without some bearing on the various critical, historical, philosophical, and moral truths, in which the scholar must be interested as a clergyman: no one pursuit worthy of a man of genius which may not be followed without incongruity.' No doubt the motives that withheld the learned and devout churchman, who thus thought, from the service of the altar, must have been powerful-as little that they were honourable to his feelings; but who can cease to regret that Coleridge's life was not cast into the same happy course as that of Crabbe or Bowles? After all, if there was not, there assuredly ought to have been, some means of adequately providing for such a man, after his name and character were fixed and determined, either in some great metropolitan institution, or within the walls of one or other of our universities. If ever those magnificent national establishments are reformed to any good or real purpose, it will be from within, by the act of their own proper authorities; and we feel assured that, in any plan of internal reform likely to proceed from the eminent persons who at present guide their counsels, a leading feature would be that of providing a greater number of stations in which men who have really distinguished themselves in science or literature might find honourable retirement and shelter for the evening of their days. We well know that Cambridge was proud of her Coleridge: he was almost worshipped there among both young and old;-his last visit, in particular, called forth a display of feeling which can never cease to be remembered, to their honour, by all who witnessed the scene. Meanwhile, as Mr. Coleridge himself did not complain, we may spare ourselves the pain of any further comments on the dark and melancholy circumstances in which this great light of his time and country, this beautiful poet, this exquisite metaphysician, this universal scholar, and profound theologian, was permitted to pass so many years of his life. We shall not even be tempted to go beyond a mere allusion to the fact, that the only reduction of the pension list, which the late Whig government ventured upon, was one which deprived ten meritorious men of letters, with Coleridge at their head, of a pittance of 100%. per annum, which had been accorded to them by King George IV. the one reduction, we verily believe, which could not have been demanded or approved of by a single tax-payer of these kingdoms, whig, tory, or radical. Hear the dying poet's own comment on this and all other such mischances :

'COMPLAINT.

How seldom, friend, a good great man inherits
Honour or wealth with all his worth and pains!
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits,
If any man obtain that which he merits,

Or any merit that which he obtains.

G 2

• REPROOF.

'REPROOF.

For shame, dear friend! renounce this canting strain!
What wouldst thou have a good great man obtain ?
Place-titles-salary-a gilded chain?

Or throne of corses which his sword hath slain?
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends!
Hath he not always treasures, always friends,

The good great man ?-Three treasures, Love, and Light,
And Calm Thoughts, regular as infant's breath;-
And three firm friends, more sure than day and night,
Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death."

Coleridge was, in truth, a high as well as a humble spirit, and he, no question, had a noble pleasure and pride in his belief-whether altogether well-founded or not we have some doubts-that he inherited not only this serene scorn of mere worldly distinctions, but a gallant indifference to immediate literary popularity, from the greatest of his poetical predecessors. We suspect that he might with more justice have compared himself on both of these heads to some of his own illustrious contemporaries, than to one at least of the immortal names to which he alludes in a chapter of his Autobiographia already quoted by us. He there says:

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 themselves. In the inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been either indifferent, or resigned, with regard to immediate reputation. Through all the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity, which makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent 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 known to Mr. Pope, when he asserted, that our great bard "grew immortal in his own despite." Speaking of one whom he had celebrated, and contrasting the duration of his works with that of his personal existence, Shakspeare adds:

"Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though 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'er-read;
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, even in the mouth of men."

'In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender, delicate,

and,

and, in comparison with his three great compeers, I had almost said, effeminate; and this additionally saddened by the unjust persecution of Burleigh, 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 contempt 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 concerned. He reserved his anger for the enemies of religion, freedom, and his country. My mind is not capable of forming a more august conception, than arises from the contemplation 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 before whom he strode so far as to dwarf himself 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."-Autobiographia, vol. i. pp. 32-35.

As we shall not be so superfluous as to attempt any orderly arrangement in an article on table-talk, we may as well quote here what Coleridge said, across the fire, nearly twenty years later, on the characteristics of Chaucer and Shakspeare:

'I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakspeare and Chaucer; but what the first effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. How well we seem to know Chaucer! How absolutely nothing do we know of Shakspeare!'-Table-Talk, March 15, 1834.

We cannot read the numerous fragments of delicious criticism on Shakspeare which are scattered over these volumes, as well as the Autobiographia, without remembering with sorrow that Coleridge's Lectures on Shakspeare, delivered before Schlegel's, and in the opinion of those who heard them at least as good as the enlightened German's, have never been collected and printed. Are they hopelessly lost? We know that one friend and admirer of our poet employed, with his consent, a skilful short-hand writer

to

to take notes of the whole course, and imperfect as these must no doubt have been, still they could scarcely fail to furnish most valuable materials for an editor such as H. N. Coleridge. We are sure Mr. Frere would be happy to place the MS., if now in his possession, at the disposal of one so well qualified to use it for the honour of the deceased, and the instruction of the world. But let us return to our extracts.

I cannot in the least allow any necessity for Chaucer's poetry, especially the "Canterbury Tales," being considered obsolete, Let a few plain rules be given for sounding the final è of syllables, and for expressing the termination of such words as oceän, nation, &c, as dissyllables,- —or let the syllables to be sounded in such cases be marked by a competent metrist. This simple expedient would, with a very few trifling exceptions, where the errors are inveterate, enable any reader to feel the perfect smoothness and harmony of Chaucer's verse. As to understanding his language,-if you read twenty pages with a good glossary, you surely can find no further difficulty even as it is; but I should have no objection to see this done:-strike out those words which are now obsolete, and I will venture to say that I will replace every one of them by words still in use out of Chaucer himself, or Gower his disciple. I do not want this myself; I rather like to see the significant terms which Chaucer unsuccessfully offered as candidates for admission into our language,-but surely so very slight a change of the text may well be pardoned even by blackletterati for the purpose of restoring so great a poet to his ancient and most deserved popularity.'*-Table-Talk, April, 1833.

Something like what Mr. Coleridge here recommends for the popularization of this great old poet has just been attempted by Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke, in a couple of small volumes, entitled The Riches of Chaucer;' and notwithstanding this affected title,

*Our poet has elsewhere this beautiful passage on a cognate subject:-' In the days of Chaucer and Gower our language might be compared to a wilderness of vocal reeds, from which the favourites 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 labours of successive poets, and in part by the more artificial state of society and social intercourse, language, mechanized as it were into a barrel-organ, supplies at once both instrument and tune. Thus even the deaf may play, so as to delight the many. Sometimes (for it is with similes 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 press-room of larger and smaller stereotype pieces, which, in the present Anglo-Gallican fashion of unconnected, epigrammatic periods, it requires but an ordinary portion of ingenuity to vary indefinitely, 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 between an egg and an egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look alike.”—Autobiographia, vol. i. p. 39.

and

and a preface in which we find the venerable Cockney school revived in all its glory, the editor appears to have acquitted himself of his task as regards the text of Chaucer, and the selection of glossarial notes, with considerable tact. Would that some really ripe and good scholar would undertake an annotated edition of the whole of Chaucer. We have no even tolerable edition of any of his writings except the Canterbury Tales; and great as Tyrwhitt was in more departments than one, much progress has been made in all of them since he wrote, and in none of them more than in the illustration of the old English tongue, especially by bringing to bear upon its obsolete forms the living commentary of comparatively unmixed Teutonic dialects. On the structure and varieties of his mother tongue we have never perhaps had a more admirable critic than has been lost to us in Mr. Coleridge.

To proceed with our Ana:

'It may be doubted whether a composite language like the English is not a happier instrument of expression than a homogeneous one like the German. We possess a wonderful richness and variety of modified meanings in our Saxon and Latin quasi-synonymes, which the Germans have not. For "the pomp and prodigality of heaven," the Germans must have said" the spendthriftness." Shakspeare is particularly happy in his use of the Latin synonymes, and in distinguishing between them and the Saxon.'

-We wish Mr. Coleridge had worked out this last idea. We think it quite just; and feel, to give but one example, how admirably the bare simple strength of Saxon monosyllables is made to contrast with and heighten the effect of the most gorgeous Latin sesquipedalia in

The multitudinous sea incarnadine,
Making the green one red.'

Again he says:

Shakspeare is of no age. It is idle to endeavour to support his phrases by quotations from Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, &c. His language is entirely his own, and the younger dramatists imitated him. The construction of Shakspeare's sentences, whether in verse or prose, is the necessary and homogeneous vehicle of his peculiar manner of thinking. His is not the style of the age. More particularly, Shakspeare's blank verse is an absolutely new creation. Read Daniel, the admirable Daniel,-in his "Civil Wars," and "Triumphs of Hymen." The style and language are just such as any very pure and manly writer of the present day-Wordsworth, for examplewould use; it seems quite modern in comparison with the style of Shakspeare. Ben Jonson's blank-verse is very masterly and individual, and perhaps Massinger's is even still nobler. In Beaumont and Fletcher it is constantly slipping into lyricisms.

I believe Shakspeare was not a whit more intelligible in his own

day