2i-2 Mr. Leslie Stephen [March 9, 



When they expound a vast scheme for a magnum opus, or one of the 

 various magna opera which at any time for thirty years were just 

 ready to issue from the press, as soon as a few pages were transcribed, 

 we perceive, after a moment, that they are not the fictions of the 

 becjszing-letter writer, but a kind of secretion, spontaneously and un- 

 consciously evolved to pacify the stings of remorse. There are 

 moments when he is querulous, but we must forgive them to the man 

 who had been hopelessly distanced in popular fame by his inferiors ; 

 whose attempts at public utterance had utterly collapsed; whose 

 ' Wallenstein ' still encumbered his publisher's shelves ; whose 

 poetical copyrights had been deliberately valued at nil ; and whose 

 name was only mentioned in the chief reviews as a superlative for 

 wilful eccentricity and absurdity. And then, at every turn, we come 

 uj^on frequent gleams, not only of subtle thought and imaginative 

 expression, but of shrewd common sense, and even at times of a 

 genuine humour, which seems to imjily that Lamb was partly serious 

 when he said that Coleridge had so much ' f-f-fun ' in him. After 

 readinc many of the letters, which still remain unpublished, I may 

 say that it is my own conviction that a life of Coleridge may still be 

 put together by some judicious writer, who should take Bos well rather 

 than the ' Acta Sanctorum ' fur his model, which would be as 

 interestinf^ as the great ' Confessions' ; which should by turns remind 

 us of Augustine, of Montaigne, and of Eousseau, and sometimes, too, 

 of the inimitable Pepys or Boswell himself ; which should show the 

 blending of the many elements of a most complex character and a 

 most versatile and opulent intellect ; which should often call forth 

 wonder, and smiles, and sighs, and indignation smothered by pity, in 

 one of those unique combinations which it would take a Shakespeare 

 to portray and act, and defy the skill of a psychologist to define. 



Only* a faint indication of this is to be found in Coleridge's 

 ' Apologia,' or, as he called it, his ' Biographia Litcraria,' of which 

 I must now say a word. It was written at his very nadir, and 

 published just after he had reached his asylum at Highgate. In this 

 sense it has a special biographical value, though its statements, 

 coloured by the illusions to which he was then specially subject, 

 have passed muster too easily with his biographers. Its aim is 

 chiefly to protest against the neglect of the public and the dispensers 

 of patronage. Such complaints generally remind me of a rifleman 

 complaining that the target persists in keeping out of the line of fire. 

 But if we must pardon something to a man so grievously tried for 

 endeavouring to shift a part of the responsibility upon other shoulders 

 than his own, we must be upon our guard against accepting censures 

 which involve injustice to others. Nothing but Coleridge's strange 

 illusions could be an apology, for example, for his complaints that 

 the Ministry had not rewarded a writer whose greatest successes had 

 been scornful denunciations of their great leader, Pitt. The book, of 

 course, is put together with a pitchfork. It is without form or pro- 

 portion, and is finally eked out with a batch of the old letters from 



