which, again, is reducible into, and is, in * I trust this touch of the polar logic will not frighten the general reader. The students of Mr. Coleridge's later works are familiar enough with it; and the scheme is as simple as it is beautiful and comprehensive.ED. April 28. 1832. DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM. — EPIC POEM. THE destruction of Jerusalem is the only subject now remaining for an epic poem; a subject which, like Milton's Fall of Man, should interest all Christendom, as the Homeric War of Troy interested all Greece. There would be difficulties, as there are in all subjects; and they must be mitigated and thrown into the shade, as Milton has done with the numerous difficulties in the Paradise Lost. But there would be a greater assemblage of grandeur and splendour than can now be found in any other theme. As for the old mythology, incredulus odi; and yet there must be a mythology, or a quasi-mythology, for an epic poem. Here there would be the completion of the prophecies— the termination of the first revealed national religion under the violent assault of Paganism, itself the immediate forerunner and condition of the spread of a revealed mundane religion ; and then you would have the character of the Roman and the Jew, and the awfulness, the completeness, the justice. I schemed it at twenty-five; but, alas! venturum expectat. April 29. 1832. VOX POPULI, VOX DEI.. - BLACK. I NEVER said that the vox populi was of course the vox Dei. It may be; but it may be, and with equal probability, a priori, vox Diaboli. That the voice of ten millions of men calling for the same thing is a spirit, I believe; but whether that be a spirit of Heaven or Hell, I can only know by trying the thing called for by the prescript of reason and God's will. Black is the negation of colour in its greatest energy. Without lustre, it indicates or represents vacuity, as, for instance, in the dark mouth of a cavern; add lustre, and it will represent the highest degree of solidity, as in a polished ebony box. In finite forms there is no real and absolute identity. God alone is identity. In the former, the prothesis is a bastard prothesis, a quasi identity only. April 30. 1832. ASGILL AND DEFOE. I KNOW no genuine Saxon English superior to Asgill's. I think his and Defoe's irony often finer than Swift's. May 1. 1832. HORNE TOOKE. - FOX AND PITT. HORNE TOOKE's advice to the Friends of the People was profound: - "If you wish to be powerful, pretend to be powerful." Fox and Pitt constantly played into each other's hands. Mr. Stewart, of the Courier, a very knowing person, soon found out the gross lies and impostures of that club as to its numbers, and told Fox so. Yet, instead of disclaiming them and exposing the pretence, as he ought to have done, Fox absolutely exaggerated their numbers and sinister intentions; and Pitt, who also knew the lie, took him at his word, and argued against him triumphantly on his own premisses. Fox's Gallicism, too, was a treasury of weapons to Pitt. He could never conceive |