monly represented. Mr. Dyce compares the passage with what Amintor says afterwards : "thy sister Accompanied with graces above her :” but in this line the metre allows us to emphasize her: to do so in the other injures the harmony. Again in Act iii. sc. 1. Mr. Dyce points the conclusion of Amintor's speech thus: "Stay, stay, my friend; I fear this sound will not become our loves; No more embrace me!"-p. 362. The other editors, except Theobald, point it thus: "No more; embrace me!” which appears to me from the context, to be right: for Amintor had not been embracing him before, but holding him off sadly and suspiciously, to gaze upon him, when the other would have flown into his arms. Because he had found Evadne, after all the promise of her luminous brow and stately presence, base, false, degraded; he feels as if the brother was to prove the same, spite of his 'noble looks.' "Now I will outbrave all, make all my servants (drunk) Mr. Dyce thinks that Septimius, to whom these words belong, would hardly go so far as to talk of making all men his servants, and therefore adds "drunk," which gives the line a totally different sense. But the assassin has been setting forth in lofty style the force of gold: "This God creates new tongues and new affections, And, though I had killed my father, give me gold, After this flight to say he would make all (men) his servants was but one waft higher than he had flown before. On the other hand, not to mention the metrical awkwardness, would it not be too sudden a descent to declare, that he would make all his servants drunk in order that in their tipsiness they might exalt his brave deed—a fellow too like Septimius with few servants if any? Mr. Dyce is of opinion that the second line, on the common reading of the first, is nonsense. "Why should his brave deed be writ in wine for virtuous?" "Writ in wine" is obviously opposed to "writ in water," which occurs in Henry VIII.* and- in Philaster.† May we not suppose that the villain winds up his vain speech by anticipating that in every jovial * Act iv. sc. 2. † Act v. sc. 9. See the original in Catull. Carm. lxx. banquet in the land his act shall be extolled amid flowing cups and become the theme of vinous eloquence? (ii) p. 220. The two letters by Mr. Robinson from which these extracts are taken, were preserved by Mrs. Clarkson to whom they were addressed and restored by her to the writer, who, at my entreaty, placed them in my hands. I must apologize to him for preferring my judgment to his in thinking that they will interest the affectionate readers of my father's writings, who are thankful for any portion of light, that is cast upon his views and intellectual movements. In the same note in which my friend, Mr. Robinson, expresses the opinion to which I have just adverted, he relates of my father:—“I can testify to his saying on one occasion, but which I do not know, 'If all the comments that have been written on Shakspeare by his editors could have been collected into a pile and set on fire, that by the blaze Schlegel might have written his lectures, the world would have been equally a gainer by the books destroyed and the book written.' A better proof could not be afforded that he did not mean to gain credit by pilfering thoughts out of a magazine, which he invited his hearers to explore." I regret that Mr. Robinson did not attend and report of all the discourses delivered by Mr. Coleridge in the Spring of 1808; but he first became acquainted with my father, and obtained admission to his lectures in May of that year. “I am very anxious to see Schlegel's book (the Dram. Vorlesungen) before the lectures commence," says my father in a letter to Mr. Robinson written at the back of a copy of the prospectus of his lectures in 1811, now printed in this volume. This shows that he first became acquainted with his fellow-lecturer's general views of Shakspeare three years after he had put forth his own in 1808; and after the time when he had prepared himself again to speak of his "judgment in the construction of his dramas, in short of all that belongs to him as a Poet, and as a dramatic Poet, &c." See the Prospectus. (kk) p. 223. If Dr. Bell was over-praised, over-preferred in his lifetime, he has surely been too much disparaged and undervalued since his departure. The plan of mutual tuition, which he brought into use, was no refined instrument for the production of moral or intellectual effects, but it was a machinery for the saving of adult labor, by means of which some portion of useful knowledge was imparted to numbers, who would otherwise have had none at all. He alone at one period represented the cause of national education in connection with the church: his system kept the place, and in some degree prepared the way, for all the better educational schemes which are at this time in actual operation or contemplated. No man, could have done the work which Dr. Bell performed without some remarkable endowments; and I must ever think that, though not of fine intellect or enlarged capacity, he yet possessed, on his one great theme, the nature of the human mind in childhood and the best way of bringing it happily into action, some tincture of sound philosophy. He constantly enforced and drew attention to the principle (not then so generally admitted as now), that Education is to be speeded forward by Encouragement, beckoning on from before, rather than by Fear urging from behind; because he saw that the former gives power, while it inspires desire, to advance; the latter with its envenomed goad, stupefies in attempting to stimulate. He was always insisting on the maxim that dulness, inattention and obstinacy in the taught, generally arises from want of sense, temper and honest diligence on the part of teachers. Dr. Bell was an enthusiast of philanthropy as truly, I believe, if not as nobly as Clarkson, Howard, or John Wesley, and had within him at least a certain quantity of precious fire to burn up somewhat of the ignorance, and consequent misery, of this world.* It is often observed that such enthusiasm may be neither the result nor the accompaniment of true Christian charity; that a man may bestow strength, time, and money, on the public, whilst, in his private sphere, he is selfish and exacting, or sensual and corrupt; that he may be raising a temple to the honor of his own inventions, while he thinks himself a model of self-devotedness. So far as these remarks are true (and perhaps it is not the truth, that any man who makes it the business of his life to promote the general good, and habitually spends and is spent in that cause, has been from the first wholly uninspired with a pure and genuine zeal), they apply to all the public agents of philanthropy. No faults or failings that can be imputed to Dr. Bell disprove his title to be enrolled in that band; nor ought he to be denied the credit due to those whose aims in life are of the higher sort. Mr. Carlyle insists, that "the professional self-conscious friends of humanity are the fatalest kind of persons to be met with in our day;" but this can be affirmed of those alone whose schemes are conceived unwisely or without any real regard to the good of the classes to be affected by them; surely it is not "benevolence prepense" or the conscious deliberate endeavor to be fellow-workers with God, that causes such failures. Of Dr. Bell it should be remembered that at Swanage he showed the same activity in promoting the welfare of others in obscure and unobserved ways, which he afterwards displayed in more noticeable enterprises;-that he established the straw-plait manufactory and the practice of vaccination in a corner of the land before he undertook to re-model all the schools of the kingdom on the Madras * "Brother Ringletub, the Missionary, inquired of Ram-Dass, a Hindoo man-god, who had set up for godhead lately, what he meant to do, then, with the sins of mankind? To which Ram-Dass at once answered, he had fire enough in him to burn up all the sins in the world. Surely it is the test of every divino man, that he have fire in him to burn up somewhat of the sins of the world, of tho miseries and errors of the world: why else is he there ?" Carlyle's Miscellanies, vol. iv. pp. 290-91. system.* As Master of Sherborne Hospital, he continued the old system in the mode of dealing with ecclesiastical revenues a little after the time when it began to strike against the consciences of many; his conscience was not sensitive on the side of church interests, and his public spirit was all flowing away in another channel. If his marriage was not happy, here too, among men of mark, he has had too many partners in misconduct or misfortune; persons who devote themselves to the public are apt to bestow too little thought or pains on their own private affairs; what wonder if the fruit prove blighted or bitter, when there has been such carelessness in choosing the seed and in attending to its germination? That in youth Dr. Bell must have possessed considerable personal attractions, and shown marks of worth, is evident from the warm and worthy friends he acquired by personal qualities alone. His conduct during the earlier part of his career was distinguished by industry and earnestness; nor was it wanting in private liberality and family affection. During his employment at Madras he gathered golden opinions, and, had he died at the end of it, would have been remembered, while memory of him remained, as a zealous and disinterested, as well as an able and ingenious man. Throughout the latter half of a long life his character seems to have deteriorated; so it will ever be with men who, by a successful course of exertion, acquire power and importance, their intellectual not being on a par with their other personal endowments,men in whom a vigorous body supports a resolute will, and gives effect to the suggestions of a quick and lively though not enlarged mind, while clearness and depth of insight, freedom and foresight of thought are not among the gifts assigned them at their birth. Such a piece of mental mechanism, wherein the practical faculty so predominates over the reflective-energy and perseverance in action so exceed the power of duly determining action-is sure to get wrong in the working, and lose its internal balance more and more. Success, long continued, corrupts the heart; opposition, which often comes in full tide at last when little experienced at first, exacerbates the temper; and meantime the ventilation of abstract or imaginative thought, refreshing and renovating, like a breeze that has swept the plain of ocean, and comes charged with the salubrious particles which it bears within its bosom, is wanting to the engrossed and over-busy mortal, who, in the last stages of his life's journey, while he draws nearer to the other world, is ever receding further and further from it in mental preparedness, and goes on perpetually increasing his burden as he "crawls toward death." All this which I have said would be brought before the reader's mind more effectually, were he to peruse the present Mr. Southey's Life of Dr. Bell,—a faithful and feeling record, which, must ever have a place, I think, in the great store-house of See the Life of Dr. Bell, vol. ii. chap. xix. X VOL IV. British Biography. Two paragraphs of the Statesman's Manual are devoted by my Father to Bell and Lancaster :* in one of them he says: “But take even Dr. Bell's original and unsophisticated plan, which I myself regard as an especial gift of Providence to the human race; and suppose this incomparable machine, this vast moral steam-engine, to have been adopted and in free motion throughout the Empire; it would yet appear to me a most dangerous delusion to rely on it as if this of itself formed an efficient national education." NOTES TO LECTURE XIII. ON POESY OR ART. (1) p. 328. It has been stated elsewhere (Biographia Literaria Introd. p. 33), that for many positions of this Lecture the author was indebted to Schelling's admirable Oration-Ueber das Verhältniss der Bildenden Künste zu der Natur: Philosophische Schriften, pp. 341–96. Here, as well as in his Lecture on the Greek Drama, Mr. Coleridge seems to have borrowed from memory. A few short sentences are taken almost verbatim; but for the most part the thoughts of Schelling are mixed up with those of the borrower, and I think that, on a careful comparison of the Lecture with the oration, any fair reader will admit that, if it be Schelling's--and that the leading thought of the whole is his, I freely own,—it is Coleridge's also. But this question every student will be able to decide for himself even without going beyond the present volume. N.B. The title of Schelling's Discourse has been commonly translated, On the Relation between the Plastic Arts and Nature; yet the term Plastic refers to Sculpture exclusively, and is never applied either by Schelling or Schlegel to Painting: and Schelling's discourse treats der Bildenden Künste, of the figuring or imaging Arts, in their relationship to Nature. Bild is a picture, a print, as well as a graven image. The verb πλáσow is “strictly used of the artist who works in soft substances, such as earth, clay, wax." Liddell and Scott. Still die Plastik is generally applied to carving or sculpture; but never, I believe, to the mere expression of shape and visual appearance by painting, drawing, or printing, * Works. I. p. 460. † He says of Raphael, p. 379. "The bloom of the most cultivated life, the perfume of fancy, together with the aroma of the spirit breathe forth unitedly from his works ;" and his criticism on Correggio, pp. 378-9, is remarkably genial and beautiful, |