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by comparing their respective areas, population on a square mile, and numbers of births to marriages; and here follows the result:

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Thus we see nothing like the working of even a false principle—that is, with any regular deviation,—but a result sometimes exceeding the truth, and sometimes falling short of it-just as might be expected from any other random guess.

We close here our comments on the census of 1831. The value of that census will be best estimated by those who shall live to witness the results of the next; for, in such investigations, the interest is less in absolute quantities than in proportionate-less in knowing what, in each particular, is our actual state, than in ascertaining our progress, or retrocession, in each. Most surely they who shall benefit by such comparison will owe a debt of gratitude to those who have originated such inquiries, and afforded a precedent for a lucid arrangement of the results-above all, to the masterly mind and long-continued industry of Mr. Rickman.

ART.

ART. IV. Specimens of the Table-Talk of S. T. Coleridge. London, 1835. 2 vols. 12mo.

THE

HE editor of Spence's Anecdotes says in his preface, "The French abound in collections of this nature, which they have distinguished with the name of Ana. England has produced few examples of the kind, but they are eminently excellent. It may be sufficient to name Selden's Table-Talk, and Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson.' These Anecdotes of Spence, after having, while in MS., furnished much amusement and instruction to the literary antiquaries of the last generation, took their place at once, on being published in extenso, among the most valuable parlour-window books in this or in any other language. That volume, rich in the fire-side gossip of Pope, Swift, and Bolingbroke, may be said to bring us down almost to the commencement of Johnson's reign as the great master and retailer of literary anecdotes and reminiscences. In its perusal we feel ourselves at home with the members of the Scriblerus Club, and are even carried back, by their unstudied communications among themselves, to a personal familiarity with the worthies of the preceding cycle. To this source we owe more than half of the little that we do know of the personal manners of both Milton and Dryden. Of Boswell we need say nothing, except that his book, in many other respects unrivalled, has this great and almost entirely peculiar advantage, that it presents its talkers, in the strict sense of the word, dramatically. Every saying is rendered doubly interesting by our knowledge of the time, the place, the occasion, and of the person or persons addressed. In almost every other point of view as unlike Dr. Johnson as one man of great faculties and great virtues can be to another, Mr. Coleridge must be allowed to have been his legitimate successor as the great literary talker of England. Had he been fortunate enough to find a faithful chronicler twenty or thirty years ago, we have no doubt the ultimate record of his conversational wisdom and ingenuity would have occupied many goodly volumes well worthy of fully sharing in the popularity of Boswell. As it is, we have much reason to be thankful that, during the last four or five years of his life, a young and affectionate kinsman, possessing the learning, the taste, and the feeling which qualified him to understand and appreciate his rich talk, happened to reside in his immediate neighbourhood, and kept a journal in which he commonly set down, before going to bed, what fragments he had been able to carry away.

It will be the natural wish of every reader that Mr. Henry Coleridge had at least tried to give more of a dramatic shape to

his record. But at the same time, all who had the pleasure of Mr. Coleridge's acquaintance are well aware that his forte was more in monologue than dialogue; that he, on almost all occasions, lectured rather than conversed; his illustrations expanding and multiplying as he proceeded, not from the quickening collision of another mind, but the onward self-evolved excitation of his own. As respects his latter intercourse with his nephew, more especially, we can conceive that we may not have lost much by the omission of what may be well called the stage directions, so useful and entertaining in the case of Boswell. We are afraid that during the short period over which the present diary extends, the state of things was such, that we may but too completely fill up every blank by one melancholy formula-place, Mr. Coleridge's bedroom-time, night-present, the poet in his arm-chair, physically worn and exhausted by a day of pain, but refreshed and invigorated by the recent entrance of his dear young friend, to whom it is a sort of necessity of his nature that he should unburthen himself of some of the innumerable trains of thought and reflection that have been occupying him, as far as bodily sufferings might permit, since their last meeting. We hope other friends will be now encouraged to task their memories, and produce some reminiscences of those earlier days as to which it would be so agreeable to have more of the Boswellian sort of accompaniment. How delightful, for instance, is almost the solitary communication furnished to these volumes by another relative, Mr. Serjeant Coleridge, who places the old man before us as stopping short one Sunday morning as he entered the churchyard on Richmond Hil!, and exclaiming, I feel as if God had given man fifty-two springs in every year!'

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Johnson's eulogy of Burke is in every body's recollection; viz. that if a barber's boy had stopped for ten minutes under the same shed with him during a shower of rain, he would have said, on going away, That is an extraordinary man.' Assuredly the same thing may be said with quite as much truth of Coleridge. The affluence of his mind could never be repressed, and such was the catholic humanity of his heart, the pure charity which mingled with every play even of his imagination, that no child of Adam ever seemed to him unworthy, we do not say of frank and kindly communication merely, but of the treatment of an equal. How completely, when once fairly in talk with any human being, no matter how lowly in condition, how deficient in education, he seemed to forget the intellectual gulph that separated himself from his auditor, we need not remind any one that knew any thing of his habits. When he carried it so far as not merely to adorn and embellish subjects of which his barber's boys might

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be supposed to have some feeling and comprehension, but to harangue them (as he often did) on topics and in a style which must to them have been alike heathen Greek, the effect was at once so quaintly ludicrous and so gently amiable, that we cannot but wish some specimens of it had been preserved, as far as such things ever can be preserved by a mere record of words. The parties addressed, however incapable of fully understanding his drift, were always cheered and delighted with the evident kindliness of his whole spirit and intentions--while he held them with his glittering eye,' the cordial childlike innocence of his smile, the inexpressible sweetness of his voice, and the rich musical flow into which his mere language ever threw itself, were subsidiary charms that told even upon the dullest and the coldest. Had it been possible that such a man should ever have taken up the trade of a demagogue, either in the pulpit or on the hustings, what power must have been his! The more unintelligible his strain, the greater of course, so the watchwords were skilfully chosen, would have been its potency.

Those who are acquainted in general with what the course of Mr. Coleridge's personal history had been, and who are told in limine that the present work is made up of the confidential conversation of the sick-room in which he so lately breathed his last, but who never happened to meet with the man himself, will perhaps be agreeably surprised when they find that it contains no trace of murmuring, in as far as his own fortunes in the world were concerned. Upon the great political events of the few last years he indeed expresses himself occasionally-as what man of understanding and honesty has not been often heard to do?-in the language of regret and mournful anticipation. Once or twice, perhaps, he has allowed some fling of virtuous indignation to escape him with regard to the immediate actors in these miserable doings. But, with these exceptions, the whole book is radiant with the habitual benignity, charity, and hopefulness of the man; and indeed, even as to the excepted topics, he had so accustomed himself to trace external events to remote causes, and to rely on that Power which can and will bring good out of evil, that his general tone of feeling, as to the apparently guiltiest of our political culprits, was that of compassion; and that we much doubt if he ever seriously did believe that the Constitution of England had been irretrievably undone.

The equanimity with which this record shows Mr. Coleridge to have looked back upon a life which any worldly person must have called eminently unfortunate, will not, as we have intimated, surprise any one who had the honour and privilege of his acquaintance. He was, in the first place, well aware that the main

VOL. LIII. NO. CV,

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source of all his external mishaps was in himself and this indeed he has plainly told us in one of the most interesting pages of his Autobiographia Literaria-a work which, however absurdly so named, as it is any thing rather than a narrative of the incidents of his own career, does nevertheless deserve to be reprinted, not only on many other accounts, but for the vivid glimpses which it affords us of his intellectual habitudes, and the prevalent moods of his mind.

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NEVER,' says the autobiographer, PURSUE LITERATURE AS A TRADE. With the exception of one extraordinary man, I have never known an individual, least of all an individual of genius, healthy or happy without a profession, i. e., some regular employment, which does not depend on the will of the moment, and which can be carried on so far mechanically, that an average quantum only of health, spirits, and intellectual exertion are requisite to its faithful discharge. Three hours of leisure, unannoyed by any alien anxiety, and looked forward to with delight as a change and recreation, will suffice to realize in literature a larger product of what is truly genial, than weeks of compulsion. Money and immediate reputation form only an arbitrary and accidental end of literary labour. The hope of increasing them by any given exertion will often prove a stimulant to industry; but the necessity of acquiring them will in all works of genius convert the stimulant into a narcotic. Motives by excess reverse their very nature, and instead of exciting, stun and stupify the mind.'-vol. i. p. 223. And again:

'It would be a sort of irreligion, and scarcely less than a libel on human nature, to believe that there is any established and reputable profession or employment, in which a man may not contrive to act with honesty and honour; and doubtless there is likewise none which may not at times present temptations to the contrary. But woefully will that man find himself mistaken, who imagines that the profession of literature, or (to speak more plainly) the trade of authorship, besets its members with fewer or with less insidious temptations than the church, the law, or the different branches of commerce. . . Let literature be an honourable augmentation to your arms, but not fill the escutcheon!'-Ibid. p. 230.

We are well aware that, after Mr. Coleridge's opinions and habits were formed, it would have been extremely difficult to find any (properly so called) professional situation for him, unless he had chosen to take orders-and why he never did so we are altogether uninformed. He himself, in the very chapter from which we have been quoting, says of the Church, that it presents to every man of learning and genius a walk of life in which he may cherish a rational hope of being able to unite the widest schemes of literary utility with the strictest performance of professional duties. There is,' he says, ' scarce a department of human knowledge

without

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