was to deliver his testimony against the materialist creed of his day, to lay stress upon the abiding element of mystery in man and nature. And, lacking as he did the industry-perhaps the power of consecutive thought - which enabled Kant, for instance, to argue the case in detail, nothing was left him but to reiterate his cardinal doctrine in all the forms that a boundless imagination placed within his reach a work which no book could have accomplished with half the results that flowed from his spoken eloquence. The scattered fragments of his conversation but they are no more than crumbs from the rich man's table-are to be found in his Table Talk. A brilliant description of it, but with more than an edge of sarcasm, forms the most striking chapter in Carlyle's Life of Sterling. There is another, equally brilliant and scarcely less touched with mockery, in the Letters of Keats. Best of all, if only because it is more appreciative, is the picture of him, as he was in his glorious dawn, by Hazlitt. One thing only needs to be added. The most definite outcome of this abounding flow of talk is to be seen in the religious, rather than in the speculative, thought of his time. And it told in two different, if not opposite, directions. Coleridge was, in fact, the father of the broad-church movement; and he was godfather of the high-church. On the one hand, he was the master of such men as Maurice; on the other hand, he did yeoman's service in preparing the ground for that conception of the Church which was afterwards elaborated by Newman. "The two strongest

proofs of Christianity," he once said, “are Christianity and Christendom." And, as time went on, he came more and more to identify the latter with the Church. In the history of literary criticism Coleridge holds a place apart. On his writings and lectures all that is most valuable in English criticism, during

As literary critic.

at least the first half of last century, may be said to rest. His critical work is contained in Biographia Literaria (1817); to a small extent in the Friend and Table Talk; to a much larger in the fragmentary records of his lectures. The latter were delivered at intervals from 18081 to 1819. They deal, for the most part, either with first principles or with the poetry and drama of England, particularly in the Elizabethan and Stuart age. He combines, in a degree unusual even with great critics, the two powers which are most essential to distinction in this field-a poet's sense of beauty, and what falls short of beauty, in the conception and execution of any literary work that comes before him, and a philosopher's genius for analysis, for tracking poetic effects to their hidden causes, for estimating the success with which, in a given imaginative product, means have been proportioned to ends. To these he adds a quality which is distinct from either of them, though closely connected with the latter a keen eye for the speculative issues involved

1 A previous course (1802), or courses, would seem to have been the creation of Coleridge's imagination, intended to parry the charge of plagiarism from Schlegel. Nor was even the course of 1806, though undoubtedly planned, ever delivered.

in imaginative creation; a faculty which, quite apart from that of criticism in the stricter sense, enabled him, with all his indolence, to leave at least the scattered fragments of what in Germany would be called an "æsthetic." It is in handling the Elizabethan Drama and the poetry of Wordsworth that he is seen at his best. The Elizabethan Drama to him means, it may fairly be objected, little beyond Shakespeare; the other playwrights-Jonson, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher are introduced chiefly, though by no means solely, as foils to Shakespeare; and two at least of the greatest-Ford and Websterseem to have been neglected altogether. But though there is some force in this criticism, what he contributed to a sound judgment of Shakespeare, and the requirements of the Drama in general, is so solid and so brilliant that his position is left practically unshaken. So also with his pronouncement on Wordsworth. Considering that Wordsworth's poetry was but just beginning to win its way against prejudice and obloquy, the verdict of Coleridge may be held to have more of the candid friend than is altogether pleasant. And Wordsworth himself seems to have been wounded. This, however, is a matter which affects the personal delicacy of the critic, not the justice of his criticism. And, bating a slight tendency to find unnecessary fault, that criticism, both in its wider and its narrower aspects, remains one of the most penetrating in the language.

From Coleridge, as critic, it is natural to pass to his lifelong friend and clear-sighted admirer, Lamb

(1775-1834).

Of the speculative strain, which was so strong in Coleridge, there is no trace Lamb. in Lamb; it is probable that he would not have accepted it even at a gift.

His range, too, is more limited, and, even within that range, he takes and leaves with a touch of waywardness. But where his admiration is roused, his sense of poetic beauty is even subtler than Coleridge's; and his vivid humour, his intense humanity, impelled him always to seize that which binds literature to the common lot of mankind: to seek in poetry the reflection of the very passions and cravings which stirred the artist's own soul, and which find an echo-though it may be a softened and a broken echo-in the heart of others less gifted than himself. To Coleridge literature may be said to end in itself; and, for many purposes, it may well be treated as doing so. Lamb, without ever sinking into the moralist, has the still rarer faculty of reaching behind the purely literary quality of a book to the vital pulsations, of which it is the imaginative register. Hence, on the one hand, his quick sense of all that is heroic and chivalrous in the Elizabethan dramatists, and, on the other hand, the instinct which impels him, wherever possible, to illustrate his reading of a drama from the conception, the tones, the gestures of actors whom he had seen on the stage. He may not always succeed in catching the mood which the dramatist himself most probably had in view; his love of paradox was sometimes an obstacle in his way, but it is always this that he endeavours to seize. Thus, brief as they are, the

criticisms which he attaches to his chief work in this field, Selections from the Elizabethan Dramatists (1808), are gems never surpassed. Apart from the appreciative intensity of his critical work, his main service perhaps is to have broken down the limits which had commonly been imposed on the study of our Drama. Previous critics, Coleridge himself not excepted, had, except for parallel passages, looked little beyond Shakespeare. Lamb was the first to treat the Elizabethan Drama, the age from 1580 to 1640, as a whole. It can only be regretted that, as critic, he wrote comparatively little. Besides the Selections, there are scattered pieces of criticism in the Essays of Elia (from 1820 onwards), and in his incomparable letters. But that is all.

The only other critical work it is necessary to mention is that of the Edinburgh and Quarterly,— Edinburgh and the former founded in 1802, the latter, Quarterly. as a political counterblast, in 1809. The editor of the Edinburgh was Sydney Smith, and then Jeffrey, with Brougham and, at first, Scott as chief contributors. Gifford, as has been said, was editor of the Quarterly, his most distinguished contributors being Scott, Southey, and Ellis. It can hardly be said that these reviews added much either to the finer or the more solid endowments of criticism. But they spoke with more authority than the old Criticals and Monthlies; in spite of their flippancy and savagery, they were not seldom just in their verdicts; and they were, on the whole, well written.