated motions of the air. For as the 

function of the human understanding is no other 

than merely (to appear to itself) to combine and 

to apply the phænomena of the association; 

and as these derive all their reality from the 

primary sensations; and the sensations again 

all their reality from the impressions ab extra; 

a God not visible, audible, or tangible, can 

exist only in the sounds and letters that form 

his name and attributes. If in ourselves there 

be no such faculties as those of the will, and 

the scientific reason, we must either have an

innate idea of them, which would overthrow 

the whole system; or we can have no idea at 

all. The process, by which Hume degraded 

the notion of cause and effect into a blind pro 

duct of delusion and habit, into the mere sen 

sation of proceeding life (nisus vitalis) associated 

with the images of the memory; this same pro 

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cess must be repeated to the equal degradation 

of every fundamental idea in ethics or theology.

Far, very far am I from burthening with the 

odium of these consequences the moral charac 

ters of those who first formed, or have since 

adopted the system! It is most noticeable of 

the excellent and pious Hartley, that in the 

proofs of the existence and attributes of God, 

with which his second volume commences, he 

makes no reference to the principles or results 

of the first. Nay, he assumes, as his founda 

tions, ideas which, if we embrace the doctrines 

of his first volume, can exist no where but in the 

vibrations of the ethereal medium common to 

the nerves and to the atmosphere. Indeed the 

whole of the second volume is, with the fewest 

possible exceptions, independent of his peculiar 

system. So true is it, that the faith, which 

saves and sanctifies, is a collective energy, a 

total act of the whole moral being; that its liv 

ing sensorium is in the heart; and that no errors 

of the understanding can be morally arraigned 

unless they have proceeded frum the heart.—

But whether they be such, no man can be cer 

tain in the case of another, scarcely perhaps 

even in his own. Hence it follows by inevitable 

consequence, that man may perchance deter 

mine, what is an heresy; but God only can 

know, who is a heretic. It does not, however, 

by any means follow, that opinions fundament 

ally false are harmless. An hundred causes 

may coexist to form one complex antidote. 

Yet the sting of the adder remains venemous, 

though there are many who have taken up the 

evil thing; and it hurted them not! Some in 

deed there seem to have been, in an unfortunate 

neighbournation at least, who have embraced 

this system with a full view of all its moral and 

religious consequences; some—

"—who deem themselves most free, 

"When they within this gross and visible sphere 

"Chain down the winged thought, scoffing assent, 

"Proud in their meanness; and themselves they cheat 

"With noisy emptiness of learned phrase, 

"Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences, 

"Selfworking tools, uncaus’d effects, and all 

"Those blind omniscients, those Almighty slaves, 

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"Untenanting Creation of its God!"

Such men need discipline, not argument; they 

must be made better men, before they can be 

come wiser.

The attention will be more profitably em 

ployed in attempting to discover and expose 

the paralogisms, by the magic of which such a 

faith could find admission into minds framed 

for a nobler creed. These, it appears to me, 

may be all reduced to one sophism as their 

common genus; the mistaking the conditions 

of a thing for its causes and essence; and the 

process by which we arrive at the knowledge 

of a faculty, for the faculty itself. The air I 

breathe, is the condition of my life, not its cause. 

We could never have learnt that we had eyes 

but by the process of seeing; yet having seen 

we know that the eyes must have preexisted 

in order to render the process of sight possible. 

Let us crossexamine Hartley’s scheme under 

the guidance of this distinction; and we shall 

discover, that contemporaneity (Leibnitz’s Lex 

Continui) is the limit and condition of the laws 

of mind, itself being rather a law of matter, at 

least of phænomena considered as material. At 

the utmost, it is to thought the same, as the law 

of gravitation is to locomotion. In every vo 

luntary movement we first counteract gravita 

tion, in order to avail ourselves of it. It must 

exist, that there may be a something to be coun 

teracted, and which by its reaction, aids the 

force that is exerted to resist it. Let us con 

sider, what we do when we leap. We first re 

sist the gravitating power by an act purely vo 

luntary, and then by another act, voluntary in 

part, we yield to it in order to light on the spot, 

which we had previously proposed to ourselves. 

Now let a man watch his mind while he is com 

posing; or, to take a still more common case, 

while he is trying to recollect a name; and he 

will find the process completely analogous. 

Most of my readers will have observed a small 

waterinsect on the surface of rivulets, which 

throws a cinquespotted shadow fringed with 

prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the 

brook; and will have noticed, how the little 

animal wins its way up against the stream, by 

alternate pulses of active and passive motion, 

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now resisting the current, and now yielding to 

it in order to gather strength and a momentary

fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no 

unapt emblem of the mind’s selfexperience in 

the act of thinking. There are evidently two 

powers at work, which relatively to each other 

are active and passive; and this is not possible 

without an intermediate faculty, which is at 

once both active and passive. (In philosophi 

cal language, we must denominate this inter 

mediate faculty in all its degrees and determina 

tions, the IMAGINATION. But in common lan 

guage, and especially on the subject of poetry, 

we appropriate the name to a superior degree 

of the faculty, joined to a superior voluntary 

controul over it.)

Contemporaneity then, being the common 

condition of all the laws of association. and a 

component element in all the materia subjecta, 

the parts of which are to be associated, must 

needs be copresent with all. Nothing, there 

fore, can be more easy than to pass off on an 

incautious mind this constant companion of 

each, for the essential substance of all. But 

if we appeal to our own consciousness, we shall 

find that even time itself, as the cause of a par 

ticular act of association, is distinct from con 

temporaneity, as the condition of all associa 

tion. Seeing a mackarel it may happen, that I 

immediately think of gooseberries, because I at 

the same time ate mackarel with gooseberries 

as the sauce. The first syllable of the latter 

word, being that which had coexisted with the 

image of the bird so called, I may then think 

of a goose. In the next moment the image of 

a swan may arise before me, though I had 

never seen the two birds together. In the two 

former instances, I am conscious that their co 

existence in time was the circumstance, that 

enabled me to recollect them; and equally 

conscious am I, that the latter was recalled to 

me by the joint operation of likeness and con 

trast. So it is with cause and effect; so too 

with order. So am I able to distinguish whe 

ther it was proximity in time, or continuity in 

space, that occasioned me to recall B. on the 

mention of A. They cannot be indeed separated 

from contemporaneity; for that would be to

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separate them from the mind itself. The act of 

consciousness is indeed identical with time con 

sidered in its essence. (I mean time per se, as 

contradistinguished from our notion of time; 

for this is always blended with the idea of space, 

which as the contrary of time, is therefore its

measure.) Nevertheless the accident of seeing 

two objects at the same moment acts, as a dis 

tinguishable cause from that of having seen 

them in the same place: and the true practical 

general law of association is this; that what 

ever makes certain parts of a total impression 

more vivid or distinct than the rest, will deter 

mine the mind to recall these in preference to 

others equally linked together by the common 

condition of contemporaneity, or (what I deem 

a more appropriate and philosophical term) of 

continuity. But the will itself by confining and 

intensifying* the attention may arbitrarily give

I am aware, that this word occurs neither in Johnson’s 

Dictionary or in any classical writer. But the word, "to 

intend," which Newton and others before him employ in this 

sense, is now so completely appropriated to another mean 

ing, that I could not use it without ambiguity: while to pa 

raphrase the sense, as by render intense, would often break 

up the sentence and destroy that harmony of the position of 

the words with the logical position of the thoughts, which is*

vividness or distinctness to any object what 

sover; and from hence we may deduce the 

uselessness if not the absurdity of certain recent 

schemes which promise an artificial memory, 

but which in reality can only produce a con 

fusion and debasement of the fancy. Sound 

logic, as the habitual subordination of the indi 

vidual to the species, and of the species to the 

genus; philosophical knowledge of facts under 

the relation of cause and effect; a chearful and 

communicative temper that disposes us to no 

tice the similarities and contrasts of things, that 

we may be able to illustrate the one by the 

other; a quiet conscience; a condition free from 

anxieties; sound health, and above all (as far 

as relates to passive remembrance) a healthy 

digestion; these are the best, these are the only 

ARTS OF MEMORY.

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*a beauty in all composition, and more especially desirable in 

a close philosophical investigation. I have therefore ha 

zarded the word, intensify; though, I confess, it sounds un 

couth to my own ear.

CHAPTER VIII.

The system of DUALISM introduced by Des 

Cartes—Refined first by Spinoza and after 

wards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of Har 

monia præstabilta—Hylozoism—Materialism

Neither of these systems on any possible 

theory of association, supplies or supersedes 

a theory of perception, or explains the form 

ation of the associable.

To the best of my knowledge Des Cartes 

was the first philosopher, who introduced the 

absolute and essential heterogeneity of the soul 

as intelligence, and the body as matter. The 

assumption, and the form of speaking, have re 

mained, though the denial of all other proper 

ties to matter but that of extension, on which 

denial the whole system of dualism is grounded, 

has been long exploded. For since impenetra 

bility is intelligible only as a mode of resistance; 

its admission places the essence of matter in an 

act or power, which it possesses in common 

with spirit; and body and spirit are therefore 

no longer absolutely heterogeneous, but may 

without any absurdity be supposed to be dif 

ferent modes, or degrees in perfection, of a 

common substratum. To this possibility, how 

er, it was not the fashion to advert. The 

soul was a thinking substance; and body a 

spacefilling substance. Yet the apparent ac 

tion of each on the other pressed heavy on the 

philosopher on the one hand; and no less hea 

vily on the other hand pressed the evident 

truth, that the law of causality holds only be 

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tween homogeneous things, i. e. things having 

some common property; and cannot extend 

from one world into another, its opposite. A 

close analysis evinced it to be no less absurd, 

than the question whether a man’s affection for 

his wife, lay Northeast, or Southwest of the 

love he bore towards his child? Leibnitz’s 

doctrine of a preestablished harmony, which 

he certainly borrowed from Spinoza, who had 

himself taken the hint from Des Cartes’s animal 

machines, was in its common interpretation too 

strange to survive the inventor—too repugnant 

to our common sense (which is not indeed enti 

tled to a judicial voice in the courts of scien 

tific philosophy; but whose whispers still exert 

a strong secret influence.) Even Wolf the ad 

mirer, and illustrious systematizer of the Leib 

nitzian doctrine, contents himself with defend 

ing the possibility of the idea, but does not 

adopt it as a part of the edifice.

The hypothesis of Hylozoism on the other 

side, is the death of all rational physiology, and 

indeed of all physical science; for that requires a 

limitation of terms, and cannot consist with the 

arbitrary power of multiplying attributes by oc 

cult qualities. Besides, it answers no purpose; 

unless indeed a difficulty can be solved by multi 

plying it, or that we can acquire a clearer notion 

of our soul, by being told that we have a million 

souls, and that every atom of our bodies has a 

soul of its own. Far more prudent is it to 

admit the difficulty once for all, and then let it 

lie at rest. There is a sediment indeed at the 

bottom of the vessel, but all the water above it 

is clear and transparent. The Hylozoist only 

shakes it up, and renders the whole turbid.

But it is not either the nature of man, or the 

duty of the philosopher to despair concerning 

any important problem until, as in the squaring 

of the circle, the impossibility of a solution has 

been demonstrated. How the esse assumed as 

originally distinct from the scire, can ever unite 

itself with it; how being can transform itself 

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into a knowing, becomes conceivable on one 

only condition; namely, if it can be shown that 

the vis representativa, or the Sentient, is itself 

a species of being; i. e. either as a property or 

attribute, or as an hypostasis or self subsistence. 

The former is indeed the assumption of mate 

rialism; a system which could not but be pa 

tronized by the philosopher, if only it actually 

performed what it promises. But how any 

affection from without can metamorphose itself 

into perception or will; the materialist has 

hitherto left, not only as incomprehensible as 

he found it, but has aggravated it into a com 

prehensible absurdity. For, grant that an ob 

ject from without could act upon the conscious

self, as on a consubstantial object; yet such 

an affection could only engender something 

homogeneous with itself. Motion could only 

propagate motion. Matter has no Inward. We 

remove one surface, but to meet with another. 

We can but divide a particle into particles; 

and each atom comprehends in itself the pro 

perties of the material universe. Let any re 

flecting mind make the experiment of explain 

ing to itself the evidence of our sensuous in 

tuitions, from the hypothesis that in any given 

perception there is a something which has been 

communicated to it by an impact or an impres 

sion ab extra. In the first place, by the impact 

on the percepient or ens representans not the 

object itself, but only its action or effect, will 

pass into the same. Not the iron tongue, but 

its vibrations, pass into the metal of the bell. 

Now in our immediate perception, it is not the 

mere power or act of the object, but the object 

itself, which is immediately present. We might 

indeed attempt to explain this result by a chain 

of deductions and conclusions; but that, first, 

the very faculty of deducing and concluding 

would equally demand an explanation; and 

secondly, that there exists in fact no such in 

termediation by logical notions, such as those 

of cause and effect. It is the object itself, not 

the product of a syllogism, which is present to 

our consciousness. Or would we explain this 

supervention of the object to the sensation, by 

a productive faculty set in motion by an im 

pulse; still the transition, into the percepient, 

of the object itself, from which the impulse 

proceeded, assumes a power that can permeate 

and wholly possess the soul

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" And like a God by spiritual art, 

"Be all in all, and all in every part."

COWLEY.

And how came the percepient here? And what 

is become of the wonderpromising MATTER, 

that was to perform all these marvels by force 

of mere figure, weight, and motion? The most 

consistent proceeding of the dogmatic material 

ist is to fall back into the common rank of

soulandbodyists; to affect the mysterious, and 

declare the whole process a revelation given, 

and not to be understood, which it would be 

prophane to examine too closely. Datur non 

intelligitur. But a revelation unconfirmed by 

miracles, and a faith not commanded by the 

conscience, a philosopher may venture to pass 

by, without suspecting himself of any irreligi 

ous tendency.

Thus as materialism has been generally taught, 

it is utterly unintelligible, and owes all its pro 

selytes to the propensity so common among 

men, to mistake distinct images for clear con 

ceptions; and vice versa, to reject as incon 

ceivable whatever from its own nature is un 

imaginable. But as soon as it becomes intel 

ligible, it ceases to be materialism. In order 

to explain thinking, as a material phænomenon, 

it is necessary to refine matter into a mere 

modification of intelligence, with the twofold 

function of appearing and perceiving. Even so 

did Priestley in his controversy with Price! 

He stript matter of all its material properties; 

substituted spiritual powers; and when we 

expected to find a body, behold! we had no 

thing but its ghost! the apparition of a defunct 

substance!

I shall not dilate further on this subject; 

because it will (if God grant health and per 

mission) be treated of at large and systemati 

cally in a work, which I have many years been 

preparing, on the PRODUCTIVE LOGOS human 

and divine; with, and as the introduction to, 

a full commentary on the Gospel of St. John. 

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To make myself intelligible as far as my pre 

sent subject requires, it will be sufficient briefly 

to observe1. That all association demands 

and presupposes the existence of the thoughts 

and images to be associated.2. The 

hypothesis of an external world exactly correspondent 

to those images or modifications of our own 

being, which alone (according to this system) 

we actually behold, is as thorough idealism as 

Berkeley’s, inasmuch as it equally (perhaps, in 

a more perfect degree) removes all reality and 

immediateness of perception, and places us in 

a dreamworld of phantoms and spectres, the 

inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation 

of motions in our own brains.3. That this 

hypothesis neither involves the explanation, nor 

precludes the necessity, of a mechanism and 

coadequate forces in the percepient, which at 

the more than magic touch of the impulse from 

without is to create anew for itself the corres 

pondent object. The formation of a copy is not 

solved by the mere preexistence of an original; 

the copyist of Raphael’s Transfiguration must 

repeat more or less perfectly the process of 

Raphael. It would be easy to explain a thought 

from the image on the retina, and that from the 

geometry of light, if this very light did not 

present the very same difficulty. We might as 

rationally chant the Brahmin creed of the tor 

toise that supported the bear, that supported 

the elephant, that supported the world, to the 

tune of "This is the house that Jack built." 

The sic Deo placitum est we all admit as the 

sufficient cause, and the divine goodness as the 

sufficient reason; but an answer to the whence? 

and why? is no answer to the how? which 

alone is the physiologist’s concern. It is a 

mere sophisma pigrum, and (as Bacon hath 

said) the arrogance of pusillanimity, which lifts 

up the idol of a mortal’s fancy and commands 

us to fall down and worship it, as a work of 

divine wisdom, an ancile or palladium fallen 

from heaven. By the very same argument 

the supporters of the Ptolemaic system might 

have rebuffed the Newtonian, and pointing to 

the sky with selfcomplacent* grin have ap 

pealed to common sense, whether the sun did 

not move and the earth stand still.

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*" And Coxcombs vanquish Berkeley with a 

grin." Pope.

CHAPTER IX.

Is philosophy possible as a science, and what are 

its conditions?Giordano Bruno—Literary 

aristocracy, or the existence of a tacit compact 

among the learned as a privileged order—

The author’s obligations to the Mystics;to 

Emanuel Kant—The difference between the 

letter and the spirit of Kant’s writings, and a 

vindication of prudence in the teaching of 

philosophy—Fichte’s attempt to complete the 

critical system—Its partial success and ultimate 

failure—Obligations to Schelling; and among 

English writers to Saumarez.

After I had successively studied in the schools 

of Locke, Berkeley, Leibnitz, and Hartley, and 

could find in neither of them an abiding place 

for my reason, I began to ask myself; is a 

system of philosophy, as different from mere 

history and historic classification possible? If 

possible, what are its necessary conditions? I 

was for a while disposed to answer the first 

question in the negative, and to admit that the 

sole practicable employment for the human 

mind was to observe, to collect, and to classify. 

But I soon felt, that human nature itself fought 

up against this wilful resignation of intellect; 

and as soon did I find, that the scheme taken 

with all its consequences and cleared of all 

inconsistencies was not less impracticable, than 

contranatural. Assume in its full extent the 

position, nihil in intellectu quod non prius in 

sensa, without Leibnitz’s qualifying præter ip 

sum intellectum, and in the same sense, in which 

it was understood by Hartley and Condilliac: 

and what Hume had demonstratively deduced 

from this concession concerning cause and ef 

fect, will apply with equal and crushing force 

to all the* other eleven categorical forms, and 

the logical functions corresponding to them. 

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How can we make bricks without straw? Or 

build without cement? We learn all things 

indeed by occasion of experience; but the very 

facts so learnt force us inward on the antece 

dents, that must be presupposed in order to 

render experience itself possible. The first 

book of Locke’s Essays (if the supposed error, 

which it labours to subvert, be not a mere 

thing of straw, an absurdity which, no man 

ever did, or indeed ever could believe) is formed 

on a Sophisma Eteroxeteseos, and involves the old 

mistake of cum hoc: ergo, propter hoc.

Videlicet; quantity, quality, relation, and mode, each 

consisting of three subdivisions. Vide Kritik der reineu 

Vernunft, p. 95, and 106. See too the judicious remarks in 

Locke and Hume.

The term, Philosophy, defines itself as an 

affectionate seeking after the truth; but Truth 

is the correlative of Being. This again is no 

way conceivable, but by assuming as a postu 

late, that both are ab initio, identical and 

coinherent; that intelligence and being are re 

ciprocally each others Substrate. I presumed 

that this was a possible conception (i. e. that it 

involved no logical inconsonance) from the 

length of time during which the scholastic 

definition of the Supreme Being, as actus pu 

rissimus sine ullâ potentialitate, was received 

in the schools of Theology, both by the Pon 

tifician and the Reformed divines. The early 

study of Plato and Plotinus, with the com 

mentaries and the THEOLOGIA PLATONICA, of 

the illustrious Florentine; of Proclus, and 

Gemistius Pletho; and at a later period of the 

"De Immenso et Innumerabili," and the "De

causa, principio et uno," of the philosopher 

of Nola, who could boast of a Sir Philip 

Sidney, and Fulke Greville among his patrons, 

and whom the idolaters of Rome burnt as an 

atheist in the year 1660; had all contributed 

to prepare my mind for the reception and 

welcoming of the Cogito quia sum, et sum quia 

Cogito; a philosophy of seeming hardihood, but 

certainly the most ancient, and therefore pre 

sumptively the most natural.

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Why need I be afraid? Say rather how dare 

I be ashamed of the Teutonic theosophist, 

Jacob Behmen? Many indeed, and gross were 

his delusions; and such as furnish frequent and 

ample occasion for the triumph of the learned 

over the poor ignorant shoemaker, who had 

dared think for himself. But while we re 

member that these delusions were such, as 

might be anticipated from his utter want of all 

intellectual discipline, and from his ignorance of 

rational psychology, let it not be forgotten that 

the latter defect he had in common with the 

most learned theologians of his age. Neither 

with books, nor with booklearned men was 

he conversant. A meek and shy quietist, his 

intellectual powers were never stimulated into 

fev’rous energy by crowds of proselytes, or by 

the ambition of proselyting. JACOB BEHMEN 

was an enthusiast, in the strictest sense, as not 

merely distinguished, but as contradistin 

guished, from a fanatic. While I in part trans 

late the following observations from a contem 

porary writer of the Continent, let me be per 

mitted to premise, that I might have trans 

cribed the substance from memoranda of my 

own, which were written many years before his 

pamphlet was given to the world; and that I 

prefer another’s words to my own, partly as a 

tribute due to priority of publication; but still 

more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case 

where coincidence only was possible.

Whoever is acquainted with the history of 

philosophy, during the two or three last cen 

turies, cannot but admit, that there appears to 

have existed a sort of secret and tacit compact 

among the learned, not to pass beyond a certain 

limit in speculative science. The privilege of 

free thought, so highly extolled, has at no time 

been held valid in actual practice, except 

within this limit; and not a single stride beyond 

it has ever been ventured without bringing 

obloquy on the transgressor. The few men 

of genius among the learned class, who actually 

did overstep this boundary, anxiously avoided 

the appearance of having so done. Therefore 

the true depth of science, and the penetration 

to the inmost centre, from which all the lines 

of knowledge diverge to their ever distant cir 

cumference, was abandoned to the illiterate 

and the simple, whom unstilled yearning, and 

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an original ebulliency of spirit, had urged to 

the investigation of the indwelling and living 

ground of all things. These then, because 

their names had never been inrolled in the 

guilds of the learned, were persecuted by the 

registered liverymen as interlopers on their 

rights and priviledges. All without distinction 

were branded as fanatics and phantasts; not 

only those, whose wild and exorbitant imagi 

nations had actually engendered only extra 

vagant and grotesque phantasms, and whose 

productions were, for the most part, poor 

copies and gross caricatures of genuine in 

spiration; but the truly inspired likewise, the 

originals themselves! And this for no other 

reason, but because they were the unlearned, 

men of humble and obscure occupations. 

When, and from whom among, the literati by 

profession, have we ever heard the divine dox 

ology repeated, "I thank thee O father! Lord 

of Heaven and Earth! because thou hast hid 

these things from the wise and prudent, and 

hast revealed them unto babes." No! the 

haughty priests of learning, not only banished 

from the schools and marts of science all, who 

had dared draw living waters from the fountain, 

but drove them out of the very temple, which 

mean time "the buyers, and sellers, and money 

changers" were suffered to make " a den of 

thieves."

And yet it would not be easy to discover 

any substantial ground for this contemptuous 

pride in those literati, who have most distin 

guished themselves by their scorn of BEHMEN, 

DE THOYRAS, GEORGE FOX, &c.; unless it be, 

that they could write orthographically, make 

smooth periods, and had the fashions of author 

ship almost literally at their fingers ends, while 

the latter, in simplicity of soul, made their 

words immediate echoes of their feelings. 

Hence the frequency of those phrases among 

them, which have been mistaken for pretences 

to immediate inspiration; as for instance, "it 

was delivered unto me," "I strove not to speak," 

" I said, I will be silent," "but the word was in 

heart as a burning fire," "and I could not 

forbear." Hence too the unwillingness to give 

offence; hence the foresight, and the dread of 

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the clamours, which would be raised against 

them, so frequently avowed in the writings of 

these men, and expressed, as was natural, in 

the words of the only book, with which they 

were familiar. "Woe is me that I am become 

a man of strife, and a man of contention,I 

love peace: the souls of men are dear unto me: 

yet because I seek for Light every one of them 

doth curse me!" O! it requires deeper feeling, 

and a stronger imagination, than belong to most 

of those, to whom reasoning and fluent ex 

pression have been as a trade learnt in boyhood, 

to conceive with what might, with what inward 

strivings and commotion, the perception of a 

new and vital TRUTH takes possession of an 

uneducated man of genius. His meditations 

are almost inevitably employed on the eternal, 

or the everlasting; for "the world is not his 

friend, nor the world’s law." Need we then be 

surprised, that under an excitement at once 

so strong and so unusual, the man’s body 

should sympathize with the struggles of his 

mind; or that he should at times be so far 

deluded, as to mistake the tumultuous sensa 

tions of his nerves, and the coexisting spec 

tres of his fancy, as parts or symbols of the 

truths which were opening on him? It has 

indeed been plausibly observed, that in order 

to derive any advantage, or to collect any in 

telligible meaning, from the writings of these 

ignorant mystics, the reader must bring with 

him a spirit and judgement superior to that of 

the writers themselves: 

"And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek?"

PARADISE REGAINED.

A sophism, which I fully agree with War  

burton, is unworthy of Milton; how much 

more so of the awful person, in whose mouth 

he has placed it? One assertion I will venture 

to make, as suggested by my own experience, 

that there exist folios on the human under 

standing, and the nature of man, which would 

have a far juster claim to their high rank and 

celebrity, if in the whole huge volume there 

could be found as much fulness of heart and 

intellect, as burst forth in many a simple page 

of GEORGE FOX, JACOB BEHMEN, and even of 

Behmen’s commentator, the pious and fervid 

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WILLIAM LAW.

The feeling of gratitude, which I cherish 

towards these men, has caused me to digress 

further than I had foreseen or proposed; but 

to have passed them over in an historical sketch 

of my literary life and opinions, would have 

seemed to me like the denial of a debt, the 

concealment of a boon. For the writings of 

these mystics acted in no slight degree to pre 

vent my mind from being imprisoned within 

the outline of any single dogmatic system. 

They contributed to keep alive the heart in the

head; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and 

working presentment, that all the products of 

the mere reflective faculty partook of DEATH, 

and were as the rattling twigs and sprays in 

winter, into which a sap was yet to be propelled, 

from some root to which I had not penetrated, 

if they were to afford my soul either food or 

shelter. If they were too often a moving cloud 

of smoke to me by day, yet they were always 

a pillar of fire throughout the night, during my 

wanderings through the wilderness of doubt, 

and enabled me to skirt, without crossing, 

the sandy deserts of utter unbelief. That the 

system is capable of being converted into an 

irreligious PANTHEISM, I well know. The 

ETHICS of SPINOZA, may, or may not, be an 

instance. But at no time could I believe, that

in itself and essentially it is incompatible with 

religion, natural, or revealed: and now I am 

most thoroughly persuaded of the contrary. 

The writings of the illustrious sage of Königs 

berg, the founder of the Critical Philosophy, 

more than any other work, at once invigorated 

and disciplined my understanding. The ori 

ginality, the depth, and the compression of the 

thoughts; the novelty and subtlety, yet solidity 

and importance, of the distinctions; the ada 

mantine chain of the logic; and I will venture 

to add (paradox as it will appear to those who 

have taken their notion of IMMANUEL KANT, 

from Reviewers and Frenchmen) the clearness 

and evidence, of the "CRITIQUE OF THE PURE 

REASON;" of the JUDGMENT; of the "METAPHI 

SICAL ELEMENTS OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY," 

and of his "RELIGION WITHIN THE BOUNDS 

OF PURE REASON," took possession of me as 

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with a giant’s hand. After fifteen years famili 

arity with them, I still read these and all his 

other productions with undiminished delight 

and increasing admiration. The few passages 

that remained obscure to me, after due efforts 

of thought, (as the chapter on original apper

ception,) and the apparent contradictions which 

occur, I soon found were hints and insinua 

tions referring to ideas, which KANT either did 

not think it prudent to avow, or which he con 

sidered as consistently left behind in a pure 

analysis, not of human nature in toto, but of 

the speculative intellect alone. Here therefore 

he was constrained to commence at the point 

of reflection, or natural consciousness: while 

in his moral system he was permitted to assume 

a higher ground (the autonomy of the will) as 

a POSTULATE deducible from the unconditional 

command, or (in the technical language of his 

school) the categorical imperative, of the con 

science. He had been in imminent danger of 

persecution during the reign of the late king of 

Prussia, that strange compound of lawless 

debauchery, and priestridden superstition: 

and it is probable that he had little inclination, 

in his old age, to act over again the fortunes, 

and hairbreadth escapes of Wolf. The expul 

sion of the first among Kant’s disciples, who at 

tempted to complete his system, from the 

university of Jena, with the confiscation and 

prohibition of the obnoxious work by the joint 

efforts of the courts of Saxony and Hanover, 

supplied experimental proof, that the venerable 

old man’s caution was not groundless. In spite 

therefore of his own declarations, I could never 

believe, it was possible for him to have meant 

no more by his Noumenon, or THING IN ITSELF, 

than his mere words express; or that in his 

own conception he confined the whole plastic 

power to the forms of the intellect, leaving for 

the external cause, for the materiale of our 

sensations, a matter without form, which is 

doubtless inconceivable. I entertained doubts 

likewise, whether in his own mind, he even laid 

all the stress, which he appears to do on the 

moral postulates.

An IDEA, in the highest sense of that word, 

cannot be conveyed but by a symbol; and, 

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except in geometry, all symbols of neces 

sity involve an apparent contradiction. Phonese 

Sunetoisen: and for those who could not pierce 

through this symbolic husk, his writings were 

not intended. Questions which can not be 

fully answered without exposing the respon 

dent to personal danger, are not entitled to a 

fair answer; and yet to say this openly, would 

in many cases furnish the very advantage, 

which the adversary is insidiously seeking 

after. Veracity does not consist in saying, 

but in the intention of communicating truth; 

and the philosopher who can not utter the 

whole truth without conveying falsehood, and 

at the same time, perhaps, exciting the most 

malignant passions, is constrained to express 

himself either mythically or equivocally. When 

Kant therefore was importuned to settle the 

disputes of his commentators himself, by de 

claring what he meant, how could he decline 

the honours of martyrdom with less offence, 

than by simply replying "I meant what I 

"said, and at the age of near four score, I have 

"something else, and more important to do, 

"than to write a commentary on my own works."

FICHTE’S Wissenschaftslehre, or Lore of Ul 

timate Science, was to add the keystone of the 

arch: and by commencing with an act, instead 

of a thing or substance, Fichte assuredly gave 

the first mortal blow to Spinozism, as taught by 

Spinoza himself; and supplied the idea of a 

system truly metaphysical, and of a metaphy 

sique truly systematic: (i. e. having its spring 

and principle within itself.) But this funda 

mental idea he overbuilt with a heavy mass of 

mere notions, and psychological acts of arbitrary 

reflection. Thus his theory degenerated into a 

crude* egoismus, a boastful and hyperstoic hos 

tility to NATURE, as lifeless, godless, and alto 

gether unholy: while his religion consisted in 

the assumption of a mere ORDO ORDINANS, which 

we were permitted exotericé to call GOD; and 

his ethics in an ascetic, and almost monkish, 

mortification of the natural passions and desires.

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In Schelling’s "NATURPHILOSOPHIE," and 

the "SYSTEM DES TRANSCENDENTALEN IDEAL 

ISMUS," I first found a genial coincidence with 

much that I had toiled out for myself, and a 

powerful assistance in what I had yet to do.

I have introduced this statement, as appro 

priate to the narrative nature of this sketch; yet 

rather in reference to the work which I have 

announced in a preceding page, than to my

*The following burlesque on the Fichtean Egoismus may, 

perhaps, be amusing, to the few who have studied the system, 

and to those who are unacquainted with it, may convey as 

tolerable a likeness of Fichte’s idealism as can be expected 

from an avowed caracature.

The categorical imperative, or the annunciation of the 

new Teutonic God, EGoENKAIPAN: a dithyrambic Ode,* 

present subject. It would be but a mere act 

of justice to myself, were I to warn my future 

readers, that an identity of thought, or even 

similarity of phrase will not be at all times a 

certain proof that the passage has been borrow 

ed from Schelling, or that the conceptions were 

originally learnt from him. In this instance, as

*by QUERKOPF VON KLUBSTICK, Grammarian, and Subrec 

tor in Gymnasio. ****

Eu! Dei vices gerens, ipse Divus, 

(Speak English, Friend!) the God Imperativus,

Here on this marketcross aloud I cry:

I, I, I! I itself I! 

The form and the substance, the what and the why, 

The when and the where, and the low and the high, 

The inside and outside, the earth and the sky, 

I, you, and he, and he, you and I, 

All souls and all bodies are I itself I! 

All I itself I! 

(Fools! a truce with this starting!) 

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All my I! all my I! 

He’s a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin!

Thus cried the God with high imperial tone:

In robe of stiffest state, that scoff’d at beauty, 

A pronounverb imperative he shone—

Then substantive and pluralsingular grown 

He thus spake on! Behold in I alone 

(For ethics boast a syntax of their own) 

Or if in ye, yet as I doth depute ye, 

In O! I, you, the vocative of duty! 

I of the world’s whole Lexicon the root! 

Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight

The genitive and ablative to boot:

The accusative of wrong, the nom’native of right, 

And in all cases the case absolute!

Selfconstrued, I all other moods decline:

Imperative, from nothing we derive us; 

Yet as a superpostulate of mine, 

Unconstrued antecedence I assign 

To X, Y, Z, the God infinitivus!

in the dramatic lectures of Schlegel to which I 

have before alluded, from the same motive of 

selfdefence against the charge of plagiarism, 

many of the most striking resemblances, indeed 

all the main and fundamental ideas, were born 

and matured in my mind before I had ever seen 

a single page of the German Philosopher; and 

I might indeed affirm with truth, before the 

more important works of Schelling had been 

written, or at least made public. Nor is this 

coincidence at all to be wondered at. We 

had studied in the same school; been discip 

lined by the same preparatory philosophy, 

namely, the writings of Kant; we had both 

equal obligations to the polar logic and dyna 

mic philosophy of Giordano Bruno; and Schel 

ling has lately, and, as of recent acquisition, 

avowed that same affectionate reverence for the 

labors of Behmen, and other mystics, which I 

had formed at a much earlier period. The 

coincidence of SCHELLING’S system with cer 

tain general ideas of Behmen, he declares to have 

been mere coincidence; while my obligations 

have been more direct. He needs give to Beh 

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men only feelings of sympathy; while I owe 

him a debt of gratitude. God forbid! that I 

should be suspected of a wish to enter into a 

rivalry with SCHELLING for the honors so une 

quivocally his right, not only as a great and 

original genius, but as the founder of the 

PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE, and as the most success 

ful improver of the Dynamic* System which, 

begun by Bruno, was reintroduced (in a more 

philosophical form, and freed from all its impu 

rities and visionary accompaniments) by KANT; 

in whom it was the native and necessary growth 

of his own system. KANT’S followers, how 

ever, on whom (for the greater part) their mas 

ter’s cloak had fallen without, or with a very 

scanty portion of, his spirit, had adopted his 

dynamic ideas, only as a more refined species 

of mechanics. With exception of one or two 

fundamental ideas, which cannot be withheld 

from FICHTE, to SCHELLING we owe the

It would be an act of high and almost criminal injustice to 

pass over in silence the name of Mr. RICHARD SAUMAREZ, 

a gentleman equally well known as a medical man and as a 

philanthropist, but who demands notice on the present oc 

casion as the author of "a new System of Physiology" in two 

volumes octavo, published 1797; and in 1812 of "an Exa 

mination of the natural and artificial Systems of Philosophy 

which now prevail" in one volume octavo, entitled, "The 

Principles of physiological and physical Science." The latter 

work is not quite equal to the former in style or arrangement; 

and there is a greater necessity of distinguishing the princi 

ples of the author’s philosophy from his conjectures con 

cerning colour, the atmospheric matter, comets, &c. which 

whether just or erroneous are by no means necessary conse 

quences of that philosophy. Yet even in this department 

of this volume, which I regard as comparatively the inferior 

work, the reasonings by which Mr. Saumarez invalidates the 

immanence of an infinite power in any finite substance are 

the offspring of no common mind; and the experiment on 

the expansibility of the air is at least plausible and highly in 

genious. But the merit, which will secure both to the book 

and to the writer a high and honorable name with posterity, 

consists in the masterly force of reasoning, and the 

completion, and the most important victories, of 

this revolution in philosophy. To me it will be 

happiness and honor enough, should I succeed 

in rendering the system itself intelligible to my 

countrymen, and in the application of it to the 

most awful of subjects for the most important 

of purposes, Whether a work is the offspring 

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of a man’s own spirit, and the product of ori 

ginal thinking, will be discovered by those who 

are its sole legitimate judges, by better tests 

than the mere reference to dates. For readers 

in general, let whatever shall be found in this 

or any future work of mine, that resembles, or 

coincides with, the doctrines of my German

*copiousness of induction, with which he has assailed, and (in my 

opinion) subverted the tyranny of the mechanic system in 

physiology; established not only the existence of final causes, 

but their necessity and efficiency in every system that merits 

the name of philosophical; and substituting life and pro 

gressive power, for the contradictory inert force, has a right 

to be known and remembered as the first instaurator of the 

dynamic philosophy in England. The author’s views, as far 

as concerns himself, are unborrowed and compleatly his own, 

as he neither possessed nor do his writings discover, the 

least acquaintance with the works of Kant, in which the 

germs of the philosophy exist; and his volumes were pub 

lished many years before the full developement of these 

germs by Schelling. Mr. Saumarez’s detection of the Brau 

nonian system was no light or ordinary service at the time; 

and I scarcely remember in any work on any subject a con 

futation so thoroughly satisfactory. It is sufficient at this 

time to have stated the fact; as in the preface to the work, 

which I have already announced on the Logos, I have ex 

hibited in detail the merits of this writer, and genuine philo 

sopher, who needed only have taken his foundations some 

what deeper and wider to have superseded a considerable 

part of my labours. 

predecessor, though contemporary, be wholly 

attributed to him provided, that the absence 

of distinct references to his books, which I could 

not at all times make with truth as designating 

citations or thoughts actually derived from him; 

and which, I trust, would, after this general ac 

knowledgment be superfluous; be not charged 

on me as an ungenerous concealment or inten 

tional plagiarism. I have not indeed (eheu! res 

angusta domi!) been hitherto able to procure 

more than two of his books, viz. the 1st volume 

of his collected Tracts, and his System of Trans 

cendental Idealism; to which, however, I must 

add a small pamphlet against Fichte, the spirit 

of which was to my feelings painfully incongru 

ous with the principles, and which (with the 

usual allowance afforded to an antithesis) 

displayed the love of wisdom rather than the 

wisdom of love. I regard truth as a divine 

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ventriloquist: I care not from whose mouth the 

sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the 

words are audible and intelligible. "Albeit, I 

"must confess to be half in doubt, whether I 

"should bring it forth or no, it being so contrary 

"to the eye of the world, and the world so po 

"tent in most men’s hearts, that I shall endanger 

"either not to be regarded or not to be under 

"stood."

MILTON: Reason of Church Government.

And to conclude the subject of citation, 

with a cluster of citations, which as taken 

from books, not in common use, may con 

tribute to the reader’s amusement, as a vo 

luntary before a sermon."Dolet mihi qui 

dem deliciis literarum inescatos subito jam ho 

mines adeo esse, præsertim qui Christianos se 

profitentur, et legere nisi quod ad delectationem 

facit, sustineant nihil: unde et disciplinæ se 

veriores et philosophia ipsa jam fere prorsus 

etiam a doctis negliguntur. Quod quidem pro 

positum studiorum, nisi mature corrigitur, tam 

magnum rebus incommodum dabit, quám dedit 

Barbaries olim. Pertinax res Barbaries est, 

fateor: sed minus potest tamen, quám illa mol 

lities et persuasa prudentia literarum, quæ si 

ratione caret, sapientiæ virtutisque specie mor 

tales miserè circumducit. Succedet igitur, ut 

arbitror, haud ita multo post, pro rusticanâ 

seculi nostri ruditate captatrix illa communi

loquentia robur animi virilis omne, omnem 

virtutem masculam profligatura, nisi cavetur."

SIMON GRYNÆUS, candido lectori, prefixed to 

the Latin translation of Plato, by Marsilius 

Ficinus. Lugduni, 1557. A too prophetic re 

mark, which has been in fulfilment from the 

year 1680, to the present 1815. N. B. By 

" persuasa prudentia," Grynæus means self 

complacent common sense as opposed to science 

and philosophic reason.

"Est medius ordo et velut equestris Ingeni 

"orum quidem sagacium et rebus humanis com 

"modorum, non tamen in primam magnitudinem 

"patentium. Eorum hominum, ut ita dicam, 

"major annona est. Sedulum esse, nihil temerè 

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"loqui, assuescere labori, et imagine prudentiæ 

"& modestiæ tegere angustiores partes captûs 

"dum exercitationem et usum, quo isti in civi 

"libus rebus pollent, pro natura et magnitudine 

"ingenii plerique accipiunt."

BARCLAII ARGENIS, p. 71.

" As therefore, physicians are many times 

"forced to leave such methods of curing as them 

"selves know to be fittest, and being overruled 

"by the sick man’s impatience, are fain to try 

"the best they can: in like sort, considering how 

"the case doth stand with the present age, full 

"of tongue and weak of brain, behold we would 

"(if our subject permitted it) yield to the stream 

"thereof. That way we would be contented to 

"prove our thesis, which being the worse in 

"itself, notwithstanding is now by reason of com 

"mon imbecility the fitter and likelier to be 

"brooked."—HOOKER.

If this fear could be rationally entertained in 

the controversial age of Hooker, under the then 

robust discipline of the scholastic logic, par 

donably may a writer of the present times an 

ticipate a scanty audience for abstrusest themes, 

and truths that can neither be communicated 

or received without effort of thought, as well 

as patience of attention.

" Che s’io non erro al calcular de’ punti, 

"Par ch’ Asinina Stella a noi predomini, 

"E’l Somaro e’l castron si sian congiunti.

"Il tempo d’Apuleio piu non si nomini:

"Che se allora un sol Huom sembrava un Asino, 

"Mille Asini á miei dì rassembran Huomini!"

Di SALVATOR ROSA Satir. I. 1. 10.

CHAPTER X.

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A chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an 

interlude preceding that on the nature and 

genesis of the imagination or plastic power—

On pedantry and pedantic expressions—Ad 

vice to young authors respecting publication—

Various anecdotes of the author’s literary life, 

and the progress of his opinions in religion 

and politics.

" Esemplastic. The word is not in Johnson, 

nor have I met with it elsewhere." Neither 

have I! I constructed it myself from the Greek 

words, eis en plattein i. e. to shape into one; 

because, having to convey a new sense, I 

thought that a new term would both aid the 

recollection of my meaning, and prevent its 

being confounded with the usual import of 

the word, imagination. "But this is pedantry!" 

Not necessarily so, I hope. If I am not mis 

informed, pedantry consists in the use of words 

unsuitable to the time, place, and company. 

The language of the market would be in the 

schools as pedantic, though it might not be re 

probated by that name, as the language of the 

schools in the market. The mere man of the 

world, who insists that no other terms but 

such as occur in common conversation should 

be employed in a scientific disquisition, and 

with no greater precision, is as truly a pedant 

as the man of letters, who either overrating 

the acquirements of his auditors, or misled by 

his own familiarity with technical or scholastic 

terms, converses at the winetable with his 

mind fixed on his musæum or laboratory; even 

though the latter pedant instead of desiring his 

wife to make the tea, should bid her add to the 

quant. suff. of thea sinensis the oxyd of hy 

drogen saturated with caloric. To use the 

colloquial (and in truth somewhat vulgar) 

metaphor, if the pedant of the cloyster, and the 

pedant of the lobby, both smell equally of the 

shop, yet the odour from the Russian binding 

of good old authenticlooking folios and quartos 

is less annoying than the steams from the 

tavern or bagnio. Nay, though the pedantry 

of the scholar should betray a little ostentation, 

yet a wellconditioned mind would more easily, 

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methinks, tolerate the fox brush of learned 

vanity, than the sans culotterie of a contemptu 

ous ignorance, that assumes a merit from 

mutilation in the selfconsoling sneer at the 

pompous incumbrance of tails.

The first lesson of philosophic discipline 

is to wean the student’s attention from the 

DEGREES of things, which alone form the 

vocabulary of common life, and to direct it to 

the KIND abstracted from degree. Thus the 

chemical student is taught not to be startled at 

disquisitions on the heat in ice, or on latent 

and fixible light. In such discourse the in 

structor has no other alternative than either to 

use old words uith new meanings (the plan 

adopted by Darwin in his Zoonomia;) or to 

introduce new terms, after the example of 

Linnæus, and the framers of the present che 

mical nomenclature. The latter mode is evi 

dently preferable, were it only that the former 

demands a twofold exertion of thought in one 

and the same act. For the reader (or hearer) 

is required not only to learn and bear in mind 

the new definition; but to unlearn, and keep 

out of his view, the old and habitual meaning; 

a far more difficult and perplexing task, and 

for which the mere semblance of eschewing 

pedantry seems to me an inadequate compen 

sation. Where, indeed, it is in our power to 

recall an appropriate term that had without 

sufficient reason become obsolete, it is doubt 

less a less evil to restore than to coin anew. 

Thus to express in one word, all that apper 

tains to the perception considered as passive, 

and merely recipient, I have adopted from our 

elder classics the word sensuous; because sen 

sual is not at present used, except in a bad 

sense, or at least as a moral distinction, while 

sensitive and sensible would each convey a 

different meaning. Thus too I have followed 

Hooker, Sanderson, Milton, &c. in designating 

the immediateness of any act or object of know 

lege by the word intuition, used sometimes 

subjectively, sometimes objectively, even as we 

use the word, thought; now as the thought, or 

act of thinking, and now as a thought, or the 

object of our reflection; and we do this without 

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