There is no mention of him in Nicéron, Michaud, Moreri or Goujet. Fournel offers nothing in the preface to his reprint of the play.18 According to the Frères Parfaict and the editor of the Ancien Théâtre François he was the author of one other play, a tragicomedy, published also in 1633.19 He seems to have composed no other dramatic works. His activity as a dramatist must then have been largely confined to 1632 and 1633, which recalls the statement of the author in the preamble of the Discours that his Traicté had been composed five or six years before its publication in 1637 (p. 247). The fact that he produced nothing after La Comédie des Comédiens squares with the statement made in the main part of the Discours, that is to say the part written in 1632 or 1633:

Il me suffit que les pieces que j'ay faictes, quoy qu'en petit nombre, parviennent és mains de ceux que j'honore et que je cheris, et qu'elles prejugent à l'avenir ce que j'aurais pû faire de plus. Si je renonce au mestier, ce n'est pas qu'il me déplaise, ny que je m'en lasse, mais je ne le puis faire ny en mercenaire, n'ayant pas le coeur si bas, ny gratuitement, n'en pouvant gratifier que les comediens, autant indignes du bien qu'on leur fait, qu'ils sont incapables de juger des pieces qu'on leur donne (p. 272).

This declaration fits the case of Gougenot much better than that of Durval who, in 1637, produced his Agarite and was promising his readers four new plays.

La Comédie des Comédiens is a dreary play to read and it is difficult to imagine that it could have succeeded on the stage in spite of the items of local interest which it contained. According to the Frères Parfaict it was represented by the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1633. In 1634 the Théâtre du Marais gave, it seems with considerable success, Scudéry's Comédie des Comédiens; a play of the same name and composed in precisely the same form: two acts in prose in which the actors, playing under their own names, discuss theatrical matters, followed by a three act tragi-comedy in verse. It is at least natural to see in this success of Scudéry's

18 Les Contemporains de Molière, Paris, 1863-1875. 19 La Fidelle Tromperie. This piece is very rare. The Frères Parfaict conclude their résumé of the plot with this sentence: Les rois que Gougenot ajoute de son invention, et qui veulent conquérir le coeur de Clorisée, en formant des sièges et donnant des batailles sur le Théatre peuvent contribuer au spectacle, mais ils ne servent à la lecture qu'à jetter beaucoup de confusion et de ridicule dans le poème (Op. Cit. IV. p. 257). This conforms very well with the spirit of the Discours whose author insists that: L'Amour et la Guerre, l'un ou l'autre separément, ou les deux ensemble, fournissent aux Auteurs tous les sujets prophanes du Theatre (p. 275) si l'armée du Roy de France.. execute quelque belle chose incidément, tout cela peut estre imité et representé (p. 269). However, many authors of the time followed the same system and the parallel is only mildly corroborative.

play of the same name and plan, some connection with the total eclipse of Gougenot as a dramatic poet after the representation of this, his second play. The passage of the preamble to the Discours, written in 1637, in which the author discusses Scudéry's motives in attacking the Cid might well be an echo of the resentment which he had felt on seeing a rival succeed where he had failed:

Ou la branche de Laurier qu'il pretend luy avoir esté ravie par son égal, ou le zele de faire connoistre la verité et la perfection de l'art de poësie, semble estre la cause de telles remarques. Si nous l'en croyons, ce n'est pas le premier, car il est trop genereux; et en ce cas il se plaindroit plustost pour l'interest commun, que pour le sien propre, il s'ensuit donc que c'est le second et sans doubte nous luy sommes obligez de la peine qu'il prend de nous instruire, mais la maniere de le faire est toujours suspecte de quelque passion d'aigreur indigne d'un honneste homme (p. 245).

And that would be a reason, in addition to the one suggested by Gasté (op. cit., p. 59), for the ressuscitation of this Discours à Cliton in which "five or six years" before, an obscure poet had, so to speak, laid out for burial the corpse of his poetic ambition.

HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE, EXPOSITOR OF

ROMANTIC CRITICISM

By WALTER GRAHAM

Western Reserve University

Lord Coleridge of Ottery St. Mary not many years ago remarked that the great Coleridge, his daughter Sara, and her husband and cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, were buried in one spot at Highgate Old Chapel, and added, "I think with modesty I may say it is a remarkable grave." The full force of his observation is not likely to be grasped by the student of to-day; for although Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his daughter have received their meed of praise from posterity, the third name, that of the self-effacing editor of Table Talk, the Friend, and the Literary Remains, is hardly known to our generation. Henry Nelson Coleridge, the critic who did more than any other contemporary to present his uncle's works to readers in a favorable light, remains a shadow in the background. His chief literary work was done in periodical criticism, that most easily forgotten form of writing. Moreover, he wrote in a day when anonymity was the rule. The articles in the Quarterly Review were not known to be his until very recently. Those in the British Critic can be determined only by internal evidence. On the other hand, his youthful essays in the Etonian were signed with a known nom de plume. These essays together form a not inconsiderable body of criticism; they show Henry Nelson Coleridge to have been one of the most important early interpreters of Romantic criticism.

In 1821, while a student at King's College, Cambridge, he contributed to Praed's famous Etonian the first of his critical efforts. It was a boyish championship of Wordsworth against Golightly and M'Farlane (pseudonyms for two members of the Etonian staff). Most of the ideas that really matter had already been ex

1 His own pseudonym was "Gerard Montgomery". Evidently he had been an admirer of Wordsworth for some time. In a letter from Cambridge he said, "My rooms have been inhabited by Sir R. Walpole, Camden, Gibbs, Dampier, but they have now received a greater cumulus of honour, W. Wordsworth having sat one hour with me in them." (See Lord Coleridge, The Story of a Devonshire House, London, 1915).

pressed in the Quarterly Review by Lamb and William Rowe Lyall. But specific criticisms are not so important here as the fact that Coleridge deliberately set out to prove Wordsworth a great everyday poet. He promised to discuss him later as an individual genius. By way of proof, the youthful advocate read before the imaginary club of fellow Etonians the Address to H. C., six years old, She was a phantom of delight, Ruth, and two stanzas from Peter Bell. Comment followed. We can hear the voice of Samuel Taylor Coleridge when the nephew speaks vaguely of Wordsworth's being "uninstructed upon one grand, comprehensive system" of philosophy. The poet appeared to the young critic as a lover of nature with marvellous observation. Yet "Elevated as that observation must be by the . . . relationship of the most noble scenery in England, most of his poetry is concerned at bottom with the ordinary incidents of humanity." Concluding, he gave further proofs of Wordsworth's "wonderful power of creating and coloring common objects by the intenseness of his imagination," and ended with a burst of extravagant praise for Tintern Abbey and the Ode on Intimations of Immortality.

If this Etonian critique, written by the twenty-three year old disciple, was too noticeably like the criticisms in the Quarterly a few years before, his next essay derived nothing from published reviews. No discerning appreciation of Wordsworth's great contemporary had appeared up to this time (1820-1). The critical expressions of Henry Nelson Coleridge in the Etonian, regarding the work of his uncle, constitute the first approach to an understanding of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet.

The nephew noted that the transition was easy from Wordsworth to Coleridge, since each was impregnated with the other's views. He was reserved in his comment on his uncle's philosophical system of commingled Platonism, Kantism, and Christianity. He called it useless if true-probably an echo of opinions expressed by many contemporaries. But, though reserved in his appreciation of the philosopher, Henry Nelson Coleridge's youthful enthusiasm knew no bounds when dealing with the poet, whom he believed not only equal but superior to all his contemporaries.

He is less abstract and ideal than Wordsworth, less philosophically sublime, more humanly passionate-not so anatomizing in the operation of the heart and mind-with a tendency to the strange, wild, and mysterious. .. To this he adds a power of language truly wonderful, more romantically splendid than Wordsworth's, more flexible and melodious than Southey's.

Encomium took one step further in the conclusion that Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser were not far ahead of Coleridge in perfect harmony of thought, passion, measure and rhyme. Somewhat more just and concrete criticism may be found in the opinion that the mysterious and preternatural are nowhere developed in literature as in the Ancient Mariner. "That unjustly vilified fragment, Christabel" was called "intensely the same in spirit." Coleridge cannot be regarded as the most genuine and original poet of love since Shakespeare; but it should be remembered that the nephew's curiously high opinions of the love poems were derived from the opinions of Coleridge himself. The conversational powers of the poet, "the fervid continuousness of his discourse," the brilliancy and justness of his images and similes these were points later emphasized by every critic and biographer. They were here noted by the nephew, and were constantly repeated by him in the years that followed. But the most striking observation was that regarding the decreasing powers of Wordsworth (observable about 1820) occasioned, he would have it, by that poet's less intimate communion with S. T. Coleridge-a point dwelt upon at length by Professor Garrod in his recent book on Wordsworth, and certainly originating, as far as the nephew was concerned, in the conversation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself.

There can be no real comparison between this excessive appreciation of a young nephew and disciple and the mature estimate written by the same pen more than twenty years later-an estimate that has been discussed elsewhere.2 Between the two were many years of experience, and, most vital of all, the years of close intimacy with the poet at Highgate, of which something more must be said.

The third essay of Henry Nelson Coleridge in the Etonian was an appreciation of Lamb. The young critic was in the main sound in his estimate, if a little too enthusiastic about Lamb's poetry. Especially laudatory is the feeling which prompted him to abandon the poet for the man. Coleridge frankly calls Lamb a poet little read, but argues that there is a place in the world of literature for the small as well as the great. His main purpose is to introduce Lamb, the man, "one of the kindliest temperament and warmest affections." He calls Lamb's prose perfect, a verdict we

2 Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, xxxviii, 278-289.