It has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in conversation and in print, more frequently than I find it easy to explain; whether I consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited circulation of my writings, or the retirement and distance in which I have lived, both from the literary and political world.

Now, it is obvious, that if his writings be few, and unimportant, and unknown, Mr. Coleridge can have no reason for composing his Literary Biography.  Yet in singular contradiction to himself—­

“If,” says he, at p. 217, vol. i, “the compositions which I have made public, and that too in a form the most certain of an extensive circulation, though the least flattering to an author’s self-love, had been published in books, they would have filled a respectable number of volumes."

He then adds,

  Seldom have I written that in a day, the acquisition or investigation
  of which had not cost me the precious labour of a month!

He then bursts out into this magnificent exclamation,

  Would that the criterion of a scholar’s ability were the number and
  moral value of the truths which he has been the means of throwing
  into general circulation!

And he sums up all by declaring,

  By what I have effected am I to be judged by my fellow men.

The truth is, that Mr. Coleridge has lived, as much as any man of his time, in literary and political society, and that he has sought every opportunity of keeping himself in the eye of the public, as restlessly as any charlatan who ever exhibited on the stage.  To use his own words, “In 1794, when I had barely passed the verge of manhood, I published a small volume of juvenile poems.”  These poems, by dint of puffing, reached a third edition; and though Mr. Coleridge pretends now to think but little of them, it is amusing to see how vehemently he defends them against criticism, and how pompously he speaks of such paltry trifles.  “They were marked by an ease and simplicity which I have studied, perhaps with inferior success, to bestow on my latter compositions.”  But he afterwards repents of this sneer at his later compositions, and tells us, that they have nearly reached his standard of perfection!  Indeed, his vanity extends farther back than his juvenile poems; and he says, “For a school boy, I was above par in English versification, and had already produced two or three compositions, which I may venture to say, without reference to my age, were somewhat above mediocrity.”  Happily he has preserved one of those wonderful productions of his precocious boyhood, and our readers will judge for themselves what a clever child it was.

  Underneath a huge oak-tree,
  There was of swine a huge company;
  That grunted as they crunch’d the mast,
  For that was ripe and fell full fast. 
  Then they trotted away for the wind grew high,
  One acorn they left and no more might you spy.