Lastly, to compare Dante and Chaucer, and inclusively Spenser and Shakespere, with the ancients, to abstract the characteristic differences, and to develop the causes of such differences. (For instance, in all the writings of the ancients I recollect nothing that, strictly examined, can be called humour; yet Chaucer abounds with it, and Dante, too, though in a very different way. Thus, too, the passion for personifications and, me judice, strong, sharp, practical good sense, which I feel to constitute a strikingly characteristic difference in favour of the feudal poets.) As to information, I could give you a critical sketch of poems, written by contemporaries of Chaucer, in Germany; an epic to compare with his Palamon, and tales with his Tales, descriptive and fanciful poems with those of the same kind in our own poet. In short, a Life of Chaucer ought, in the work itself, and in the appendices of the work, to make the poet explain his age, and to make the age both explain the poet, and evince the superiority of the poet over his age. I think that the publication of such a work would do your work some little service, in more ways than one. It would occasion, necessarily, a double review of it in all the Reviews; and there is a large class of fashionable men who have been pleased of late to take me into high favour, and among whom even my name might have some infiuence, and my praises of you some weight. But let me hear from you on the subject.

Now for my own business. As soon as you possibly can do something respecting the abridgement of Tucker,1 do so; you will, on my honour, be doing good, in the best sense of the word! Of course I cannot wish you to do anything till after the 24th, unless it should be put in your way to read that part of the letter to Phillips.

As to my own work, let me correct one or two conceptions of yours respect ing it. I could, no doubt, induce my friends to publish the work for me, but

1 Godwin "exerted himself actively in the matter, as appears by the correspondence of Charles Lamb.

I am possessed of facts that deter me. I know that the booksellers not only do not encourage, but that they use unjustifiable artifices to injure works published on the authors' own account. It never answered, as far as I can find, in any instance. And even the sale of a first edition is not without objections on this score-to this, however, I should certainly adhere, and it is my resolution. But I must do something immediately. Now, if I knew that any bookseller would purchase the first edition of this work, as numerous as he pleased, I should put the work out of hand at once, totus in illo. But it was never my intention to send one single sheet to the press till the whole was bona fide ready for the printer-that is, both written, and fairly written. The work is half written out, and the materials of the other half are all in paper, or rather on papers. I should not expect one farthing till the work was delivered entire ; and I would deliver it at once, if it were wished. But, if I cannot engage with a bookseller for this, I must do something else first, which I should be sorry for. Your division of the sorts of works acceptable to booksellers is just, and what has been always my own notion or rather knowledge; but, though I detailed the whole of the contents of my work so fully to you, I did not mean to lay any stress with the bookseller on the first half, but simply state it as preceded by a familiar introduction, and critical history of logic. On the work itself I meant to lay all the stress, as a work really in request, and non-existent, either well or ill-done, and to put the work in the same class with "Guthrie," and books of practical instruction-for the universities, classes of scholars, lawyers, &c. &c. Its profitable sale will greatly depend on the pushing of the booksellers, and on its being considered as a practical book, Organum verè Organum, a book by which the reader is to acquire not only knowledge, but likewise power. I fear that it may extend to seven hundred pages; and would it be better to publish the Introduction of History separately, either after or before? God bless you, and all

P.S. If you read to Phillips any part of my letter respecting my own work, or rather detailed it to him, you would lay all the stress on the practical.

TUESDAY, March 26, 1811. DEAR GODWIN,-Mr. Grattan did me the honour of calling on me, and leaving his card, on Sunday afternoon, unfortunately a few minutes after I had gone out-and I am so unwell, that I fear I shall not be able to return the call today, as I had intended, though it is a grief even for a brace of days to appear insensible of so much kindness and condescension. But what need has Grattan of pride?

"Ha d'uopo solo
Mendicar dall' orgoglio onore e stima,
Chi senza lui di vilipendio é degno."
Chiabrera.

I half caught from Lamb that you had written to Wordsworth, with a wish that he should versify some tale or other, and that Wordsworth had declined it. I told dear Miss Lamb that I had formed a complete plan of a poem, with little plates for children, the first thought, but that alone, taken from Gesner's "First Mariner;" and this thought, I have reason to believe, was not an invention of Gesner's. It is this that in early times, in some island or part of the Continent, the ocean had washed in, overflowing a vast plain of twenty or thirty miles, and thereby insulating one small promontory or cape of high land, on which was a cottage, containing a man and his wife, and an infant daughter. This is the one thought; all that Gesner has made out of it-(and I once translated into blank verse about half of the poem, but gave it up under the influence of a double disgust, moral and poetical)-I have rejected; and, strictly speaking, the tale in all its parts, that one idea excepted, would be original. The tale will contain the curse, the occasions,

the process, with all its failures and ultimate success, of the construction of the first boat, and of the undertaking of the first naval expedition. Now, supposing you liked the idea (I address you and Mrs. G., and as commerciants, not you as the philosopher who gave us the first system in England that ever dared reveal at full that most important of all important truths, that morality might be built on its own foundation, like a castle built from the rock and on the rock, with religion for the ornaments and completion of its roof and upper stories-nor as the critic who, in the life of Chaucer, has given us, if not principles of aesthetic or taste, yet more and better data for principles than had hitherto existed in our language)—if (we pulling like two friendly tradesmen together, for you and your wife must be one flesh, and I trust are one heart) you approve of the plan, the next question is, Whether it should be written in prose or in verse, and if the latter, in what metre-stanzas, or eight-syllable iambics with rhymes (for in rhyme it must be), now in couplets and now in quatrains, in the manner of Cooper's admirable translation of the Vert-Vert of Gresset. (N.B. not Cowper).

Another thought has struck me within the last month, of a school-book in two octavo volumes, of Lives in the manner of Plutarch-not, indeed, of comparing and coupling Greek with Roman, Diom with Brutus, and Cato with Aristides, of placing ancient and modern together Numa with Alfred, Cicero with Bacon, Hannibal with Gustavus Adolphus, and Julius Cæsar with Buonaparte—or what perhaps might be at once more interesting and more instructive, a series of lives, from Moses to Buonaparte, of all those great men, who in states or in the mind of man had produced great revolutions, the effects of which still remain, and are more or less distant causes of the present state of the world. I remain, with unfeigned and affec tionate esteem,

Yours, dear Godwin,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

[Godwin replied to Coleridge's letter as follows:-]

March 27, 1811.

DEAR COLERIDGE,-I am much gratified by your yesterday's letter, as I shall always be by every approach to a coincidence of sentiment on the part of a man of your originality and learning. I published my sentiments respecting the welfare and happiness of the human species, from a heart filled with a sincere conviction of the truth of the tenets I delivered, and which was no longer able to keep them pent up within itself; and it gives me a pain which few men can comprehend, when I see such persons as Southey1 and others who, I am told, are also honest and philanthropical, treat my efforts not only with disdain, but with something like abhorrence. Thank God! I have never

had the persuasion as to the singleness of heart of that man, with which you have been impressed: otherwise nothing can be more disheartening than to see the few, who are able, and ought to be willing, to co-operate for general good, doing their utmost to destroy their kind. Indeed, I am convinced that (separately from the uncontrollable hostility of fighting religious creeds) this cannot be; and of consequence, that the man who does not understand me and my intentions, wants the chord in his own bosom, which (if it existed) could not fail to vibrate in unison with mine.

. I like exceedingly the plan you have sketched of a first mariner. Mrs. Godwin and I have read it together; and she has no other fear respecting it, but lest you should take it in too high a key, and put into it the metaphysics and abstrusenesses in which you are so eminently at home. There should not be a sentence-not even a line-in a book intended for children, of which a child might not fairly be expected to conceive an idea. In answer to your queries of the form, I conceive a short essay which is to be illustrated with

1 Southey's dislike of Godwin was to a great extent personal. He never forgave his second marriage.

various plates, ought to be in verse: further than this I dare not go; I think the author who does not consult his own genius unshackled, and inquire within himself what style, and what scheme of harmony most naturally springs out of his conceptions, can scarcely be expected to do well.

I am bound to add, that the encouragement which my limited means and infant trade allow me to afford to intellectual application and industry, would, I am afraid, be wholly beneath your attention. If love and a crust would tempt you to co-operate in my little scheme for refining and elevating the circle of juvenile studies, it is well, but

"If these be motives weak, break off be-
times !"

lutely say, with the Apostles, "silver

Such as I have (and I will not abso

and gold have I none") I tender unto you.

Mrs. Godwin desires me to express the great pleasure with which she read your letter, and her best wishes in your favour.

I remain, with great regard,
Yours,

W. GODWIN.

FRIDAY Morning, March 29, 1811. DEAR GODWIN,-My chief motive in undertaking "The First Mariner" is merely to weave a few tendrils around your destined walking-stick, which, like those of the woodbine (that, serpentlike climbing up, and with tight spires embossing the straight hazel, rewards the lucky schoolboy's search in the winter copse) may remain on it, when the woodbine, root and branch, lies trampled in the earth. I shall consider the work as a small plot of ground given up to you, to be sown at your own hazard with your own seed (goldgrains would have been but a bad saw, and besides have spoilt the metaphor). If the increase should more than repay your risk and labour, why then let me be one of your guests at Hendcot House. Your last letter impressed and affected

me strongly. Ere I had yet read or seen your works, I, at Southey's recommendation, wrote a sonnet in praise of the author. When I had read them, religious bigotry, the but half-understanding your principles, and the not half-understanding my own, combined to render me a warm and boisterous anti-Godwinist. But my warfare was open; my unfelt and harmless blows aimed at an abstraction I had christened with your name; and at that time, if not in the world's favor, you were among the captains and chief men in its admiration. I became your acquaintaince, when more years had brought somewhat more temper and tolerance; but I distinctly remember that the first turn in my mind towards you, the first movements of a juster appreciation of your merits, was occasioned by my disgust at the altered tone of language of many whom I had long known as your admirers and disciples-some of them, too, men who had made themselves a sort of reputation in minor circles as your acquaintances, and therefore your echoes by authority, who had themselves aided in attaching an unmerited ridicule to you and your opinions by their own ignorance, which led them to think the best settled truths, and indeed every thing in your "Political Justice," whether assertion, or deduction, or conjecture, to have been new thoughtsdownright creations! and by their own vanity, which enabled them to forget that everything must be new to him who knows nothing; others again, who though gifted with new talents, had yet been indebted to you and the discussions occasioned by your work, for

much more of their development, who had often and often styled you the great master, written verses in your honour, and, worse than all, now brought your opinions-with many good and worthy men'-into as unmerited an odium, as the former class had into contempt, by attempts equally unfeeling and unwise, to realize them in private life, to the disturbance of domestic peace. In all these there was such a want of common sensibility, such a want of that gratitude to an intellectual benefactor, which even an honest reverence for their past selves should have secured, as did then, still does, and ever will, disgust me. *** To this add that business of review-writing, which I have never hesitated to pronounce an immoral employment, unjust to the author of the books reviewed, injurious in its influences on the public taste and morality, and still more injurious on its influences on the head and heart of the reviewer himself. The prægustatores among the luxurious Romans soon lost their taste; and the verdicts of an old prægustator were sure to mislead, unless when, like dreams, they were interpreted into contraries. Our reviewers are the genuine descendants of these palate-seared taste-dictators. I am still confined by indisposition, but mean to step out to Hazlitt's-almost my next door neighbour-at his particular request. It is possible that I may find you there.

With kind remembrances to Mrs. Godwin,

Yours, dear Godwin, affectionately,
S. T. COLERIDGE