Coleridge, but far his inferior in power and compass of intellect. I speak of Goethe: he also was defective, and defective under far stronger provocations and excitement, in patriotic feeling. He cared little for Weimar, and less for Germany. And he was, thus far, much below Coleridgethat the passion which he could not feel Coleridge yet obliged himself practically to obey in all things which concerned the world, whereas Goethe disowned this passion equally in his acts, his words, and his writings. Both are now gone-Goethe and Coleridge; both are honoured by those who knew them, and by multitudes who did not. But the honours of Coleridge are perennial, and will annually grow more verdant; whilst from those of Goethe every generation will see something fall away, until posterity will wonder at the subverted idol, whose basis, being hollow and unsound, will leave the worship of their fathers an enigma to their descendants.

NOTE REFERRED TO ON PAGE 143

I have somewhere seen it remarked with respect to these charges of plagiarism, that, however incontrovertible, they did not come with any propriety or grace from myself as the supposed friend of Coleridge, and as writing my sketch of slight reminiscences on the immediate suggestion of his death. My answer is this: I certainly was the first person (first, I believe, by some years) to point out the plagiarisms of Coleridge, and above all others that circumstantial plagiarism, of which it is impossible to suppose him unconscious, from Schelling. Many of his plagiarisms were probably unintentional, and arose from that confusion between things floating in the memory and things selfderived which happens at times to most of us that deal much with books on the one hand, and composition on the other. An author can hardly have written much and rapidly who does not sometimes detect himself, and perhaps, therefore, sometimes fail to detect himself, in appropriating the thoughts, images, or striking expressions of others. It is enough for his conscientious self-justification, that he is anxiously vigilant to guard himself from such unacknowledged obligations, and forward to acknowledge them as soon as ever they are pointed out. But no excess of candour the most indulgent will allow us to suppose that a most profound speculation upon the original relations inter se of the subjective and the objective, literally translated from the German, and stretching over some pages, could, after any interval of years, come to be mistaken by the translator for his own. This amounted to an entire essay. But suppose the compass of the case to lie within a single word, yet if that word were so remarkable, so provocative to the curiosity, and promising so much weight of meaning (which reasonably any great departure from ordinary diction must promise), as the word esemplastic,1 we should all hold it impossible for a man to

1 "Esemplastic" :-A writer in "Blackwood," who carried a wrath into the discussion for which I and others found it hard to account, made it a sort of charge against myself, that I had overlooked this remarkable case. If I had, there would have been no particular reason for anger or surprise, seeing that the particular German work in which these plagiarisms were traced had been lent to me under most rigorous limitations as to the time for returning it; the owner of the volume was going out of London, and a very few hours (according to my present remembrance only two) were all that he could allow me for hunting

appropriate this word inadvertently. I, therefore, greatly understated the case against Coleridge, instead of giving to it an undue emphasis. Secondly, in stating it at all, I did so (as at the time I explained) in pure kindness. Well I knew that, from the direction in which English philosophic studies were now travelling, sooner or later these appropriations of Coleridge must be detected; and I felt that it would break the force of the discovery, as an unmitigated sort of police detection, if first of all it had been announced by one who, in the same breath, was professing an unshaken faith in Coleridge's philosophic power. It could not be argued that one of those who most fervently admired Coleridge had professed such feelings only because he was ignorant of Coleridge's obligations to others. Here was a man who had actually for himself, unguided and unwarned, discovered these obligations; and yet, in the very act of making that discovery, this man clung to his original feelings and faith. But, thirdly, I must inform the reader that I was not, nor ever had been, the "friend" of Coleridge in any sense which could have a right to restrain my frankest opinions upon his merits. I never had lived in such intercourse with Coleridge as to give me an opportunity of becoming his friend. To him I owed nothing at all; but to the public, to the body of his own readers, every writer owes the truth, and especially on a subject so important as that which was then before me.

With respect to the comparatively trivial case of Pythagoras, an author of great distinction in literature and in the Anglican Church has professed himself unable to understand what room there could be

through the most impracticable of metaphysical thickets (what Coleridge elsewhere calls "the holy jungle of metaphysics"). Meantime I had not overlooked the case of esemplastic; I had it in my memory, but hurry of the press and want of room obliged me to omit a good deal. Indeed, if such omissions constituted any reproach, then the critic in "Blackwood" was liable to his own censure. For I remember to this hour several Latin quotations made by Schelling, and repeated by Coleridge as his own, which neither I nor my too rigorous reviewer had drawn out for public exposure. As regarded myself, it was quite sufficient that I had indicated the grounds, and opened the paths, on which the game must be sought; that I left the rest of the chase to others, was no subject for blame, but part of my purpose; and, under the circumstances, very much a matter of necessity.-In taking leave of this affair, I ought to point out a ground of complaint against my reviewer under his present form of expression, which I am sure could not have been designed. It happened that I had forgotten the particular title of Schelling's work; naturally enough, in a situation where no foreign books could be had, I quoted it under a false one. And this inevitable error of mine on a matter so entirely irrelevant is so described that the neutral reader might suppose me to have committed against Coleridge the crime of Lauder against Milton--that is, taxing him with plagiarism by referring, not to real works of Schelling, but to pretended works, of which the very titles were forgeries of my own. This, I am sure, my unknown critic never could have meant. The plagiarisms were really there; more and worse in circumstances than any denounced by myself; and, of all men, the "Blackwood critic was the most bound to proclaim this; or else what became of his own clamorous outcry? Being, therefore, such as I had represented, of what consequence was the special title of the German volume to which these plagiarisms were referred?- [The reference in this footnote, written by De Quincey in 1854, is to an article on "The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge," which had appeared in Blackwood for March 1840, the writer of which had animadverted on De Quincey's previous disclosures on the subject in his Tait papers of 1834-5. --M.]

"

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NOTE ON COLERIDGE'S PLAGIARISMS

for plagiarism in a case where the solution ascribed to Coleridge was amongst the commonplaces of ordinary English academic tuition. Locally this may have been so; but hardly, I conceive, in so large an extent as to make that solution publici juris. Yet, however this may be, no help is given to Coleridge; since, according to Mr. Poole's story, whether the interpretation of the riddle were or were not generally diffused, Coleridge claimed it for his own.-[In Mrs. Sandford's Thomas Poole and his Friends (1888), vol. ii. pp. 304-6, there is printed a letter of Mr. Poole's, dated June 1835, doubting the accuracy of De Quincey's story of their discourse in 1807 respecting Coleridge's plagiarisms.-M.]

I

Finally for distance from the press and other inconveniences of unusual pressure oblige me to wind up suddenly-the whole spirit of my record at the time (twenty years ago), and in particular the special allusion to the last Duke of Ancaster's case, as one which ran parallel to Coleridge's, involving the same propensity to appropriate what generally were trifles in the midst of enormous and redundant wealth, survives as an indication of the animus with which I approached this subject, starting even from the assumption that I was bound to consider myself under the restraints of friendship-which, for the second time let me repeat, I was not. In reality, the notes contributed to the Aldine edition of the "Biographia Literaria," by Coleridge's admirable daughter, have placed this whole subject in a new light; and, in doing this, have unavoidably reflected some degree of justification upon myself. Too much so, I understand to be the feeling in some quarters. This lamented lady is thought to have shown partialities in her distributions of praise and blame upon this subject. will not here enter into that discussion. But, as respects the justification of her father, I regard her mode of argument as unassailable. Filial piety the most tender never was so finely reconciled with candour towards the fiercest of his antagonists. Wherever the plagiarism was undeniable, she has allowed it; whilst palliating its faultiness by showing the circumstances under which it arose. But she has also opened a new view of other circumstances under which an apparent plagiarism arose that was not real. I myself, for instance, knew cases where Coleridge gave to young ladies a copy of verses, headed thus"Lines on from the German of Hölty." Other young ladies made transcripts of these lines; and, caring nothing for the German authorship, naturally fathered them upon Coleridge, the translator. These lines were subsequently circulated as Coleridge's, and as if on Coleridge's own authority. Thus arose many cases of apparent plagiarism. And, lastly, as his daughter most truly reports, if he took-he gave. Continually he fancied other men's thoughts his own; but such were the confusions of his memory that continually, and with even greater liberality, he ascribed his own thoughts to others.

CHAPTER III

THE LAKE POETS: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 1

IN 1807 it was, at the beginning of winter, that I first saw William Wordsworth. I have already mentioned 2 that I had introduced myself to his notice by letter as early as the spring of 1803. To this hour it has continued, I believe, a mystery to Wordsworth why it was that I suffered an interval of four and a half years to slip away before availing myself of the standing invitation with which I had been honoured to the poet's house. Very probably he accounted for this delay by supposing that the new-born liberty of an Oxford life, with its multiplied enjoyments, acting upon a boy just emancipated from the restraints of a school, and, in one hour, elevated into what we Oxonians so proudly and so exclusively denominate “a man,' ,"3 might have tempted me into pursuits alien from the pure intellectual passions which had so powerfully mastered my youthful heart some years before. Extinguished such a passion could not be; nor could he think so, if remembering the fervour with which I had expressed it, the sort of "nympholepsy" which had

1 Composed of articles in Tait's Magazine for January, February, and April 1839, as revised and recast by De Quincey, published, with some additions, for the second volume of the Collective Edinburgh Edition of his writings in 1854.-M.

2 Ante, p. 59.-M.

3 At the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where the town is viewed as a mere ministerial appendage to the numerous colleges-the civic Oxford, for instance, existing for the sake of the academic Oxford, and not vice versû--it has naturally happened that the students honour with the name of " a man him only who wears a cap and gown.