fore in the two following they seem to sink and become feeble: as, after the bursting of the storm, we behold the scattered clouds dispersed over the heavens.

66

Coleridge's digressions are not the worst parts of his lectures, or rather, he is always digressing. He quoted Mrs. Barbauld under the appellation of an amiable lady," who had asked how Richardson was inferior to Shakspeare? Richardson, he allowed, evinces an exquisite perception of minute feeling, but there is a want of harmony, a vulgarity in his sentiment; he is only interesting. Shakspeare on the contrary elevates and instructs. Instead of referring to our ordinary situations and common feelings he emancipates us from them, and when most remote from ordinary life is most interesting. I should observe, this depreciation of the interesting in poetry is one of the most characteristic features of the new German criticism. It is always opposed by Schiller to the beautiful, and is considered as a very subordinate merit indeed. Hence the severity of the attacks on Kotzebue, who certainly is more interesting to nineteen out of twenty than Shakspeare. C. took occasion, on mentioning Richardson to express his opinions of the immorality of his novels. The lower passions of our nature are kept through seven or eight volumes, in a hot-bed of interest. Fielding's is far less pernicious; "for the gusts of laughter drive away sensuality."

P. S. Coleridge called Voltaire " a petty scribbler." I oppose to this common-place, in which aversion is compounded with contempt, Goethe's profound and cutting remark: "It has been found that certain monarchs unite all the talents and powers of their race. It was thus with Louis XIV: and it is so with authors. In this sense it may be said that Voltaire is the greatest of all conceivable Frenchmen." I abhor Bonaparte as the gates of hell, yet I smile at the drivellers who cry out c'est un bon caporal. Damn 'em both if you will, but don't despise them.

PROSPECTUS OF LECTURES IN 1811. London Philosophical Society, Scots Corporation Hall, Crane Court, Fleet Street.

R. COLERIDGE will commence on Mon

MR

day, Nov. 18th, a Course of Lectures on Shakspeare and Milton, in Illustration of the principles of Poetry, and their Application as grounds of criticism to the most popular works of later English Poets, those of the Living included.

After an introductory Lecture on false criticism, (especially in Poetry,) and on its causes: two thirds of the remaining course will be assigned, 1st, to a philosophical analysis and explanation of

all the principal characters of our great Dramatist, as Othello, Falstaff, Richard III, Iago, Hamlet, &c. and 2nd, to a critical comparison of Shakspeare, in respect of Diction, Imagery, Management of the Passions, Judgment in the construction of his Dramas, in short of all that belongs to him as a Poet, and as a dramatic Poet, with his contemporaries, or immediate successors, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, &c. in the endeavour to determine what of Shakspeare's merits and defects are common to him with other writers of the same age, and what remain peculiar to his own Genius.

The course will extend to fifteen Lectures, which will be given on Monday and Thursday evenings successively. The Lectures to commence at halfpast seven o'clock.

337

NOTES.

(a) p. 1.

T now seems clear to me, that my Father here alludes

IT

to a course of lectures delivered in 1808, and I think it most probable that, from some momentary confusion of mind, he wrote "sixteen or seventeen" instead of "ten or eleven;" unless his writing was wrongly copied. It does not appear that he lectured on Shakspeare in 1801, or 1802; but in March, April, and May of 1808, and I doubt not in February likewise, he lectured on Poetry at the Royal Institution. Schlegel's lectures, the substance of which we now have in the Dramaturgische Vorlesungen, were read at Vienna that same Spring; but they were not published till 1809, and it is mentioned in an Observation prefixed to part of the work printed in 1811, that the portion respecting Shakspeare and the English Theatre was re-cast after the oral delivery.

(b) p. 3. My Father appears to confound the date of publication with that of delivery, when he affirms that Schlegel's Dramatic Lectures were not delivered till two years after his on the same subjects: but the fact is, as has been mentioned in the last note, that those parts of Schlegel's Dram. Vorlesung. which contain the coincidences with my Father, in his view of Shakspeare, were not orally delivered at all-certainly not in the Spring of 1808, but added when the discourses were prepared for the press, at which time the part about Shakspeare was almost altogether re-written.

Few auditors of Mr. Coleridge's earliest Shakspearian lectures probably now survive. None of those who attended his lectures before April in 1808 have I been able to discover or communicate with. But I have found this record in Mr. Payne Collier's edition of Shakspeare, vol. vii. p. 193. "Coleridge, after vindicating himself from the accusation that he had derived his ideas of Hamlet from Schlegel, (and