Literaria, or biographical sketches of his life and opinions; and other works, poetical and political. In 1818, he commenced The Friend, a series of essays, that extended to three volumes; and in the tenth and eleventh numbers of which, he says, he has left a record of his principles. In 1825, he published Aids to Reflection, in the formation of a manly character, &c.; and, in 1830, his Treatise on the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the idea of each: with aids towards a right judgment of the late catholic bill. Mr. Coleridge is at present residing at Highgate, where he occasionally receives his literary friends, and passes his time in reading, and the amusements of his garden. He is said to excel all his cotemporaries in powers of argument; and, when once fairly launched on any favourite topic, to be possessed of the faculty of rivetting, for hours, the attention of his audience, by the charm of his eloquence alone.

In addition to the works already mentioned, he wrote, during the peace of Amiens, essays for The Morning Post and Courier. Mr. Fox is said to have pointed his allusion to these contributions, when he declared, that the war, which followed the above treaty, was a war raised by The Morning Post. Whilst Mr. Coleridge was staying at Rome, Buonaparte is said to have sent an order for his arrest, from which he was rescued, partly by the forbearance of the late pope, Pius the Seventh. Our poet, however, has never displayed any evidence of his having been guided by any fixed political creed; and he altogether disowns, as was hinted by The Morning Chronicle, that he ever bettered his fortune by his labours as a political writer. Indeed, it is as a poet only that he will be known by posterity; however zealously his friends may la

bour to procure a reputation for him as the founder of a sect in morals or

philosophy. The chief fault of Coleridge's poetry lies in the style, which has been justly objected to on account of its obscurity, general turgidness of diction, and a profusion of new-coined double epithets. With regard to its ob scurity, he says, in the preface to a late edition of his poems, that where he appears unintelligible, the deficiency is in the reader." This is nothing more or less than to suppose his readers endowed with the powers of divination; for we defy any one who is not in the confidence of the author upon the subject, to solve the riddle which is appended, a conclusion, to Christabel. might as well attribute deficiency of capacity to a beholder of his countenance, who should fail, in its workings, to discover the exact emotions of his mind; for Mr. Coleridge has afforded no clearer clue to the generality of his poetical arcana. This is particularly manifest in his singularly wild and striking poem of The Ancient Mariner, on which he is said to have written the following epigram, addressed to himself:

as

Your poem must eternal be, Dear sir! it cannot fail; For, 'tis incomprehensible,

And without head or tail.

He

Mr. Coleridge is unquestionably at the head of the Lake school of poetry, and excels all his fraternity of that class in feeling, fancy, and sublimity. Some of his minor poems will bear comparison with those of the bards of this or any other age or country; and his verses on Love appear to us the most touching, delicate, and beautiful delineation of that passion, that ever was penned. Mr. Coleridge, who is much esteemed in private life, is, we believe, a widower, but has two sons staviving, who have graduated at the universities,

this portion of his youth, and the scenery by which he was surrounded, are strikingly described in the introduction to the third canto of Marmion. He received the rudiments of education at an academy kept by a Mr. Leechman, in Edinburgh, whence he was removed to the high school, then under the superintendence of Dr. Adam; but, during the four years he remained there, he does not appear to have displayed any remarkable abilities. There is his own authority for saying, observes the writer of his life in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, that even in the exercise of metrical translation, he fell far short of some of his companions, although others preserve a somewhat different recollection, and state, that this was a department in which he always manifested a superiority. His passion for tale-telling probably was no small hindrance to his advancement at school, as he himself confesses in his general introduction to a new edition of his novels. "I believe," he says, "some of my old schoolfellows can still bear witness that I had a distinguished character for that talent, at a time when the applause of my companions was my recompense for the disgraces and punishments, which the future romance writer incurred, for being idle himself and keeping others idle, during hours that should have been employed on our tisks. The chief enjoyment of my holidays was to escape with a chosen friend, who had the same taste with myself, and alternately to recite to each other such wild adventures as we were able to devise. We told, each in turn, interminable tales of knight errantry, and battles and enchantments, which were continued from one day to another as opportunity offered, without our ever thinking of bringing them to a conclusion. As we observed a strict secrecy on the subject of this intercourse, it acquired all the character of a concealed pleasure; and we used to select, for the scenes of our indulgence, long walks through the solitary and romantic environs of Arthur's Seat, Salisbury Craigs, Braid Hills, and similar places in the vicinity of Edinburgh; and the recollection of those holidays still forms an oasis in the pilgrimage which I have to look back upon."

On leaving school, in 1783, he ap

pears to have had a strong desire for a military life; but a lameness in his right leg prevented him from following his inclination. On being told that this defect was an insuperable bar to his wishes, he, in an agony of mortified feeling, went and suspended himself by the wrists from his bed-room window, and on being discovered in this situation, said he wished to prove, that however unfitted by his limbs for the profession of a soldier, he was at least strong enough in his arms. In the October of the year last-mentioned, he became a student of the University of Edinburgh, and left it in a year or two, without having added much to his stock of classical knowledge. At the age of fifteen, the breaking of a blood-vessel brought on an illness, which, to use his own words, "threw him back on the kingdom of fiction, as if by a species of fatality." Being for some time forbidden to speak or move, he did nothing but read, from morning to night; and by a perusal of old romances, old plays, and epic poetry, was unconsciously amassing materials for his future writings. His studies, he tells us, resembled those of Waverley in a similar situation; "the passages concerning whose reading," he adds, "were imitated from recollections of my own." In his sixteenth year, he commenced studying for the bar, and became an apprentice to his father, and a pupil of Professor Dick, the professor of civil law in the university. On the 10th of July, 1792, he passed advocate, and began life in an elegant house in the most fashionable part of the town; but being already placed beyond the reach of want by the affluence of his father, and his intellect being by no means of the forensic cast, he, with the exception of one occasion in defence of a prisoner, gave no indication of professional capacities, nor exerted himself to display them.

Taking advantage, therefore, of the occurrence of circumstances favourable to the developement of his poetical genius, he, after a few years' practice, gave up the bar, and devoted himself to literary pursuits. This was primarily in consequence of an introduction to Mr. Lewis, author of The Monk, whose imitations of the German ballad poets had acquired for their author a degree

tion to a late edition of which, he tells us, that a lady of taste having strongly advised him not to risk a fail in the estimation of the public by the publication of this poem, he replied, If I fail, it is a sign that I ought never to have succeeded, and I will write prose for life." Its success, he adds, was so extraordinary, as to induce him, for the moment, to conclude that he had at last fixed a nail in the proverbially inconstant wheel of fortune, whose stability in behalf of an individual who had so boldly courted her favours for three successive times, had not, as yet, been shaken. In 1811, appeared his Don Roderick; and, in 1813, Rokeby, which met with a less favourable reception than a burlesque upon it under the title of Jokeby. It was succeeded, in 1814, by The Lord of the Isles; but it made so little impression upon the public, that, in allusion to this and the two preceding productions, a friend observed to him, "his works only found a tolerable sale in consequence of having his name upon the title-page." To put this assertion to the proof, he published his next poenis anonymously, entitled The Bridal of Triermain, and Harold the Dauntless, which are certainly the least popular of his poetical compositions.

He now resolved to attempt prose writing; and, in the year last-mentioned, he published Waverley, about a third of which he had written eleven years previously, but had thrown it aside in consequence of the unfavourable opinion of a critical friend. It seems that he took more than ordinary pains to conceal that he was the author of this work, even after it had been fully established in the estimation of the public. The writer of his life, before quoted from, assigns as one reason for this, Sir Walter's reluctance to be considered as one writing for fortune, and having previously expressed an opinion, that our author's desire of becoming a land proprietor was a passion which far exceeded bis appetite for literary fame, observes, "It was now the principal spring of his actions, to add as much as possible to the little realm of Abbotsford, in order that be might take his place-not among the great literary names which posterity is to revere, but among the county gentle

men of Roxburgshire." With a view, according to the same authority, of procuring the means of extending his estate, Sir Walter composed that delightful series of fiction, which, at the termination of the Georgian era, amounted to no less than seventy volumes. From 1815 to 1819, appeared, successively, Guy Mannering; the Antiquary; and the first series of The Tales of My Landlord, containing The Black Dwarf and Old Mortality; Rob Roy; and the second series of The Tales of My Landlord, containing The Heart of Mid Lothian; and the third series of Tales of My Landlord, containing The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose. In all of these, with the exception of Old Mortality, he had contrived to keep clear of national prejudices; but, in the work just alluded to, his partial portraiture of the cavaliers offended his countrymen, and gave rise to a pamphlet from Dr. M'Crie in The Christian Instructor, which Sir Walter answered in a subsequent series of The Tales of My Landlord. In 1820, in which year he was made a baronet, were published Ivanhoe, one of the most popular, and The Monastery and The Abbot, the least meritorious, of the Waverley novels. In 1821, appeared Kenilworth; which was succeeded, successively, by The Pirate; The Fortunes of Nigel ; Peveril of the Peak; Quentin Durward; Tales of the Crusaders; Woodstock; Chronicles of the Canongate, first and second series; and Anne of Geierstein, which was published in 1829. In the mean time, some of the most important transactions of his life had occurred; the bankruptcy of Messrs. Constable and Co., in January, 1826, had involved him in obligations to the amount of £100,000; and, in the following May, he had the misfortune to lose his wife. He bore the former event with great magnanimity. "It is very hard," was his observation to a friend on the occasion, "thus to lose all the labours of a lifetime, and be made a poor man at last, when I ought to have been otherwise. But if God grant me health and strength for a few years longer, I have no doubt that I shall redeem it all." He now felt himself called upon to redouble his literary exertions; and, after having sold his house and furniture in

Edinburgh, he published, in 1827, his Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, in nine volumes octavo; the profits of which, amounting to £12,000, with other earnings and resources, enabled him to pay his creditors a dividend of about six shillings in the pound.

It was in this year, at the first annual dinner of the Edinburgh Theatrical Fund Association, that Sir Walter avowed himself to be the author of The Waverley Novels, and threw off the mantle of disguise, which, as he afterwards remarked to a friend, was getting somewhat tattered. "He did not think," he said, "that in coming to the assembly rooms that day, he would have the task of acknowledging, before three hundred gentlemen, a secret, which, considering that it was communicated to more than twenty people, had been remarkably well kept. He was now before the bar of his country, and might be understood to be on his trial before Lord Meadowbank as an offender, yet he was sure that every impartial jury would bring in a verdict of not proven. He did not now think it necessary to enter into the reasons of his long silence: perhaps caprice had a great share in it. He had only to say, however, that the merits of these works, if they had any, and their faults, were entirely imputable to himself."

In November, 1828, he published the first, and in 1829, the second part of a juvenile history of Scotland, entitled The Tales of a Grandfather; and in the same year appeared a new edition of the Waverley Novels, the copyright of which was purchased for £8,400. This was illustrated by notes and prefaces, and, in some parts, amended by the author, whose creditors or himself were to have half of the profits, in consideration of Sir Walter's literary aid. In addition to those already mentioned, our author wrote several minor and fugitive works, particularly the lives of Swift and Dryden, with an edition of their works; Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk; a poem called The Field of Waterloo; An Account of the Regalia of Scotland; Halidon Hill, a dramatic poem; An Introductory Essay to Border Antiquities; and the articles, Chivalry, Romance, and The Drama, for the Supplement of the sixth edition of The Encyclopædia Britannica. He had

also written some political papers on the Tory side, particularly in a weekly journal called The Beacon; but those for which he is most celebrated are the letters signed Malachi Malagrowther, in which he opposed the parliamentary regulations, then in progress, for reducing the monetary system of Scotland to an equality with that of England. He was particularly careful about the proof of these letters; which being remarked to him by Mr. Ballantyne, the printer, "Yes," said he, in a tone that electrified even this familiar friend, "my former works were for myself, but this is for my country."

Sir Walter Scott, is upwards of six feet in height; bulky, but not corpulent in the upper part of his body; and slightly lame in his right limb, which requires to be supported by a staff. The most remarkable part of his person is said to be his head, which is tall and cylindrical, with a small chin, large bushy eyebrows, thin lips, and little grey eyes, possessing, says his biographer, "the extraordinary property of shutting as much below as from above, when their possessor is excited by a ludicrous idea." When not animated by conversation, his countenance is sometimes heavy, if not vacant; but the cheerfulness of his mind renders, in general, his aspect more humorous than solemn.

His great intellectual characteristics are, his powers of memory and imagination, his faculty of combining and embellishing past events, and his skill in portraying natural character. As a poet, he is neither profound nor sublime; he deals, as in his prose, with the beings of the past; but, having little or no scope for the delineation of familiar character, his verses, though replete with good feeling and pleasing imagery, are deficient in interest to the general reader, and fail to awaken his sympathies, though they may gratify his taste.

It is in the character of a novelist that his name will go down to posterity, as the inventor of a new class of fictitious writing, in which respect he is only equalled by Shakspeare, Milton, Byron, Godwin, Banim, and Shelley. His Life of Napoleon is a decided failure; we in vain look either for the accuracy of the historian or the profundity of the philosopher; and imagination takes up much