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himself. Whenever it is re-published, what it contains of Schelling's will be stated precisely. Would that an equal restitution could be made in all quarters of all that has been borrowed, with change of shape but little or no alteration of substance! In this case, not a few writers, whose originality is now unquestioned, would lose more weight from their coinage than my Father will do, by subtraction of that which he took without disguise from Schelling and others :-for how commonly do men imagine themselves producing and creating, when they are but metamorphosing!

"That Coleridge was tempted into this course by vanity," says the writer in Blackwood toward the end of his article; "by the paltry desire of applause, or by any direct intention to defraud others of their due, we do not believe; this never was believed and never will be believed." Truly I believe not; but no thanks to the accuser who labors to convict him of "wanting rectitude and truth;" who reads his apologies the wrong way, as witches say their prayers backward;—who hatches a grand project for Schelling in order to bring him in guilty of a design to steal it; who uses language respecting him which the merest vanity and dishonesty alone could deserve. This never has been or will be believed by the generous and intelligent, though men inclined to fear and distrust his opinions are strengthened in their prejudices by such imputations upon their maintainer, and many are prevented from acquiring a true knowledge of him and of them. What Schelling himself thought on the subject will be seen from the following extract of a letter of Mr. Stanley, author of the Life of Dr. Arnold, kindly communicated to me by Archdeacon Hare. "Schelling's remarks about Coleridge were too generally expressed, I fear, to be of any use in a vindication of him, except so far as proving his own friendly feeling toward him. But as far as I can reconstruct his sentence it was much as follows, being in answer to a question whether he had known Coleridge personally. Whether I have seen Coleridge or not, I can not tell; if he called upon me at Jena, it was before his name had become otherwise known to me, and amongst the number of young Englishmen, whom I then saw, I can not recall the persons of individuals. But I have read what he has written with great pleasure, and I took occasion in my lectures to vindicate him from the charge, which has been brought against him, of pla

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giarizing from me, and I said that it was I rather who owed much to him, and that, in the Essay on Prometheus, Coleridge in his remark, that "Mythology was not allegorical but tautegorical," had concentrated in one striking expression (in einem schlagenden Ausdruck) what l'had been laboring to represent with much toil and trouble. This is all that I can be sure of.' Such was this truly great Man's feeling about the wrongs that he had sustained from my Father. Had the writer in Blackwood pointed out his part in the Biographia Literaria without one word of insult to the author's memory, he would have proved his zeal for the German Philosopher, and for the interests of literature more clearly than now, because more purely, and deserved only feelings of respect and obligation from all who love and honor the name of Coleridge.

It will already have been seen, that no attempt is here made to justify my Father's literary omissions and inaccuracies, or to deny that they proceeded from any thing defective in his frame of mind; I would only maintain that this fault has not been fairly reported or becomingly commented upon. That a man who has been "more highly gifted than his fellows," is therefore to have less required of him in the way of " rectitude and truth,” that he is to be "held less amenable to the laws which ought to bind all human beings," is a proposition which no one sets up except for the sake of taking it down again, and some man of genius along with it; but there is another proposition, confounded by some perhaps with the aforesaid, which is true, and ought, in justice and charity, to be borne in mind; I mean that men of " peculiar intellectual conformation," who have peculiar powers of intellect, are very often peculiar in the rest of their constitution, to such a degree that points in their conduct, which, in persons of ordinary faculties and habits of mind, could only result from conscious wilful departure from the rule of right, may in their case have a different origin, and though capable, more or less, of being controlled by the will may not arise out of it. Marked gifts are often attended by marked deficiencies even in the intellect those best acquainted with my Father are well aware that there was in him a special intellectual flaw; Archdeacon Hare has said, that his memory was notoriously irretentive;" and it is true that, on a certain class of subjects, it was extraordinarily con Lectures on Shakspeare, IV. p. 351.

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fused and inaccurate matter of fact, as such, laid no hold upon his mind; of all he heard and saw, he readily caught and well retained the spirit, but the letter escaped him he seemed incapable of paying the due regard to it. That it is the duty of any man, who has such a peculiarity, to watch over it and endeavor to remedy it, is unquestionable; I would only suggest that this defect, which belonged not to the moral being of Coleridge but to the frame of his intellect, and was in close connection with that which constituted his peculiar intellectual strength, his power of abstracting and referring to universal principles, often rendered hin unconscious of incorrectness of statement, of which men in general scarcely could have been unconscious, and that to it, and not to any deeper cause, such neglects and transgressions of established rules as have been alleged against him, ought to be referred.*

* At all times his incorrectness of quotation and of reference and in the relation of particular circumstances was extreme; it seemed as if the door betwixt his memory and imagination was always open, and though the former was a large strong room, its contents were perpetually mingling with those of the adjoining chamber. I am sure that if I had not had the facts of my Father's life at large before me, from his letters and the relations of friends, I should not have believed such confusions as his possible in a man of sound mind. To give two out of numberless instances,—in a manuscript intended to be perused by his friend Mr. Green, he speaks of a composition by Mr. Green himself, as if he, S. T. Coleridge, were the author of it. A man, who thus forgets, will oftener ascribe the thoughts of another, when they have a great cognateness with, and a deep interest for, his own mind, to himself, than such cognate and interesting thoughts to another; but my Father's forgetfulness was not always in the way of appropriation, as this story, written to me by Mrs. Julius Hare, will show. She says, it was "told him (Archdeacon Hare) many years ago by the Rev. Robert Tennant, who was then his Curate, but afterwards went to Florence and died there. He had a great reverence and admiration for Mr. Coleridge, and used occasionally to call upon him. During one of these visits, Mr. C. spoke of a book (Mr. Hare thinks it was on Political Economy), in which there were some valuable remarks bearing upon the subject of their conversation. Mr. Tennant immediately purchased the book on this recommendation, but on reading it was surprised to find no such passages as Mr. C. had referred to. Some time after he saw the same book at the house of a friend, and mentioned the circumstance to him; upon which his friend directed him to the margin of the volume before him, and there he found the very remarks in Mr. C.'s own writing, which he had writen in as marginalia, and forgotten that they were his own and not the author's. Mr. Hare had always intended asking Mr. T. to give him this story in detail in writing, but unfor

A certain infidelity there was doubtless in the mirror of his mind, so strong was his tendency to overlook the barrier between imagination and actual fact. No man had a keener insight into character than he, or saw moral and mental distinctions more clearly; yet his judgments of particular persons were often rela

tunately delayed it too long till Mr. T.'s very sudden death prevented it ltogether; but he can vouch for its general correctness."

My Father trusted to his memory, knowing it to be powerful and not aware that it was inaccurate, in order to save his legs and his eyes. I sus pect that he quoted even longish passages in Greek without copying them, by the slight differences that occur. Another phænomenon of his memory was its curious way of interchanging properties; as when he takes from Hobbes and gives to Des Cartes, what is not to be found in the latter and is to be found in the former. (See chapter v.) This he did in the face of Sir James Mackintosh, one of the most clear-headed and accurately learned men of the day, after inciting him to examine his own positions by contradiction; so incautious and dreamy was he. It seems as if he was ever dreaming of blows and caring for them no more than for the blows of a dream. How much strength of memory may co-exist with weakness, the intellect remain ing quite sound in the main, may often be observed in old men. Just sc many a nervous man can walk twenty miles when he can not walk straight. into a room, or lift a cup to his lips without shaking it.

It was from this same mixture of carelessness and confusedness that my Father neglected all his life long to make regular literary acknowledgments. He did it when he happened to think of it, sometimes disproportionately, at other times not, but without the slightest intention, and in some cases without the possibility of even temporary concealment. He published The Fall of Robespierre as An Historic Drama by S. T. Coleridge, without joining Mr. Southey's name with his in the title-page, though my Uncle and all his many friends knew that he wrote the second and third act of it; and in a note to the Conciones he spoke of the first act only as his own. He did not call the Catullian Hendecasyllables a translation, though at any hour 1 might have seen the original in the copy of Matthisson's poems which he had given me, and in which he had written, after the presentation, "Die Kinderjahre, p. 15-29; der-Schmetterling, p. 50; and the Alpenreise, p. 75, will be especial favorites with you, I dare anticipate. 9th May, 1820, Highgate." His Hendecasyllables contain twelve syllabies, and as metre are, to my ear, a great improvement, on Matthisson's eleven-syllable lines. He acted in the same way with regard to two epigrams of Lessing's, one in the Poetic Works, ii. p. 78, called Names, and another on Rufa and her Lapdog, which has been printed somewhere,-(Die Namen and An Die Dorilis. Works of Lessing, vol. i. p. 19 and p. 46.) He had spoken of them as translations to Mr. Cottle. Mr. Green tells me that in the Confessions are a few phrases borrowed from Lessing, which will be pointed out particularly hereafter. My Father once talked of translating all that author's works An epigram printed in the Remains, Hoarse Mævius is also from the Cer

tively wrong; not that he ascribed to them qualities which they did not possess, or denied them those which they had, but that his feelings and imagination heightened and magnified that side or aspect of a mind, which was most present to him at the time when his estimate was drawn: the good and the beautiful, which man; he seems to have spoken of it as such to Mr. Cottle. The fourth and sixth stanzas of Separation, VII. p. 198. are adopted from Cotton's Chlorinda. The late Mr. Sidney Walker thought that my Father was indebted to Casimir's xiiith Ode for the general conception of his Lines in an swer to a melancholy Letter, one of the Juvenile Poems. The second stanza looks like an expansion of the commencement:

Non si sol semel occidit,

Non rubris iterum surget ab Indiis.

I see no likeness elsewhere, except of subject. Mr. S. W. also pointed out to me an image taken from the opening of Ossian's War of Inisthoma, in Lines on an Autumnal Evening, “ As when the Savage," &c. (VII. p. 42.) The Rose (VII. 43.) is, I believe from the French.

"And I the while, the sole unbusy thing

Nor honey make, nor build, nor pair, nor sing,"

VII. p. 271.

would probably have been written, even if Herbert had not written, as Mr Walker reminded me,

All things are busy; only I

Neither bring honey with the bees,

Nor flowers to make that, nor the husbandry

To water these.

(Employment, Poems.)

I think it will hardly be supposed that Mr. Coleridge meant to cheat Casimir, Cotton, Lessing and Matthisson of the articles he borrowed from them. The two former he celebrated in his writings, when they were not much in the world's eye: the two latter are popular and well-known authors, whose works are in every hand in Germany, and here in the hands of many. Mr. Dequincey says he relied "too much upon the slight knowledge of German literature in this country;"- -a blind remark! Who relies for concealment on a screen which he is doing his best to throw down? Had my Father calculated at all he would have done it better; but to calculate was not in his nature. If he ever deceived others it was when he was himself deceived first. Hazlitt said he "always carried in his pocket a list of the Illustrious Obscure." I think he made some writers, who were obscure when he first noticed them, cease to be so; and it will be found, that he did not generally borrow from the little known without declaring his obligations; that most of his adoptions were from writers too illustrious to be wronged by plagia. ism. It is true that Maasz, from whom he borrowed some things, never

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