One feels, again, that in his defence of the egoism of the great reformers, he was apologizing for a vice of his own rather than making an impersonal statement of truth.  “How can a tall man help thinking of his size,” he asked, “when dwarfs are constantly standing on tiptoe beside him?” The personal note that occasionally breaks in upon the oracular rhythm of the Table Talk, however, is a virtue in literature, even if a lapse in philosophy.  The crumbs of a great man’s autobiography are no less precious than the crumbs of his wisdom.  There are moods in which one prefers his egotism to his great thoughts.  It is pleasant to hear Coleridge boasting; “The Ancient Mariner cannot be imitated, nor the poem Love. They may be excelled; they are not imitable.” One is amused to know that he succeeded in offending Lamb on one occasion by illustrating “the cases of vast genius in proportion to talent and the predominance of talent in conjunction with genius in the persons of Lamb and himself.”  It is amusing, too, to find that, while Wordsworth regarded The Ancient Mariner as a dangerous drag on the popularity of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge looked on his poem as the feature that had sold the greatest number of the copies of the book.  It is only fair to add that in taking this view he spoke not self-complacently, but humorously: 

I was told by Longmans that the greater part of the Lyrical Ballads had been sold to seafaring men, who, having heard of the Ancient Mariner, concluded that it was a naval song-book, or, at all events, that it had some relation to nautical matters.

Of autobiographical confessions there are not so many in Table Talk as one would like.  At the same time, there are one or two which throw light on the nature of Coleridge’s imagination.  We get an idea of one of the chief differences between the poetry of Coleridge and the poetry of Wordsworth when we read the confession: 

    I had the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim
    one of the relation of place.  I remember the man or the tree, but
    where I saw them I mostly forget.

The nephew who collected Coleridge’s talk declared that there was no man whom he would more readily have chosen as a guide in morals, but “I would not take him as a guide through streets or fields or earthly roads.”  The author of Kubla Khan asserted still more strongly on another occasion his indifference to locality: 

Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact but harmonious opposites in this—­that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations, just as a bright pan of brass, when beaten, is said to attract the swarming bees; whereas, for myself, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson, I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of