thing which belongs to these several views of it, and determines us in the application of the same common name, viz. an unusual vividness in external objects or in our immediate impressions, exciting a movement of imagination in the mind, and leading by natural association or sympathy to harmony of sound and the modulation of verse in expressing it. This is what you, Sir, cannot understand. I could not assert in the same sense that fear is sculpture and painting, etc.' because this would be an abuse of the English language: we talk of the poetry of painting, etc. which could not be, if poetry was confined to the technical sense of lines in ten syllables.' The crimes of Verres, I also grant, were not the same thing as the eloquence of Cicero, though I suspect you confound the crimes of revolutionary France with Mr. Pitt's speeches; and as to Milton's poetry and my criticisms, there is almost as much difference between them as between Milton's poetry and your verses. You say, the principal subjects of which poetry treats, are the passions and affections of mankind; we are all under the influence of our passions and affections, that is, in Mr. Hazlitt's new language, we all act on the principles of poetry, and are in truth all poets. We all exert our muscles and limbs, therefore we are anatomists and surgeons; we have teeth which we employ in chewing, therefore we are dentists,'

etc.

Not at all; we are all poets, inasmuch as we are under the influence of the passions and imagination, that is, as we have certain common feelings, and undergo the same process of mind with the poet, who only expresses in a particular manner what he and all feel alike; but in exerting our muscles, we do not dissect them; in chewing with our teeth, we do not perform the part of dentists, etc. There is nothing parallel in the two cases. You anticipate,' you say, these brilliant conclusions for me'; and do not perceive the difference between the extension of a logical principle, and an abuse of common language.-You proceed, As another specimen of his definitions, we may take the following. "Poetry does not define the limits of sense, nor analyse the distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling." Poetry was at the beginning of the book asserted to be an impression; it is now the excess of the imagination beyond an impression; what this excess is we cannot tell, but at least it must be something very unlike an impression.' Poetry at the beginning of the book was asserted to be not simply an impression, but an impression by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of the imagination: now, you say it is the excess of the imagination beyond an impression; and you bring this as a proof of a contradiction in terms. An impression, by its vividness exciting a

my general character of Swift, which might have drawn you into something of a wider field of speculation; and you pick out a straggling sentence or two to cavil at in my account of Pope, of Chaucer, of Milton, and Shakespear, on which you are glad to discharge the gall that has been accumulating in your mind for several pages. If you think by this means, to put me or the public out of conceit with my writings, you have mistaken the matter entirely. You can only put down my arguments by meeting them fairly, or my style, by writing better than you do.

We occasionally,' you proceed, discover a faint semblance of connected thinking in Mr. Hazlitt's pages; but wherever this is the case, his reasoning is for the most part incorrect.' This is a curious inference. This faint semblance of connected thinking,' is, it appears, when I maintain some opinion, which is a sprout from some popular doctrine'; but if I push it a little farther than you were aware of, my reasoning becomes incorrect. Thus it has been a popular doctrine with some critics, (which yet you do not admit)— That the progress of science is unfavourable to the culture of the imagination. It is no doubt true, that the individual who devotes his labour to the investigation of abstract truth, must acquire habits of thought very different from those which the exercise of the fancy demands.' You add in italics, the cause lies in the exclusive appropriation of his time to reasoning, and not in the logical accuracy with which he reasons.' Whenever I have any discovery to communicate, which I think you cannot comprehend, I will in future put it in italics, to make it equally profound and clear. It appears by you, that the incompatibility between the successful pursuit of different studies does not arise from anything incompatible in the studies themselves, but from the time devoted to each. The mind is equally incapacitated from passing from one to the other, whether they are the most opposite or the most alike. The dreams of alchemy, and the schemes of astrology, the traditional belief in the doctrine of ghosts and fairies, though made up almost entirely of imagination, self-will, superstition and romance, were not a jot more favourable to the caprices and fanciful exaggerations of poetry, either in the public mind, or in that of individuals, than the modern system which excludes (both by the logical accuracy with which it proceeds, and a constant appeal to demonstrable facts), every alloy of passion, and all exercise of the imagination. You should never put your thoughts in italics. If I were to attempt a character of verbal critics, I should be apt to say, that their habits of mind disqualify them for general reasoning or fair discussion that they are furious about trifles, because they have nothing else to interest them; that they have no way of giving

given in upon evidence.' I bring this simile as an instance in point, and you say I have not brought it to prove something else.

You charge me with misrepresenting Longinus, and prove that I have not. The word évayúviov signifies not as you are pleased to paraphrase it vehemently energetic,' but simply full of contests.' Must the Greek language be new-fangled, to prove that I am ignorant of it?

not.

The only mistake you are able to point out, is a slip of the pen, which you will find to have been corrected long ago in the second edition. Your pretending to say that Dr. Johnson was an admirer of Milton's blank verse, is not a slip of the pen-you know he was There is as little sincerity in your concluding paragraph. You would ascribe what little appearance of thought there is in my writings to a confusion of images, and what appearance there is of imagination to a gaudy phraseology. If I had neither words nor ideas, I should be a profound philosopher and critic. How fond you are of reducing every one else to your own standard of excellence!

I have done what I promised. You complain of the difficulty of remembering what I write; possibly this Letter will prove an exception. There is a train of thought in your own mind, which will connect the links together: and before you again undertake to run down a writer for no other reason, than that he is of an opposite party to yourself, you will perhaps recollect that your wilful artifices and shallow cunning, though they pass undetected, will hardly screen you from your own contempt, nor, when once exposed, will the gratitude of your employers save you from public scorn.

Your conduct to me is no new thing: it is part of a system which has been regularly followed up for many years. Mr. Coleridge, in his Literary Life, has the following passage to shew the treatment which he and his friends received from your predecessor, the editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review.-'I subjoin part of a note from the Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin, in which having previously informed the public that I had been dishonoured at Cambridge for preaching Deism, at a time when for my youthful ardour in defence of Christianity I was decried as a bigot by the proselytes of French philosophy, the writer concludes with these words-" Since this time he has left his native country, commenced citizen of the world, left his poor children fatherless, and his wife destitute. Ex hoc disce his friends, Lamb and Southey." With severest truth,' continues Mr. Coleridge, it may be asserted that it would not be easy to select two men more exemplary in their domestic affections than those whose names were thus printed at full length, as in the same rank of morals with a denounced infidel and fugitive, who had left his children fatherless, and his wife

VOL. I.: 2 C

401