facts speak truth, you must know what the truth is which ought to be proved, — the ideal truth, — the truth which was consciously or unconsciously, strongly or weakly, wisely or blindly, intended at all times.*

* I have preserved this passage, conscious, the while, how liable it is to be misunderstood, or at least not understood. The readers of Mr. Coleridge's works generally, or of his“ Church and State” in particular, will have no difficulty in entering into his meaning; namely, that no investigation in the non-mathematical sciences can be carried on in a way deserving to be called philosophical, unless the investigator have in himself a mental initiative, or, what comes to the same thing, unless he set out with an intuition of the ultimate aim or idea of the science or aggregation of facts to be explained or interpreted. The analysis of the Platonic and Baconian methods in "The Friend," to which I have before referred, and the " Church and State," exhibit respectively a splendid vindication and example of Mr. Coleridge's mode of reasoning on this subject.-ED.

April 18. 1833.

CHURCH OF ROME. CELIBACY OF THE

CLERGY.

In my judgment, Protestants lose a great deal of time in a false attack, when they labour to convict the Romanists of false doctrines. Destroy the Papacy, and help the priests to wives, and I am much mistaken if the doctrinal errors, such as there really are, would not very soon pass away. They might remain in terminis, but they would lose their sting and body, and lapse back into figures of rhetoric and warm devotion, from which they, most of them, such as transubstantiation, and prayers for the dead and to saints,— originally sprang. But, so long as the Bishop of Rome remains Pope, and has an army of Mamelukes all over the world, we shall do very little by fulminating against mere doctrinal errors. In the Milanese, and elsewhere in the north of Italy, I am told there

VOL. II.

M

is a powerful feeling abroad against the Papacy. That district seems to be something in the state of England in the reign of our Henry the Eighth.

How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of the celibacy of the clergy been! Even the best and most enlightened men in Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation of the wedded life in general? Impossible! and the morals of both sexes in Spain, Italy, France, &c. prove it abundantly.

The Papal church has had three phases, -anti-Cæsarean, extra-national, anti-Chris

tian.

April 20. 1833.

ROMAN CONQUEST OF ITALY.

THE Romans would never have subdued the Italian tribes if they had not boldly left Italy and conquered foreign nations, and so, at last, crushed their next-door neighbours by external pressure.

April 24. 1833.

WEDDED LOVE IN SHAKSPEARE AND HIS CONTEMPORARY DRAMATISTS. TENNYSON'S POEMS.

EXCEPT in Shakspeare, you can find no such thing as a pure conception of wedded love in our old dramatists. In Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher, it really is on both sides little better than sheer animal desire.

There is scarcely a suitor in all their plays, whose abilities are not discussed by the lady or her waiting-women. In this, as in all things, how transcendant over his age and his rivals was our sweet Shakspeare !

I have not read through all Mr. Tennyson's poems, which have been sent to me; but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what I have seen. The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is. Even if you write in a known and approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a metrist yourself, that you will not write harmonious verses; but to deal in new metres without considering what metre means and requires, is preposterous. What I would, with many wishes for success, prescribe to Tennyson, indeed without it he can never be a poet in act, is to write for the next two or three years in none but one or two well-known and strictly defined metres, such as the heroic couplet, the octave stanza, or