To L. Minucius Basilus Rome, March, B.C. 44

My congratulations!  I rejoice with you!  I love you!  I have your interests at heart!  I pray you love me, and let me know how you are, and what is happening. [Written to one of Caesar’s assassins; apparently, immediately after the event.]

To Atticus May, B.C. 44

I see I have been a fool to take comfort in the Ides of March.  We had indeed the courage of men, but no more wisdom than children have.  The tree was cut down, but its roots remained, and it is springing up again.  The tyrant was removed, but the tyranny is with us still.  Let us therefore return to the “Tusculan Disputations” which you often quote, with their reasons why death is not to be feared.

* * * * *

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Biographia Literaria

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born at Ottery St. Mary, in the county of Devon, on October 21, 1772.  He was educated at Christ Hospital where Charles Lamb was among his friends.  He read very widely but was without any particular ambition or practical bent, and had undertaken to apprentice himself to a shoemaker, when his head-master interfered.  He entered Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1791.  During the second year of his residence at the University, he left Cambridge, on account of an unsuccessful love affair, and enlisted in the regiment of dragoons under an assumed name.  He soon secured his discharge from the army and went to Bristol where he met Southey.  In 1795 he married Miss Fricker, and removed to Nether Stowey, a village in Somersetshire, where he wrote the “Ancient Mariner” and the first part of “Christabel.”  While here he became a close friend of Wordsworth.  Coleridge originally intended his “Biographia Literaria” to be a kind of apologia, in other words, to put forth his claims for public recognition; and although he began the book with this intention, it subsequently developed into a book containing some of his most admirable criticism.  He gives voice to a crowd of miscellaneous reflections, suggested, as the work got under way, by popular events, embracing politics, religion, philosophy, poetry, and also finally settling the controversy that had arisen in respect of the “Lyrical Ballads.”  The autobiographical parts of the “Biographia” are confined solely to his intellectual experiences, and the influences to which his life was subjected.  As a treatise on criticism, especially on Wordsworth, the book is of supreme importance.  “Here,” says Principal Shairp, “are canons of judgement, not mechanical, but living.”  Published in 1817, it was followed shortly after his death by a still more important edition with annotations and an introduction by the poet’s daughter Sara.

I.—­The Nature of Poetic Diction

Little of what I have here written concerns myself personally; the narrative is designed chiefly to introduce my principles of politics, religion, and poetry.  But my special purpose is to decide what is the true nature of poetic diction, and to define the real poetic character of the works of Mr. Wordsworth, whose writings have been the subject of so much controversy.