One instance there is of magnificent promise, and laughable non-performance, unequalled in the annals of literary History.  Mr. Coleridge informs us, that he and Mr. Wordsworth (he is not certain which is entitled to the glory of the first discovery) have found out the difference between Fancy and Imagination.  This discovery, it is prophesied, will have an incalculable influence on the progress of all the Fine Arts.  He has written a long chapter purposely to prepare our minds for the great discussion.  The audience is assembled—­the curtain is drawn up—­and there, in his gown, cap, and wig, is sitting Professor Coleridge.  In comes a servant with a letter; the Professor gets up, and, with a solemn voice, reads to the audience.—­It is from an enlightened Friend; and its object is to shew, in no very courteous terms either to the Professor or his Spectators, that he may lecture, but that nobody will understand him.  He accordingly makes his bow, and the curtain falls; but the worst of the joke is, that the Professor pockets the admittance-money,—­for what reason, his outwitted audience are left, the best way they can, to “fancy or imagine.”

But the greatest piece of Quackery in the Book is his pretended account of the Metaphysical System of Kant, of which he knows less than nothing.  He wall not allow that there is a single word of truth in any of the French Expositions of that celebrated System, nor yet in any of our British Reviews.  We do not wish to speak of what we do not understand, and therefore say nothing of Mr. Coleridge’s Metaphysics....

We have done.  We have felt it our duty to speak with severity of this book and its author—­and we have given our readers ample opportunities to judge of the justice of our strictures.  We have not been speaking in the cause of literature only, but, we conceive, in the cause of Morality and Religion.  For it is not fitting that He should be held up as an example to the rising generation (but, on the contrary, it is most fitting that he should be exposed as a most dangerous model), who has alternately embraced, defended, and thrown aside all systems of Philosophy—­and all creeds of Religion,—­who seems to have no power of retaining an opinion,—­no trust in the principles which he defends,—­but who fluctuates from theory to theory, according as he is impelled by vanity, envy, or diseased desire of change,—­and who, while he would subvert and scatter into dust those structures of knowledge, reared by the wise men of this and other generations, has nothing to erect in their room but the baseless and air-built fabrics of a dreaming Imagination.

ON THE COCKNEY SCHOOL OF POETRY

No.  I

[From Blackwood’s Magazine, October, 1817]

  Our talk shall be (a theme we never tire on)
  Of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron,
  (Our England’s Dante)—­Wordsworth—­HUNT, and KEATS,
  The Muses’ son of promise; and of what feats
  He yet may do.