Solomon introduced the commercial spirit into his kingdom. I cannot think his idolatry could have been much more, in regard to himself, than a state protection or toleration of the foreign worship.

When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad. A madman is properly so defined.

Charles Lamb translated my motto Sermoni propriora by — properer for a sermon!

July 28. 1832.

FAITH AND BELIEF.

THE sublime and abstruse doctrines of Christian belief belong to the church; but the faith of the individual, centred in his heart, is or may be collateral to them.* Faith

* Mr. Coleridge used very frequently to insist upon the distinction between belief and faith. He once told me, with very great earnestness, that if he were that

is subjective. I throw myself in adoration before God; acknowledge myself his creature, simple, weak, lost; and pray for help and pardon through Jesus Christ: but when I rise from my knees, I discuss the doctrine of the Trinity as I would a problem in geometry; in the same temper of mind, I mean, not by the same process of reasoning, of

course.

moment convinced -a conviction, the possibility of which, indeed, he could not realize to himself— that the New Testament was a forgery from beginning to end-wide as the desolation in his moral feelings would be, he should not abate one jot of his faith in God's power and mercy through some manifestation of his being towards man, either in time past or future, or in the hidden depths where time and space are not. This was, I believe, no more than a vivid expression of what he always maintained, that no man had attained to a full faith who did not recognize in the Scriptures a correspondency to his own nature, or see that his own powers of reason, will, and understanding were preconfigured to the reception of the Christian doctrines and promises. - ED.

August 4. 1832.

DOBRIZHOFFER.*

I HARDLY know any thing more amusing than the honest German Jesuitry of Dobriz

*“He was a man of rarest qualities,

Who to this barbarous region had confined
A spirit with the learned and the wise
Worthy to take its place, and from mankind
Receive their homage, to the immortal mind
Paid in its just inheritance of fame.

But he to humbler thoughts his heart inclined:
From Gratz amid the Styrian hills he came,

And Dobrizhoffer was the good man's honour'd

name.

"It was his evil fortune to behold

The labours of his painful life destroy'd;
His flock which he had brought within the fold
Dispersed; the work of ages render'd void,

And all of good that Paraguay enjoy'd
By blind and suicidal power o'erthrown.
So he the years of his old age employ'd,
A faithful chronicler, in handing down
Names which he loved, and things well worthy to
be known.

hoffer. His chapter on the dialects is most valuable. He is surprised that there is no form for the infinitive, but that they say,

"And thus when exiled from the dear-loved scene,
In proud Vienna he beguiled the pain
Of sad remembrance: and the empress-queen,
That great Teresa, she did not disdain

In gracious mood sometimes to entertain
Discourse with him both pleasurable and sage;
And sure a willing ear she well might deign

To one whose tales may equally engage

The wondering mind of youth, the thoughtful heart of age.

"But of his native speech, because well-nigh
Disuse in him forgetfulness had wrought,
In Latin he composed his history;

A garrulous, but a lively tale, and fraught
With matter of delight and food for thought.
And if he could in Merlin's glass have seen

By whom his tomes to speak our tongue were taught,
The old man would have felt as pleased, I ween,
As when he won the ear of that great empress-queen.

“Little he deem'd, when with his Indian band He through the wilds set forth upon his way, A poet then unborn, and in a land

Which had proscribed his order, should one day

I wish, (go, or eat, or drink, &c.) interposing a letter by way of copula, — forgetting his own German and the English, which are, in truth, the same. My dear daughter's translation of this book* is, in my judgment, unsurpassed for pure mother English by any thing I have read for a long time.

GENIUS. DRYDEN AND POPE.

I HAVE generally found a Scotchman with a little literature very disagreeable. He is a

Take up from thence his moralizing lay, And, shape a song that, with no fiction drest, Should to his worth its grateful tribute pay, And sinking deep in many an English breast, Foster that faith divine that keeps the heart at rest." Southey's Tale of Paraguay, Canto III. st. 16.

* "An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay. From the Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer, eighteen Years a Missionary in that Country." - Vol. ii. P. 176.