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past, more disposed to think well of the young men of that day, who, from not exercising their reason, were carried into the vortex of the revolution. Much has been written on the proposed scheme of settling in the wilds of America;-the spot chosen was Susquehannah,-this spot Coleridge has often said was selected, on account of the name being pretty and metrical, indeed he could never forbear a smile when relating the story. This day-dream, as he termed it, (for such it really was) the detail of which as related by him always gave it rather a sportive than a serious character, was a subject on which it is doubtful whether he or Mr. Southey were really in earnest at the time it was planned. The dream was, as is stated in the "Friend," that the little society to be formed was, in its second generation, to have combined the innocence of the patriarchal age with the knowledge and general refinements of European culture, and “I "dreamt," says he, "that in the sober evening of my life I should behold colonies of indepen"dence in the undivided dale of industry." Strange fancies! and as vain as strange! This scheme, sportive, however, as it might be, had its admirers; and there are persons now to be found, who are desirous of realizing these visions, the past-time in thought and fancy of these young poets-then about 23 years of age. During this dream, and about this time, Southey

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and Coleridge married two sisters of the name of Fricker, and a third sister was married to an Utopian poet as he has been called, of the name of Lovel, whose poems were published with Mr. Southey's. They were, however, too wise to leave Bristol for America, for the purpose of establishing a genuine system of property-a Pantisocracy, which was to be their form of government-and under which they were to realize all ⚫ their new dreams of happiness. Marriage, at all events, seems to have sobered them down, and the vision vanished.

Chimerical as it appeared, the purveyors of amusement for the reading public were thus furnished with occupation, and some small pecuniary gain, while it exercised the wit of certain anti-Jacobin writers of the day, and raised them into notice. Canning had the faculty of satire to an extraordinary degree, and also that common sense tact, which made his services at times so very useful to his country; his powers seemed in their full meridian of splendour when an argument or new doctrine permitted him rapidly to run down into its consequence, and then brilliantly and wittily to shew its defects. In this he eminently excelled. The beauties of the antiJacobin are replete with his satire. He never attempted a display of depth, but his dry sarcasm left a sting which those he intended to

wound carried off in pain and mortification. This scheme of Pantisocracy excited a smile among the kind-hearted and thinking part of mankind; but, among the vain and restless ignorant wouldbe-political economists, it met with more attention; and they, with their microscopic eyes, fancied they beheld in it what was not quite so visible to the common observer. Though the plan was soon abandoned, it was thought sufficient for the subject of a lecture, and afforded some mirth when the minds of the parties concerned in it arrived at manhood. Coleridge saw, soon after it was broached, that no scheme of colonizing that was not based on religion could be permanent.-Left to the disturbing forces of the human passions to which it would be exposed, it would soon perish; for all government to be permanent should be influenced by reason, and guided by religion.

In the year 1795 Coleridge, residing then at Clevedon, a short distance from Bristol, published his first prose work, with some additions by Mr. Southey, the "Conciones ad Populum." In a short preface he observes, "The two following ad"dresses were delivered in the month of February, " 1795, and were followed by six others in defence 'of natural and revealed religion. There is a "time to keep silence,' saith King Solomon;— "but when I proceeded to the first verse of the

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"fourth chapter of the Ecclesiastes, and con"sidered all the oppressions that are done under "the sun and behold the tears of such as were

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oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on "the side of their oppressors there was power,' I "concluded this was not the time to keep si"lence;' for truth should be spoken at all times, "but more especially at those times when to speak truth is dangerous."

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In these addresses he showed that the example of France was a warning to Great Britain; but, because he did not hold opinions equally violent with the Jacobin party of that day, he was put down as an anti-Jacobin; for, he says, "the "annals of the French revolution have been re"corded in letters of blood, that the knowledge of "the few cannot counteract the ignorance of the

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many; that the light of philosophy, when it is "confined to a small minority, points out its pos"sessors as the victims, rather than the illumina"tors of the multitude. The patriots of France "either hastened into the dangerous and gigantic error of making certain evils the means of con

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tingent good, or were sacrificed by the mob, with "whose prejudices and ferocity their unbending "virtue forbade them to assimilate. Like Sam"son, the people were strong, like Samson, they "were also blind:" and he admonishes them at the end of the third lecture to do all things in the spirit of love.

"It is worthy of remark," says he, in a MS. note, "that we may possess a thing in such ful

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ness as to prevent its possession from being an object of distinct consciousness. Only as it les

sens or dims, we reflect on it, and learn to value "it. This is one main cause why young men of "high and ardent minds find nothing repulsive "in the doctrines of necessity, which, in after years, they (as I have) recoil from. Thus, too, “the faces of friends dearly beloved become dis“tinct in memory or dream only after long ab"sence." Of the work itself he says, " Except "the two or three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical necessity and Unitarianism, I "see little or nothing in these outbursts of my youthful zeal to retract, and with the exception of some flame-coloured epithets applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and others, or rather to per"sonifications (for such they really were to me) as "little to regret. Qualis ab initio eornon S.T.C.* When a rifacimento of the Friend took place, [1818] at vol. ii. p. 240, he states his reasons for reprinting the lecture referred to, one of the series delivered at Bristol in the year 1794-95, because, says he, this very lecture, vide p. "10, has been referred to in an infamous libel "in proof of the author's Jacobinism."

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* This note was written at Highgate, in a copy of the Conciones ad Populum.

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