How those plays overflow with wit! And yet plays. I scarcely know a more deeply tragic scene any where than that in "Rollo," in which Edith pleads for her father's life, and then, when she cannot prevail, rises up and imprecates vengeance on his murderer.1 Our version of the Bible is to be loved and prized for this, as for a thousand other things,—that it has preserved a purity of meaning to many terms of natural objects. Without this holdfast, our vitiated imaginations would refine away language to mere abstractions. Hence the French have lost their poetical language; and Mr. Blanco White says the same thing has happened to the Spanish. I have the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim one of the relation of place. I remember the man or the tree, but where I saw them I mostly forget.2 1 Act iii. sc. 1.: "ROLLO. Hew off her hands! Lady, hold off! No! hew 'em; Hew off my innocent hands, as he commands you! And to thy face, in heaven's high name defy thee! My aged father's loss, shall stand before thee ROLLO. Save him, I say; run, save him, save her father; EDITH. May then that pity," &c.-H. N. C. 2 There was no man whose opinion in morals, or even in a matter of general conduct in life, if you furnished the pertinent circumstances, I would have sooner adopted than Mr. Coleridge's; but I would not take him as a guide through streets or fields or earthly roads. He had much of the geometrician about him; but he could not find his way. In this, as in many other peculiarities of more importance, he inherited strongly E Craniology is worth some consideration, although it is merely in its rudiments and guesses yet. But all the coincidences which have been observed could scarcely be by accident. The confusion and absurdity, however, will be endless until some names or proper terms are discovered for the organs, which are not taken from their mental application or significancy. The forepart of the head is generally given up to the higher intellectual powers; the hinder part to the sensual emotions. Silence does not always mark wisdom. I was at dinner, some time ago, in company with a man, who listened to me and said nothing for a long time; but he nodded his head, and I thought him intelligent. At length, towards the end of the dinner, some apple dumplings were placed on the table, and my man had no sooner seen them, than he burst forth with-"Them's the jockies for me!" I wish Spurzheim could have examined the fellow's head. At Some folks apply epithets as boys do in making Latin verses. When I first looked upon the Falls of the Clyde, I was unable to find a word to express my feelings. last, a man, a stranger to me, who arrived about the same time, said:" How majestic !"-(It was the precise term, and I turned round and was saying "Thank you, Sir! that is the exact word for it -when he added, eodem flatu) "Yes! how very pretty!”1 from his learned and excellent father, who deserves, and will, I trust, obtain, a separate notice for himself when his greater son's life comes to be written. I believe the beginning of Mr. C.'s liking for Dr. Spurzheim was the hearty good humour with which the Doctor bore the laughter of a party, in the presence of which he, unknowing of his man, denied any ideality, and awarded an unusual share of Locality, to the majestic silver-haired head of my dear uncle and father-in-law. But Mr. Coleridge immediately shielded the craniologist under the distinction preserved in the text, and perhaps, since that time, there may be a couple of organs assigned to the latter faculty.-H. N. C. 1 See this anecdote, with slight variations, as related fifteen years earlier, in "Lectures and Notes on Shakspere," &c., p. 41. It was in 1803, on a tour in Scotland, with Wordsworth and his sister, that Coleridge saw the falls of the Clyde. Dora Wordsworth, also, relates the anecdote in her diary of the tour. JULY 8, 1827. Bull and Waterland.—The Trinity.—Athanasian Creed.*—Cant.* BULL and Waterland are the classical writers on the Trinity.1 In the Trinity there is, 1. Ipseity. 2. Alterity. 3. Community. You may express the formula thus : God, the absolute Will or Identity, = Prothesis. = The Father Thesis. The Son = Antithesis. The Spirit = Synthesis. The author of the Athanasian Creed is unknown. It is, in my judgment, heretical in the omission, or implicit denial, of the Filial subordination in the Godhead, which is the doctrine of the Nicene Creed, and for which Bull and Waterland have so fervently and triumphantly contended; and by not holding to which, Sherlock staggered to and fro between Tritheism and Sabellianism. This creed is also tautological, and, if not persecuting, which I will not discuss, certainly containing harsh and ill-conceived language. How much I regret that so many religious persons of the present day think it necessary to adopt a certain cant of manner and phraseology as a token to each other. They must improve this and that text, and they must do so and so in a prayerful way; and so on. Why not use common language? A young lady the other day urged upon me that such and such feelings were the marrow of all religion; upon which I recommended her to try to walk to London upon her marrow-bones only. 1 Mr. Coleridge's admiration of Bull and Waterland as high theologians, was very great. Bull he used to read in the Latin Defensio Fidei Nicænæ, using the Jesuit Zola's edition of 1784, which, I think, he bought at Rome. He told me once, that when he was reading a Protestant English Bishop's work on the Trinity, in a copy edited by an Italian Jesuit in Italy, he felt proud of the church of England, and in good humour with the church of Rome.-H. N. C. JULY 9, 1827. Scale of Animal Being. IN the very lowest link in the vast and mysterious chain of Being, there is an effort, although scarcely apparent, at individualisation; but it is almost lost in the mere nature. A little higher up, the individual is apparent and separate, but subordinate to anything in man. At length, the animal rises to be on a par' with the lowest power of the human nature. There are some of our natural desires which only remain in our most perfect state on earth as means of the higher powers' acting.1 1 These remarks seem to call for a citation of that wonderful passage, transcendant alike in eloquence and philosophic depth, which the readers of the "Aids to Reflection" have long since laid up in cedar : 66 Every rank of creatures, as it ascends in the scale of creation, leaves death behind it or under it. The metal at its height of being seems a mute prophecy of the coming vegetation, into a mimic semblance of which it crystallizes. The blossom and flower, the acmé of vegetable life, divides into correspondent organs with reciprocal functions, and by instinctive motions and approximations seems impatient of that fixure, by which it is differenced in kind from the flower-shaped Psyche that flutters with free wing above it. And wonderfully in the insect realm doth the irritability, the proper seat of instinct, while yet the nascent sensibility is subordinate thereto,-most wonderfully, I say, doth the muscular life in the insect, and the musculo-arterial in the bird, imitate and typically rehearse the adaptive understanding, yea, and the moral affections and charities of man. Let us carry ourselves back, in spirit, to the mysterious week, the teeming work-days of the Creator, as they rose in vision before the eye of the inspired historian "of the generations of the heaven and earth, in the days that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." And who that hath watched their ways with an understanding heart, could, as the vision evolving still advanced towards him, contemplate the filial and loyal bee; the home-building, wedded, and divorceless swallow; and, above all, the manifoldly intelligent ant tribes, with their commonwealth and confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husband-folk, that fold in their tiny flocks on the honied leaf, and the virgin sisters with the holy instincts of maternal love, detached and in selfless purity, and not say to himself, Behold the shadow of approaching Humanity, the sun rising from behind, in the kindling morn of creation! Thus all lower natures find their highest good in semblances and seekings of that which is higher and better. All things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving. And shall man alone stoop? Shall his pursuits and desires, the reflections of his inward life, be like the reflected image of a tree on the edge of a pool, that grows downward, and seeks a mock heaven in the unstable element beneath it, JULY 12, 1827. Popedom.-Scanderbeg.-Thomas à Becket.-Pure Ages of Greek, Latin,* Italian, and English.-Luther.-Baxter.-The Surplice.*-Algernon Sidney's Style.-Burke.*—Ariosto and Tasso.-Prose and Poetry.The Fathers.-Rhenferd.-Jacob Behmen. WHAT THAT a grand subject for a history the Popedom is! The Pope ought never to have affected temporal sway, but to have lived retired within St. Angelo, and to have trusted to the superstitious awe inspired by his character and office. He spoiled his chance when he meddled in the petty Italian politics. Scanderbeg would be a very fine subject for Walter Scott; and so would Thomas à Becket, if it is not rather too much for him. It involves in essence the conflict between arms, or force, and the men of letters. Observe the superior truth of language, in Greek, to Theocritus inclusively; in Latin, to the Augustan age exclusively; in Italian, to Tasso exclusively; and in English, to Taylor and Barrow inclusively. Luther is, in parts, the most evangelical writer I know, after the apostles and apostolic men. Pray read with great attention Baxter's Life of himself. It is an inestimable work.' I may not unfrequently doubt in neighbourhood with the slim water-weeds and oozy bottom-grass that are yet better than itself and more noble, in as far as substances that appear as shadows are preferable to shadows mistaken for substance! No! it must be a higher good to make you happy. While you labour for anything below your proper humanity, you seek a happy life in the region of death. Well saith the moral poet : 'Unless above himself he can Erect himself, how mean a thing is man!"" P. 105, 2nd ed.-H. N. C. "The moral poet" is Daniel. For “ read "poor." 1 This, a very thick folio of the old sort, was one of Mr. Coleridge's text books for English church history. He used to say that there was no substitute for it in a course of study for a clergyman or public man, and that the modern political Dissenters, who affected to glory in Baxter as a leader, would read a bitter lecture on themselves in every page of |