Famous Reviews eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 678 pages of information about Famous Reviews.

Famous Reviews eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 678 pages of information about Famous Reviews.
and he now loves and reveres his memory.  By far the most spirited and powerful of his poetical writings, is the War Eclogue, Slaughter, Fire, and Famine; and in that composition he loads the Minister with imprecations and curses, long, loud, and deep.  But afterwards, when he has thought it prudent to change his Principles, he denies that he ever felt any indignation towards Mr. Pitt; and with the most unblushing falsehood declares, that at the very moment his muse was consigning him to infamy, death, and damnation, he would “have interposed his body between him and danger.”  We believe that all good men, of all parties, regard Mr. Coleridge with pity and contempt.

Of the latter days of his literary life, Mr. Coleridge gives us no satisfactory account.  The whole of the second volume is interspersed with mysterious inuendoes.  He complains of the loss of all his friends, not by death, but estrangement.  He tries to account for the enmity of the world to him, a harmless and humane man, who wishes well to all created things, and “of his wondering finds no end.”  He upbraids himself with indolence, procrastination, neglect of his worldly concerns, and all other bad habits,—­and then, with incredible inconsistency, vaunts loudly of his successful efforts in the cause of Literature, Philosophy, Morality, and Religion.  Above all, he weeps and wails over the malignity of Reviewers, who have persecuted him almost from his very cradle, and seem resolved to bark him into the grave.  He is haunted by the Image of a Reviewer wherever he goes.  They “push him from his stool,” and by his bedside they cry, “Sleep no more.”  They may abuse whomsoever they think fit, save himself and Mr. Wordsworth.  All others are fair game—­and he chuckles to see them brought down.  But his sacred person must be inviolate, and rudely to touch it, is not high treason, it is impiety.  Yet his “ever-honoured friend, the laurel-honouring Laureate,” is a Reviewer—­his friend Mr. Thomas Moore is a Reviewer—­his friend Dr. Middleton, Bishop of Calcutta, was the Editor of a Review—­almost every friend he ever had is a Reviewer;—­and to crown all, he himself is a Reviewer.  Every person who laughs at his silly Poems—­and his incomprehensible metaphysics, is malignant—­in which case, there can be little benevolence in this world; and while Mr. Francis Jeffrey is alive and merry, there can be no happiness here below for Mr. Samuel Coleridge.

And here we come to speak of a matter, which, though somewhat of a personal and private nature, is well deserving of mention in a Review of Mr. Coleridge’s Literary Life, for sincerity is the first of virtues, and without it no man can be respectable or useful.  He has, in this Work, accused Mr. Jeffrey of meanness—­hypocrisy—­falsehood—­and breach of hospitality.  That gentleman is able to defend himself—­and his defence is no business of ours.  But we now tell Mr. Coleridge, that instead of humbling his Adversary, he has heaped

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Famous Reviews from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.