every day, and giving no doubtful promise of the tyranny to come; and secondly, in particular, because the national Church was to him the ark of the covenant of his beloved country, and he saw the Whigs about to coalesce with those whose avowed principles lead them to lay the hand of spoliation upon it. Add to these two grounds, some relics of the indignation which the efforts of the Whigs to thwart the generous exertions of England in the great Spanish war had formerly roused within him; and all the constituents of any active feeling in Mr. Coleridge's mind upon matters of state are, I believe, fairly laid before the reader. The Reform question in itself gave him little concern, except as he foresaw the present attack on the Church to be the immediate consequence of the passing of the Bill; "for let the form of the House of Commons," said he, "be what it may, it will be, for better or for worse, pretty much what the country at large is; but once invade that truly national and essentially popular institution, the Church, and divert its funds to the relief or aid of individual charity or public taxation-how specious soever that pretext may be--and you will never thereafter recover the lost means of perpetual cultivation. Give back to the Church what the nation originally consecrated to its use, and it ought then to be charged with the education of the people; but half of the original revenue has been already taken by force from her, or lost to her through desuetude, legal decision, or public opinion; and are those whose very houses and parks are part and parcel of what the nation designed for the general purposes of the clergy, to be heard, when they argue for making the Church support, out of her diminished revenues, institutions, the intended means for maintaining which they themselves hold under the sanction of legal robbery ?" Upon this subject Mr. Coleridge did indeed feel very warmly, and was accustomed to express himself accordingly. It weighed upon his mind night and day; and he spoke upon it with an emotion which I never saw him betray upon any topic of common politics, however decided his opinion might

be.

In this, therefore, he was felix opportunitate mortis ;

non enim vidit. -; and the just and honest of all parties will heartily admit over his grave, that as his principles and opinions were untainted by any sordid interest, so he maintained them in the purest spirit of a reflective patriotism, without spleen, or bitterness, or breach of social union.*

* These volumes have had the rather singular fortune of being made the subject of three several reviews before publication. One of them requires notice.

The only materials for the Westminster Reviewer were the extracts in the Quarterly; and his single object being to abuse and degrade, he takes no notice of any even of these, except those which happen to be at variance with his principles in politics or political economy. To have reflected on the memory of Coleridge for not having been either a Benthamite or a Malthusian economist, might perhaps have been just and proper, and the censure certainly would have been borne by his friends in patience. The Westminster Review has, of course, just as good a right to find fault with those who differ from it in opinion as any other Review. But neither the Westminster nor any Review has a right to say that which is untrue, more especially when the misrepresentation is employed for the express purpose of injury and detraction. Among a great deal of coarse language unbecoming the character of the Review or its editor, there is the following passage:"The trampling on the labouring classes is the religion that is at the bottom of his heart, for the simple reason that he (Coleridge) is himself supported out of that last resource of the enemies of the people, the Pension List." And Mr. Coleridge is afterward called a "Tory pensioner," "a puffed up partisan," &c.

Now the only pension, from any public source or character whatever, received by Mr. Coleridge throughout his whole life, was the following:

In 1821 or 1822, George the Fourth founded the Royal Society of Literature, which was incorporated by charter in 1825. The King gave a thousand guineas a year out of his own private pocket to be distributed among ten literary men, to be called Royal Associates, and to be selected at the discretion of the Council. It is true that this was done under a Tory Government; but I believe the Government had no more to do with it than the Westminster Review. It was the mere act of George the Fourth's own princely temper. The gentlemen chosen to receive this bounty were the following:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge;
Rev. Edward Davies;

Rev. John Jamieson, D. D.;
Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus;

It would require a rare pen to do justice to the constitution of Coleridge's mind. It was too deep, subtle, and peculiar, to be fathomed by a morning visiter. Few persons knew much of it in any thing below the surface; scarcely three or four ever got to understand it in all its marvellous completeness. Mere personal familiarity with this extraordinary man did not put you in possession of him; his pursuits and aspirations, though in their mighty range presenting points of contact and sympathy for all, transcended in their ultimate reach the extremest limits of most men's imaginations. For the last thirty years of his life, at least, Coleridge was really and truly a philosopher of the antique cast. He had his esoteric views; and all his prose works, from the "Friend" to the "Church and State," were little more than feelers,

Thomas James Mathias;

James Millingen;

Sir William Ouseley;

William Roscoe;

Rev. Henry John Todd;
Sharon Turner.

I have been told that a majority of these persons-all the world knows that three or four at least of them-were Whigs of strong water; but probably no one ever before imagined that their political opinions had any thing to do with their being chosen Royal Associates. I have heard and believe that their only qualifications were literature and misfortune; and so the King wished. This annual donation of 105l. a year was received by Mr. Coleridge during the remainder of George the Fourth's life. In the first year of the present reign the payment was stopped without notice, in the middle of a current quarter; and was not recontinued during Coleridge's life. It is true that this resumption of the royal bounty took place under a Whig Government; but I believe the Whigs cannot justly claim any merit with the Westminster Review for having advised that act; on the contrary, to the best of my knowledge, Lord Grey, Lord Brougham, and some other members of the Whig ministry, disapproved and regretted it. But the money was private money, and they could of course have no control over it.

If the Westminster Reviewer is acquainted with any other public pension, Tory, Whig, or Radical, received by Mr. Coleridge, he has an opportunity every quarter of stating it. In the meantime, I must take the liberty of charging him with the utterance of a calumnious untruth.-H. N. C.

pioneers, disciplinants, for the last and complete exposition of them. Of the art of making books he knew little, and cared less; but had he been as much an adept in it as a modern novelist, he never could have succeeded in rendering popular or even tolerable, at first, his attempt to push Locke and Paley from their common throne in England. A little more working in the trenches might have brought him closer to the walls with less personal damage; but it is better for Christian philosophy as it is, though the assailant was sacrificed in the bold and artless attack. Mr. Coleridge's prose works had so very limited a sale, that although published in a technical sense, they could scarcely be said to have ever become publici juris. He did not think them such himself, with the exception, perhaps, of the " Aids to Reflection," and generally made a particular remark if he met any person who professed or showed that he had read the "Friend" or any of his other books. And I have no doubt that had he lived to complete his great work on Philosophy reconciled with Christian Religion," he would without scruple have used in that work any part or parts of his preliminary treatise, as their intrinsic fitness required. Hence, in every one of his prose writings there are repetitions, either literal or substantial, of passages to be found in some others of those writings; and there are several particular positions and reasonings, which he considered of vital importance, reiterated in the "Friend," the "Literary Life," the "Lay Sermons," the "Aids to Reflection," and the "Church and State." He was always deepening and widening the foundation, and cared not how often he used the same stone. In thinking passionately of the principle, he forgot the authorship and sowed beside many waters, if peradventure some chance seedling might take root and bear fruit to the glory of God and the spiritualization of

man.

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His mere reading was immense; and, the quality and direction of much of it well considered, almost unique in this age of the world. He had gone through most of the Fathers, and, I believe, all the Schoolmen of any eminence; while his familiarity with all the more common depart

ments of literature in every language is notorious. The early age at which some of these acquisitions were made, and his ardent self-abandonment in the strange pursuit, might, according to a common notion, have seemed adverse to increase and maturity of power in after life; yet it was not so; he lost, indeed, for ever, the chance of being a popular writer; but Lamb's inspired charity-boy of twelve years of age continued to his dying day, when sixty-two, the eloquent centre of all companies, and the standard of intellectual greatness to hundreds of affectionate disciples, far and near. Had Coleridge been master of his genius, and not, alas! mastered by it;—had he less romantically fought a single-handed fight against the whole prejudices of his age, nor so mercilessly racked his fine powers on the problem of a universal Christian philosophy-he might have easily won all that a reading public can give to a favourite, and have left a name— not greater or more enduring indeed-but-better known, and more prized, than now it is, among the wise, the gentle, and the good, throughout all ranks of society. Nevertheless, desultory as his labours, fragmentary as his productions, at present may seem to the cursory observer --my undoubting belief is, that in the end it will be found that Coleridge did, in his vocation, the day's work of a giant. He has been melted into the very heart of the rising literatures of England and America; and the principles he has taught are the master-light of the moral and intellectual being of men, who, if they shall fail to save, will assuredly illustrate and condemn, the age in which they live. As it is, they 'bide their time.

I might here properly end what will, perhaps, seem more than enough of preface for such a work as this; but I know not how I could reconcile with the duty which I owe to the memory of Coleridge a total silence on the charges which have been made against him by a distinguished writer in one of the monthly publications. I allude, of course, to the papers which have appeared since his death in several numbers of Tait's Magazine. To Mr. Dequincey (for he will excuse my dropping his other name) I am unknown; but many years ago I learned to