Letters (Biog. Lit. ii. 160-1) of the playgoer who attends the theatre merely to gratify his curiosity; and Lectures (p. 237), ' Expectation in preference to surprise as a characteristic of Shakespeare's plays.'

32. in perusing French tragedies. Coleridge cherished throughout his life an unreasonable antipathy to the French classical drama, and indeed to everything French; yet his remarks in Satyrane's Letters show that he was fully alive to the distinctive excellence of this form of drama. Cp. Lectures, p. 213, where he characterizes the dialogue of French tragedies as 'the natural product of the hotbed of vanity, namely, the closet of an author who is actuated originally by a desire to excite surprise and wonderment at his own superiority to other men', &c. (1818).

PAGE 15 1. 3. I was wont boldly to affirm, &c. Cp. T. T., July 3, 1833: 'The collocation of words is so artificial in Shakespeare and Milton, that you may as well think of pushing a brick out of a wall with your forefinger as attempt to remove a word out of their finished passages;' and p. 340 (ed. 1858).

II. from Donne to Cowley. See Miscellanies, p. 135. 'Wonder-exciting vigour, intenseness, and peculiarity of thought, using at will the almost boundless stores of a capacious memory, and exercised on subjects where we have no right to expect it-this is the wit of Donne !' Cp. also Poet. Works, p. 471.

...

has

26. the Monody at Matlock, pub. 1791; the Vision of Hope, pub. 1796. Letter to Thelwall, Nov. 1796: Bowles written a poem lately without plan or meaning, but the component parts are divine. It is entitled "Hope: an allegorical sketch "'.

(Letters, p. 179.)

30. The poems of West, Gilbert West (1703-56). He is best known for his imitations of Spenser and translations of Pindar's Odes and of Euripides. In his introduction to the translation of the Odes is a condemnation of Cowley's previous translation, very similar in spirit to Coleridge's criticisms of the same work (Biog. Lit. ii. 66). Johnson found West's translation 'elegant and exact, but sometimes too paraphrastical'; and Horace Walpole remarked of it that 'the poetry is very stiff'. Gray, on the other hand, speaks of himself and his friends being 'all enraptured and enmarvailed' by West's imitation of Spenser, 'On the abuse of travelling.' (Gray's Works, ed. Gosse, ii. 90.)

PAGE 16 1. 2. Warton. Thomas Warton (1728-90). His sonnets, which were special favourites with Hazlitt, resemble those of Bowles in their tenderness and sincerity of feeling. One in particular, To the River Lodon, suggests comparison with Bowles's To the Itchin, and Coleridge's To the River Otter, which it may have helped to inspire. Coleridge scarcely seems to make due acknowledgement of his debt to Warton, just as he omits all reference to Akenside, whose influence he yet undoubtedly felt. (See › Athenæum, Feb. 16, 1905; Letters, p. 197.)

4. Percy's collection. Thomas Percy (1728-1811), Bishop of Dromore, poet, scholar, and antiquary. His Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (most of them genuine English poems, some retouched, and some modern imitations) were published in 1765, and became generally and immediately popular, going through four editions before Percy's death. Of the poets of the succeeding generation, Walter Scott came most directly under their influence. Wordsworth, writing in 1815 (Essay Supplementary to Preface), says: 'I do not think there is an able writer of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligations to the Reliques; I know that it is so with my friends; and for myself, I am happy in this occasion to make a public avowal of my own.'

F. N. Cowper's Task. The Task was first published in 1785; Thomson's Castle of Indolence in 1746. Coleridge was certainly familiar with Cowper in 1796 (cp. Letters, p. 197, where he speaks of the 'divine chit-chat of Cowper'), and probably earlier.

17. the lines which are now adopted. These lines, contributed by Coleridge to Book II of Southey's Joan of Arc (first edition 1796), were to have been enlarged into a separate poem and published in the 1797 edition of Coleridge's poems, under the title of Visions of the Maid of Orleans. The additions, however, were never finally completed, and the poem was left in the fragmentary state in which it finally appeared (in the Sibylline Leaves, 1817) as the Destiny of Nations: a Vision. The only addition of importance is the passage ll. 123-270 (Poet. Works, p. 584). Coleridge is surely strangely at fault in classing this poem, 'in respect of the general tissue of style,' with the shorter blank verse poems of these years. See his letter to Wade, June 16, 1814 (Poet. Works, p. 585), where he speaks of 'the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb down of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew in the single lines,' a criticism which includes his own verse as well as Southey's.

18. in the present collection, i. e. in Sibylline Leaves, published with the first edition of the Biog. Lit.

20. the Tragedy of Remorse. In its earliest form, as written and sent to Sheridan in 1797, the drama was entitled Osorio. Rejected by Sheridan, it lay for many years in MS.; in 1812 it was recast as Remorse, and produced in January 1813 at Drury Lane.

PAGE 17 1. 3. a copy of verses half ludicrous, half splenetic. The Address to a Young Jackass and its tethered Mother, first published in Morning Chronicle, Dec. 30, 1794. See Letters, p. 606. The motto Sermoni propriora was not affixed to this poem, but (in the edition of 1797) to the poem Reflections on leaving a place of retirement (see T. T., July 25, 1832: Charles Lamb translated my motto sermoni propriora by properer for a sermon!').

II. under the name of Nehemiah Higginbottom.

These

sonnets were first printed in the Monthly Magazine for Nov. 1797. In Cottle's Reminiscences (p. 160) appears a letter from Coleridge (which must have been written in the same month), where he says: 'I sent to the Monthly Magazine three mock sonnets in ridicule of my own Poems, and Charles Lloyd's, and Charles Lamb's, &c., &c., exposing that affectation of unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent, in commonplace epithets, flat lines forced into poetry by italics (signifying how well and mouthishly the author would read them), puny pathos, &c., &c. The instances were all taken from myself and Lloyd and Lamb. I signed them "Nehemiah Higginbottom". I think they may do good to our young Bards (see Poet. Works, p. 599). It is to be noticed that Coleridge here writes as if all the sonnets were example of the same faults. A comparison of the sonnets in their original form (Poet. Works, p. 110), and as they appear in the Biog. Lit., shows that Coleridge has added largely, in the first sonnet, to the number of italicized words and employed capital letters where they are not found in the originals. In Lloyd's early poems the examples of these faults are very few yet the style and sentiment of the first sonnet suggest that it was aimed at Lloyd. The second sonnet seems a satire, not so much on Lloyd's style as on Lloyd himself ("'Tis true on Lady Fortune's gentlest pad I amble on,' &c.). Of the affected simplicity in language of this sonnet, however, Lamb's sonnets are probably the prototype; whereas in the last sonnet, Coleridge seems to have been, as he declares, his own victim.

PAGE 18 F. N. written and inserted in the Morning Post. Coleridge is here inventing. The epigram in question appeared in the Morning Post, Jan. 24, 1800, with this heading: 'To MR PYE on his Carmen Seculare (a title which has by various persons who have heard it been thus translated, "A Poem an age long").' See Poet. Works, p. 444.

CHAPTER II

The first chapter of the Biographia Literaria is the only one in which we have anything like consecutive biography. In this second chapter Coleridge turns to a quite irrelevant topic, the irritability of men of genius, which leads him on to a denunciation of irresponsible criticism. His attacks on the false methods of criticism prevailing in his day, though occasionally they took too personal a direction, constitute one of the most interesting and significant features of the Biographia Literaria.

How long before this Coleridge had arrived at the conclusions embodied in this chapter with regard to genius is shown in a letter to Sotheby (Sept. 1802: Letters, p. 402): 'It is my faith that the genus irritabile is a phrase applicable only to bad poets. Men of great genius have indeed as an essential of their composition great sen

sibility, but they have likewise great confidence in their own powers; and fear must always precede anger in the human mind.' And A. P. 1805 (p. 160): Those only who feel no originality, no consciousness of having received their thoughts and opinions from direct inspiration, are anxious to be thought original. The certainty, the feeling that he is right, is enough for the man of genius.'

PAGE 19 1. 14. Genus irritabile vatum. Horace, Ep. 11. ii. 102.

27. Schwärmerei. 'Schwärmer' in the sense of fanatic is found as early as the sixteenth century (Alberus, Luther). Its commoner use in the present day is to signify 'passionate devotion to any cause or object, reasonable or unreasonable' (see Heyne, Deutsches Wörterbuch).

PAGE 20 1. 29. While the former rest content between thought and reality. The man of absolute genius, that is, chooses an imaginative and ideal medium of expression-the world of artistic forms; the man of commanding genius chooses a real medium -the actual world of existing things and human lives. And it is by choosing an irrelevant and inadequate medium that the latter become 'the shaping spirit of Ruin'. Cf. The Friend (1809-10), No. 8: Luther was possessed with his poetic images as with substances apart from himself: Luther did not write, he acted poems.'

PAGE 21 1. 19. Chaucer. T. T., March 15, 1834: 'I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age,' &c.

F. N. Mr. Pope was under the common error of his age. For Coleridge's exposure of this error (the substitution of a criterion extracted from the art-forms of a particular age for a criterion founded in the universal nature of man) compare his lectures on Shakespeare passim, and especially the introductory lectures of the courses of 1811-12 and 1818. But Coleridge hardly realized to what extent the admiration which the critics of the eighteenth century entertained for Shakespeare shook their confidence in their own theories. (See especially Johnson's 'Preface'.)

the first course of lectures, which differed, &c. Coleridge's first course was given early in 1808. The record preserved is too scanty to enable us to verify his description of their contents. Schlegel's lectures (which were delivered in the same year) seem first to have come into his hands when most of the lectures of the second course (1811-12) had been delivered. Coleridge again and again asserted his independence of Schlegel. See especially Lect. IX (1811-12), the statement prefixed to the notes on Hamlet in the lectures and notes of 1818, and the letter to a gentleman written in Feb. 1818 (Lectures, p. 127); also the letter to Sir G. Beaumont (1804: Memorials of Coleorton, i. 48), where reference is made to an analysis of Hamlet's character by Coleridge. There is no doubt, however, that in the lectures of 1818 he borrowed largely

from Schlegel. See the Appendix to Notes and Lectures on Shakespeare by S. T. Coleridge, edited by his daughter (1849).

PAGE 22 1. 1. grew immortal in his own despite. Pope's Epist. to Augustus (Imit. of Horace), 11. 69 foll.: Shakespeare For gain not glory winged his roving flight, And grew immortal in his own despite.

2. Speaking of one whom he had celebrated. Coleridge's opinion, to the end of his life, was that Shakespeare's sonnets were all addressed to a woman (T. T., May 14, 1833). The theory that the hero of sonnets i-cxxvi is William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, was put forward by J. Boaden in the Gentleman's Magazine for Oct. 1832. A month later H. W. Bright wrote to the Magazine claiming to have reached the same conclusion in 1819. (See the Gentleman's Magazine for Oct. and Nov. 1832.) The defects of this theory are exposed in his Life of Shakespeare (pp. 422-6) by Mr. Sidney Lee, who advances strong arguments for the claims of the Earl of Southampton. But neither with regard to the identity of Shakespeare's friend, nor of the rival alluded to in the next quotation, has any single theory as yet found general acceptance.

PAGE 23 1. 20. the unjust persecution of Burleigh, &c. Coleridge here represents the view commonly held in his day, and based upon the transparent attack on Burleigh in Mother Hubbard's Tale, that Burleigh was the chief obstacle in the path of Spenser's preferment. (Cf. also Landor, Imaginary Conversations, ‘Queen Elizabeth and Cecil'.) But there is no evidence whatever of unjust persecution. Spenser's rewards may seem to us ill-proportioned to his deserts, but they were far greater than have fallen to the lot of many poets. His appointment as secretary to Lord Grey was the result of his success with the Shepheard's Calendar, and thence sprang his estate in Ireland, no inconsiderable property. On the publication of the Faery Queene, i-iii, he obtained a pension of £50 a year (about £400 in our own money). His lack of further success was probably due (1) to his unfortunate choice of patrons-first Leicester, then Raleigh, then Essex-and to his loyalty to them when out of favour; and (2) to the outspoken criticism of public affairs in the Faery Queene. Coleridge is still less historical when he speaks of 'the severe calamities which overwhelmed Spenser's latter days' as 'diffusing over his compositions a melancholy grace'. For before the attack upon his house in 1598 he cannot be said to have suffered any severe calamity, and after that date he wrote no poetry at all.

28. Milton... reserved his anger, &c. For Coleridge's view of the causes and character of Milton's invective in his controversial writings, see the Apologetic Preface prefixed to Fire, Famine, and Slaughter in 1817 (Poet. Works, p. 527).