Westerns! From what I saw of Horner, I thought him a superior man, in real intellectual greatness.

Canning flashed such a light around the constitution, that it was difficult to see the ruins of the fabric through it.

MAY 12, 1830.

Shakspere.-Milton.-Homer.

SHAKSPERE is the Spinozistic deity-an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspere's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspere; but John Milton himself is in every line of the "Paradise Lost." Shakspere's rhymed verses are excessively condensed,-epigrams with the point everywhere ; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out. No one can understand Shakspere's superiority fully until he has ascertained, by comparison, all that which he possessed in common with several other great dramatists of his age, and has then calculated the surplus which is entirely Shakspere's own. His rhythm is so perfect, that you may be almost sure that you do not understand the real force of a line, if it does not run well as you read it. The necessary mental pause after every hemistich or imperfect line is always equal to the time that would have been taken in reading the complete

verse.

I have no doubt whatever that Homer is a mere concrete name for the rhapsodies of the "Iliad." Of course there

991

Mr. Coleridge was a decided Wolfian in the Homeric question; but he had never read a word of the famous Prolegomena, and knew nothing of Wolf's reasoning but what I told him of it in conversation. Mr. C. informed me, that he adopted the conclusion contained in the text, upon the first perusal of Vico's "Scienza Nuova ;""not," he said, "that Vico has reasoned it out with such learning and accuracy as you report of Wolf, but Vico struck out all the leading hints, and I soon filled up the rest out of my own head."--H. N. C.

was a Homer, and twenty besides. I will engage to compile twelve books with characters just as distinct and consistent as those in the "Iliad," from the metrical ballads, and other chronicles of England, about Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I say nothing about moral dignity, but the mere consistency of character. The different qualities were traditional. Tristram is always courteous, Lancelot invincible, and so on. The same might be done with the Spanish romances of the Cid. There is no subjectivity whatever in the Homeric poetry. There is a subjectivity of the poet, as of Milton, who is himself before himself in everything he writes; and there is a subjectivity of the persona, or dramatic character, as in all Shakspere's great creations, Hamlet, Lear, &c.

MAY 14, 1830.

Reason and Understanding.—Words and Names of Things.

UNTIL

you have mastered the fundamental difference, in kind, between the reason and the understanding as faculties of the human mind, you cannot escape a thousand difficulties in philosophy. It is pre-eminently the Gradus ad Philosophiam.

The general harmony between the operations of the mind and heart, and the words which express them in almost all languages, is wonderful; whilst the endless discrepancies between the names of things is very well deserving notice. There are nearly a hundred names in the different German dialects for the alder-tree. I believe many more remarkable instances are to be found in Arabic. Indeed, you may take a very pregnant and useful distinction between words and mere arbitrary names of things.

THE

MAY 15, 1830.
The Trinity.-Irving.

HE Trinity is,-1,
3. the Love, or Life.

the Will; 2. the Reason, or Word; As we distinguish these three,

so we must unite them in one God. The union must be as transcendant as the distinction.

Mr. Irving's notion is tritheism,-nay, rather in terms, tri-dæmonism. His opinion about the sinfulness of the humanity of our Lord is absurd, if considered in one point of view; for body is not carcass. How can there be a sinful carcass ? But what he says is capable of a sounder interpretation. Irving caught many things from me; but he would never attend to anything which he thought he could not use in the pulpit. I told him the certain consequence would be, that he would fall into grievous errors. Sometimes he has five or six pages together of the purest eloquence, and then an outbreak of almost madman's babble.1

MAY 16, 1830.

Abraham.-Isaac.-Jacob.

HOW wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the

characters of the three patriarchs in Genesis! To be sure, if ever man could, without impropriety, be called, or supposed to be," the friend of God," Abraham was that man. We are not surprised that Abimelech and Ephron seem to reverence him so profoundly. He was peaceful, because of his conscious relation to God; in other respects, he takes fire, like an Arab sheikh, at the injuries suffered by Lot, and goes to war with the combined kinglings immediately.

Isaac is, as it were, a faint shadow of his father Abraham. Born in possession of the power and wealth which his father had acquired, he is always peaceful and meditative; and it is curious to observe his timid and almost childish imitation

1 The admiration and sympathy which Mr. Coleridge felt and expressed towards the late Mr. Irving, at his first appearance in London, were great and sincere; and his grief at the deplorable change which followed was in proportion. But, long after the tongues shall have failed and been forgotten, Irving's name will live in the splendid eulogies of his friend. See "Church and State," p. 180, n.-H. N. C.

of Abraham's stratagem about his wife.1 Isaac does it beforehand, and without any apparent necessity.

Jacob is a regular Jew, and practises all sorts of tricks and wiles, which, according to our modern notions of honour, we cannot approve. But you will observe that all these tricks are confined to matters of prudential arrangement, to worldly success and prosperity (for such, in fact, was the essence of the birthright); and I think we must not exact from men of an imperfectly civilized age the same conduct as to mere temporal and bodily abstinence which we have a right to demand from Christians. Jacob is always careful not to commit any violence; he shudders at bloodshed. See his demeanour after the vengeance taken on the Shechemites. He is the exact compound of the timidity and gentleness of Isaac, and of the underhand craftiness of his mother Rebecca. No man could be a bad man who loved as he loved Rachel. I dare say Laban thought none the worse of Jacob for his plan of making the ewes bring forth ring-streaked lambs.

IF

Passion.* 3

MAY 17, 1830..

Cure for Scepticism.*-William Penn.*-Love.

F a man's conduct cannot be ascribed to the angelic, nor to the bestial within him, what is there left for us to refer it to, but the fiendish? Passion without any appetite is fiendish.

The best way to bring a clever young man, who has become sceptical and unsettled, to reason, is to make him feel something in any way. Love, if sincere and unworldly, will, in nine instances out of ten, bring him to a sense and assurance of something real and actual; and that sense alone will make him think to a sound purpose, instead of dreaming that he is thinking.

1 Gen. xxvi. 6.-H. N. C.

2 Gen. xxxiv.-H. N. C.

3 We have substituted "passion" for the editor's heading, "Origin of Acts."

"Never marry but for love," says William Penn in his "Reflexions and Maxims; "but see that thou lovest what is lovely."

L

MAY 18, 1830.

Lord Eldon's Doctrine as to Grammar Schools.-Unpractical
Worldlings.*-Our Past Deeds.-Democracy.

ORD ELDON'S doctrine, that grammar-schools, in the sense of the reign of Edward VI. and Queen Elizabeth, must necessarily mean schools for teaching Latin and Greek, is, I think, founded on an insufficient knowledge of the history and literature of the sixteenth century. Ben Jonson uses the term " grammar without any reference to the learned languages.

It is intolerable when men, who have no other knowledge, have not even a competent understanding of that world in which they are always living, and to which they refer everything.

Although contemporary events obscure past events in a living man's life, yet as soon as he is dead, and his whole life is a matter of history, one action stands out as conspicuously as another.

A democracy, according to the prescript of pure reason, would, in fact, be a church. There would be focal points in it, but no superior.

MAY 20, 1830.

The Eucharist.-Baptism.*—St. John, xix. 11.—Divinity of Christ.— Genuineness of Books of Moses.-Mosaic Prophecies.

O doubt, Chrysostom, and the other rhetorical fathers, contributed a good deal, by their rash use of figurative language, to advance the superstitious notion of the eucharist; but the beginning had been much earlier.

In

1 Mr. Coleridge made these remarks upon my quoting Selden's wellknown saying (Table Talk), “that transubstantiation was nothing but rhetoric turned into logic."-H. N. C.