empty forms of boasted liberty! This dear-bought grace of cathedrals, this costly defence of despotism, this nurse of grovelling sentiment and cold-hearted lip-worship, will be gone; it will be gone, that sensibility to interest, that jealous tenacity of honors, which suspects in every argument a mortal wound ; which inspires oppression while it prompts servility; which stains indelibly whatever it touches; and under which supple dulness loses half its shame by wearing a mitre where reason would have placed a foolscap! The age of priesthood will be no more. Peace to its departing spirit! With delighted ears should I listen to some fierce orator from St. Omers' or from Bedlam, who would weep over its pageantries rent and faded, and pour forth eloquent nonsense on a funeral oration."*-Ib. p. 88.

Prolific as the age in which we live is in examples of political inconsistency-where shall we meet with one equally glaring with this?

Coleridge, it is true, has left us affecting evidence that towards the close of his life he felt considerable

*It was not without some hesitation that I decided on printing these extraordinary exemplifications of the effect of times and circumstances upon even the strongest minds. The friends of Coleridge will forgive my doing so, in consideration of the important lesson they contribute to the volume of human history, and of the striking illustration they afford of the distraction of the moral and political elements of society, at that fearful period when the hurricane of the French Revolution burst upon the world.

self-abasement, and looked forward to a blissful eternity through the sole merits of his Redeemer. Yet extreme sorrow for the aberrations of his early life is nowhere a prominent item in his inventory of himself; insomuch that with whatever candour, or even partiality, we contemplate him, it is hardly possible to escape from the observation that he regarded with too little compunction the egregious follies of his youth. And may we not make it a useful comment on the difficult chapter of Christian humility, that he who, with so much confidence and such extraordinary penetration, set himself up for an expositor of the things hard to be understood, of an inspired apostle, was himself at so great a distance from that favoured individual, in the grace so conspicuously displayed by him when contrasting his latter with his former course of life-the triumph of the persecuted Christian with the loathings of the persecuting Jew.

The vicious and bitter effusions of genius are relished, because there is in human nature, unsubdued by the Christian religion, a tendency to evil, which it is the part and the bounden duty of the genuine philosopher to correct, and not to abet. But if we are at issue on this account, with a man possessed of so many redeeming qualities as Coleridge; what shall we say of his poetical congeners Byron and Shelley, whose brilliant talents were in subservience to the most unbri

dled waywardness of genius.* With what avidity, and danger of irretrievable perdition, will not libertines, throughout all succeeding ages, under the shelter of inimitable poetry, imbibe the sentiments which they delight to pour forth from the poisoned fountains of their impassioned imaginations! How has the former, in particular, in the wanton luxuriancy of a depraved heart and reckless fancy, sported with the victims of his sensitive temperament! Yet we have abundant evidence that these are the sort of men who, of all others, feel most acutely the stings and arrows

* I ought, perhaps, to apologize for associating these men together, since, however superior Byron may be considered to Coleridge as a poet (and even this is a matter of taste), to compare Coleridge as a moral being either with Byron or Shelley, would be doing him the greatest injustice.

In 1829, there was an elegant edition of the poetical works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, published by Messrs. Galignani, at Paris, in one large Svo. volume, with the following "Notice to the Public :-"

"Messrs. Galignani beg leave to intimate, that the present edition of the works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, is infinitely more perfect than any of those published in London; as they have been favoured, from private sources, with many original productions of these esteemed writers, which are now for the first time given to the public; in addition to which, all their contributions have been carefully selected from the numerous miscellaneous publications in which they have from time to time appeared."

The biographical memoirs prefixed to the respective works of each are remarkably well written, and the facts recorded appear to have been drawn from tolerably authentic sources; but my chief object in this note is to exhibit no insignificant evidence of the opinion of the literary community abroad as to the congeniality of these poets. Alas poor Coleridge! The works of Byron have not only been honoured with an independent existence from the same celebrated press-but have made their appearance, complete or separate, to an extent which claims for them considerably more than the space of a single page in a very closely printed advertising list.

of criticism, and are most ready to run into the farthest regions of their besetting metaphysics for an antidote to the tinyest drop of critical or rival venom that may have passed upon their wounded pride.

"Nothing," said Burke, can be considered more hard than the heart of a thorough-bred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit, than to the frailty and passion of a man." What he here says of political is still more applicable to poetical metaphysicians such as Byron, whose malignity may indeed be likened to "the principle of Evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil."

A quotation from his preface to cantos six, seven, and eight of Don Juan will illustrate this.

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"In the course of these cantos," he observes, a stanza or two will be found relative to the late Marquis of Londonderry. Of the manner of that person's death little need be said, except that if a poor radical, such as Waddington or Watson, had cut his throat, he would have been buried in a cross-road, with the usual appurtenances of a stake and mallet. But the minister was an elegant lunatic a sentimental suicide-he merely cut the carotid artery (blessings on their learning), and lo! the pageant and the abbey! and the syllables of dolour yelled forth by the newspapers, and the harangue of the coroner in an eulogy over the bleeding body of the deceased (an

Antony worthy of such a Cæsar), and the nauseous and atrocious cant of a degraded crew of conspirators, against all that is sincere and, honourable. In his death he was necessarily one of two things by the law -a felon or a madman-and in either case no great subject for panegyric."

The above is very far from all the bitter invective he vents upon Lord Londonderry, but enough to show the colour of his own heart—a heart worthy of the sentiments with which the preface in question concludes.

"With regard to the objections," he proceeds to say, "which have been made, on another score, to the already published cantos of this poem, I shall content myself with two quotations from Voltaire :—

"La pudeur s'est enfuite des cœurs et s'es refugiée sur les levres."

"Plus les mœurs sont depravés, plus les expressions deviennent mesurées; on croit regagner en langage ce qu'on a perdu en vertu.”

"This is the real fact, as applicable to the degraded and hypocritical mass which leavens the present English generation, and is the only answer they deserve. The hackneyed and lavished title of blasphemer, which, with radical, liberal, jacobin, reformer, &c., are the changes which the hirelings are daily ringing in the ears of those who will listen-should be welcome to all who recollect on whom it was originally

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