Aug. 12. 1854.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



117 



LONDON, SATURDAY, AUGUST 12, 1854. 



coi<ebii>ge's ijictubes on shakspearb. 



A learned friend of mine, and a justly valued 

 contributor to " N. & Q.," the Rev. Dr. Mait- 

 lAND, has referred me to the following passage in 

 the Mishna {Capita Patrurn^ v. § 15.), in illustra- 

 tion of Coleridge's division of readers into four 

 classes, as mentioned in my last communication 

 regarding his lectures of 1812-13. The resem- 

 blance is striking : 



" Quadruplices conditiones (inveniunt) in his qui sedent 

 coram sapientibus (audiendi causa). Videlicet conditio 

 spongiaa, clepsydrae, sacci fecinacei, et cribri. Spongia 

 sugendo attrahit omnia. Clepsydra quod ex una parte 

 attrahit, ex altera rursum etfundit. Saccus fecinaceus 

 effundit vinum et coUigit feces. Cribrum emittit farinam 

 et colligit similam." 



I need hardly say that the passage is new to 

 me, being entirely out of my line of reading; but 

 how far it would have been new to Coleridge, I 

 cannot determine : my note of the opening of his 

 second lecture does not show that he referred to 

 any authority, but contains merely these intro- 

 ductory words, " Readers may be divided into 

 four classes." Therefore, if he acknowledged the 

 obligation, I have no trace of it ; and my opinion 

 is, not only that he did not, but that it was scarcely 

 necessary in a popular address (not a written 

 essay) to be very particular on such points. 

 However, it well merited observation, and in what 

 I sent I should have noticed it, had the informa- 

 tion been in my possession. If we are to blame 

 Coleridge for plagiarism, we are bound to praise 

 him for improvements on the original. I will 

 now proceed to some other points, inserting as 

 little of my own, and as much of Coleridge's, as 

 your limits will allow. 



I will commence with a passage somewhat akin 

 to what precedes, where the lecturer divides the 

 readers of Shakspeare into two classes, intro- 

 ducing them by some general remarks upon the 

 characters the poet employs in his dramas. It 

 occurs in the ninth lecture, where he says, — 



" Shakspeare's characters, from Othello and 

 Macbeth down to Dogberry and the Gravedigger, 

 may be termed ideal realities ; they are not the 

 things themselves, so much as abstracts of the 

 things which a great mind takes into itself, and 

 there naturalises them to its own conception. 

 Take Dogberry : are no important truths there 

 conveyed, no admirable lessons taught, and no 

 valuable allusions made to reigning follies, which 

 the poet saw must for ever reign ? Dogberry is 

 not the creature of the day, to disappear with the 

 day, but the representative and abstract of truth. 



which must ever be true, and of humour, which 

 must ever be humorous. 



"The readers of Shakspeare may be divided 

 into two classes: 1. Those who read his works 

 both with feeling and understanding ; 2. Those 

 who, without affecting to criticise, merely feel, 

 and may be said to be recipients of the poet's 

 power. 



" Between these two there can be no medium. 

 The ordinary reader, who does not bring his un- 

 derstanding to bear upon the subject, is often 

 sensible that some ideal trait of his own has been 

 caught — that some nerve has been touched ; and 

 he knows that it has been touched by the vibration 

 he experiences — a thrill, which tells us that we 

 have become better acquainted with ourselves. 



" In the plays of Shakspeare every man sees 

 himself without knowing that he does so ; as in 

 some of the phenomena of nature, in the mist of 

 the mountain, the traveller beholds his own figure, 

 but the glory round the head distinguishes it from 

 a mere vulgar copy ; in traversing the Brocken, 

 in the north of Germany, at sunrise, the brilliant 

 beams are shot askance, and you see before you 

 a being of gigantic proportions, and of such ele- 

 vated dignity, that you only recognise it to be 

 yourself by similarity of action. In the same way, 

 near Messina, natural forms, at determined dis- 

 tances, are represented on an invisible atmosphere, 

 not as they really exist, but dressed in all the 

 prismatic colours of the imagination. So in 

 Shakspeare, every form is true, everything has 

 reality for its foundation ; we can all recognise 

 the truth, but we see it decorated with such hues 

 of beauty, and magnified with such proportions of 

 grandeur, that, while we know the figure, we 

 know also how much it has been refined and 

 exalted." 



A great part of this ninth lecture was devoted 

 to the Tempest^ and passing over what is said of 

 Prospero, Miranda, and other characters, I shall 

 make a quotation from what Coleridge said re- 

 garding Ariel. 



" If (he observed) a doubt could ever be en- 

 tertained, whether Shakspeare was a great poet, 

 acting upon laws arising out of his own nature, 

 and not without law, as has sometimes been idly 

 asserted, that doubt must be removed by the cha- 

 racter of Ariel. The very first words he utters 

 introduce the spirit, not as an angel above men ; 

 not as a fiend, below men ; but while the dra- 

 matist gives him the faculties and advantages 

 of reason, he divests him of all mortal cha- 

 racter, not positively it is true, but negatively. 

 In air he lives, from air he derives his being ; in 

 air he acts, and all his colours and properties seem 

 to have been obtained from the rainbow and the 

 skies. There is nothing about Ariel that cannot 

 be conceived to exist either at sunrise or sunset ; 



