against a thousand times more than sinning, he himself suffered an almost life-long punishment for his errors, whilst the world at large has the unwithering fruits of his labours, his genius, and his sacrifice. Necesse est tanquam immaturam mortem ejus defleam; si tamen fas est aut flere, aut omnino mortem vocare, qua tanti viri mortalitas magis finita quam vita est. Vivit enim, vivetque semper, atque etiam latius in memoria hominum et sermone versabitur, postquam ab oculis recessit.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the youngest child of the Reverend John Coleridge, Vicar of the Parish of Ottery St. Mary, in the county of Devon, and master of Henry the Eighth's Free Grammar School in that town. His mother's maiden name was Ann Bowdon. He was born at Ottery on the 21st of October, 1772, "about eleven o'clock in the forenoon," as his father the Vicar has, with rather a curious particularity, entered it in the register.

He died on the 25th of July, 1834, in Mr. Gillman's house, in the Grove, Highgate, and is buried in the old churchyard,' by the road side.

ΑΙ ΔΕ ΤΕΑΙ ΖΩΟΥΣΙΝ ΑΗΔΟΝΕΣ

H. N. C.

1 He lies, in fact, now, in a crypt under the school chapel, by the side of his wife, of his daughter, of her husband, who writes this Preface, and their son. See Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge: v. i. p. 48.

DECEMBER 29, 1822.

Character of Othello.—Schiller's “Robbers.”—Shakspere.—Scotch Novels. -Lord Byron.-John Kemble.—Mathews.-Coleridge Interrupted.

OT

1

THELLO must not be conceived as a negro, but a high and chivalrous Moorish chief. Shakspere learned the spirit of the character from the Spanish poetry, which was prevalent in England in his time. Jealousy does not strike me as the point in his passion; I take it to be rather an agony that the creature, whom he had believed angelic, with whom he had garnered up his heart, and whom he could not help still loving, should be proved impure and worthless. It was a struggle not to love her. It was a moral indignation and regret that virtue should so fall:“But yet the pity of it, Iago!-O Iago! the pity of it, Iago!" In addition to this, his honour was concerned: Iago would not have succeeded but by hinting that his honour was compromised. There is no ferocity in Othello; his mind is majestic and composed. He deliberately determines to die; and speaks his last speech with a view of showing his attachment to the Venetian State, though it had superseded him.

Schiller has the material Sublime ;3 to produce an effect, he sets you a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames, or locks up a father in 1 When, as we have occasionally done, we supply a heading, it is marked with an asterisk.

2 Caballeros Granadinos,

Aunque Moros, hijos d'algo.-H. N. C.

3 This expression-" material Sublime"-like a hundred others which have slipped into general use, came originally from Mr. Coleridge, and was by him, in the first instance, applied to Schiller's "Robbers."—See Act iv. sc. 5.-H. N. C.

an old tower.

But Shakspere drops a handkerchief, and

the same or greater effects follow.

Lear is the most tremendous effort of Shakspere as a poet; Hamlet as a philosopher or meditater; and Othello is the union of the two. There is something gigantic and unformed in the former two; but in the latter, everything assumes its due place and proportion, and the whole mature powers of his mind are displayed in admirable equilibrium.

I think “Old Mortality" and "Guy Mannering" the best of the Scotch novels.

It seems, to my ear, that there is a sad want of harmony in Lord Byron's verses. Is it not unnatural to be always connecting very great intellectual power with utter depravity? Does such a combination often really exist in rerum naturâ ?

I always had a great liking-I may say, a sort of nondescript reverence-for John Kemble. What a quaint creature he was! I remember a party, in which he was discoursing in his measured manner after dinner, when the servant announced his carriage. He nodded, and went on. The announcement took place twice afterwards, Kemble each time nodding his head a little more impatiently, but still going on. At last, and for the fourth time, the servant entered, and said,—" Mrs. Kemble says, sir, she has the rheumatise, and cannot stay." "Add ism!" dropped John, in a parenthesis, and proceeded quietly in his harangue.

Kemble would correct any body, at any time, and in any place. Dear Charles Mathews-a true genius in his line, in my judgment-told me he was once performing privately before the King. The King was much pleased with the imitation of Kemble, and said, "I liked Kemble very much. He was one of my earliest friends. I remember once he was talking, and found himself out of snuff. offered him my box. He declined taking any-he, a poor

I

actor, could not put his fingers into a royal box.' I said, 'Take some, pray; you will obleege me.' Upon which Kemble replied, 'It would become your royal mouth better to say, oblige me;' and took a pinch."

It is not easy to put me out of countenance, or interrupt the feeling of the time by mere external noise or circumstance; yet once I was thoroughly done up, as you would say. I was reciting, at a particular house, the "Remorse; and was in the midst of Alhadra's description' of the death of her husband, when a scrubby boy, with a shining face set in dirt, burst open the door and cried out, Please, ma'am, master says, Will you ha', or will you not ha', the pin-round ?"

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JANUARY 1, 1823.

Parliamentary Privilege.-Permanency and Progression of Nations— Kant's Races of Mankind.

ORIVILEGE is a substitution for Law, where, from the

PRIVI

nature of the circumstances, a law cannot act without clashing with greater and more general principles. The House of Commons must, of course, have the power of taking cognizance of offences against its own rights. Sir Francis Burdett might have been properly sent to the Tower for the speech he made in the House; 2 but when

1 H. N. C. quotes some fifty lines of the "Remorse" here. We omit the quotation, as uncalled-for.

2 March 12, 1810. Sir Francis Burdett made a motion in the House of Commons for the discharge of Mr. Gale Jones, who had been committed to Newgate by resolution of the House on the 21st of February preceding. Sir Francis afterwards published, in "Cobbett's Political Register," of the 24th of the same month of March, a " Letter to his Constituents," denying the power of the House of Commons to imprison the people of England, and he accompanied the letter with an argument in support of his position. On the 27th of March a complaint of breach of privilege, founded on this publication, was made in the House by Mr. (now Sir Thomas) Lethbridge, and after several long debates, a motion that Sir Francis Burdett should be committed to the Tower was made on the 5th of April, 1810, by Sir Robert Salisbury, and carried by a majority of 38.-H. N. C.

с

afterwards he published it in Cobbett, and they took cognizance of it as a breach of privilege, they violated the plain distinction between privilege and law. As a speech in the House, the House could alone animadvert upon it, consistently with the effective preservation of its most necessary prerogative of freedom of debate; but when that speech became a book, then the law was to look to it; and there being a law of libel, commensurate with every possible object of attack in the State, privilege, which acts, or ought to act, only as a substitute for other laws, could have nothing to do with it. I have heard that one distinguished individual said, “That he, for one, would not shrink from affirming, that if the House of Commons chose to burn one of their own members in Palace Yard, it had an inherent power and right by the constitution to do so." This was said, if at all, by a moderate-minded man; to what atrocious tyranny some persons may advance in theory, under shadow of this word privilege.

and may show

There are two principles in every European and Christian State: Permanency and Progression. In the civil wars of the seventeenth century in England, which are as new and fresh now as they were a hundred and sixty years ago, and will be so for ever to us, these two principles came

1 See this position stated and illustrated in detail in Mr. Coleridge's work "On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the idea of each,” p. 21, 2nd edit., 1830. Well acquainted as I am with the fact of the comparatively small acceptation which Mr. Coleridge's prose works have ever found in the literary world, and with the reasons, and, what is more, with the causes of it, I still wonder that this particular treatise has not been more noticed: first, because it is a little book ; secondly, because it is, or at least nineteen-twentieths of it are, written in a popular style; and thirdly, because it is the only work, that I know or have ever heard mentioned, that even attempts a solution of the difficulty in which an ingenious enemy of the Church of England may easily involve most of its modern defenders in Parliament, or through the press, upon their own principles and admissions. Mr. Coleridge himself prized this little work highly, although he admitted its incompleteness as a composition:-" But I don't care a rush about it," he said to me, author. The saving distinctions are plainly stated in it, and I am sure nothing is wanted to make them tell, but that some kind friend should steal them from their obscure hiding-place, and just tumble them down before the public as his own."-H. N. C.

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as an