would have been some subjectivity, or subjectivity would have made them.

The Greeks were then just on the verge of the bursting forth of individuality.

Valckenaer's treatise on the interpolation of the Classics by the later Jews and early Christians is well worth your perusal as a scholar and critic.*

July 13. 1832.

PRINCIPLES AND FACTS. SCHMIDT.

I HAVE read all the famous histories, and, I believe, some history of every country and nation that is, or ever existed; but I never did so for the story itself as a story. The only thing interesting to me was the princi

*I confess I do not know which of the numerous works of this splendid scholar Mr. Coleridge meant. There is not, to my recollection, any treatise of Valckenaer's bearing such a title in terms, although there are one or two which might comprehend the subject. I believe to this day many of Valckenaer's compositions remain unpublished.-ED.

ples to be evolved from, and illustrated by,

*

the facts. After I had gotten my princi

"The true origin of human events is so little susceptible of that kind of evidence which can compel our belief; so many are the disturbing forces which, in every cycle or ellipse of changes, modify the motion given by the first projection; and every age has, or imagines it has, its own circumstances, which render past experience no longer applicable to the present case; that there will never be wanting answers, and explanations, and specious flatteries of hope, to persuade and perplex its government, that the history of the past is inapplicable to their case. And no wonder, if we read history for the facts, instead of reading it for the sake of the general principles, which are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree to its leaves: and no wonder if history so read should find a dangerous rival in novels; nay, if the latter should be preferred to the former, on the score even of probability. I well remember that, when the examples of former Jacobins, as Julius Cæsar, Cromwell, and the like, were adduced in France and England, at the commencement of the French consulate, it was ridiculed as pedantry and pedants' ignorance to fear a repetition of usurpation and military despotism at the close of the enlightened eighteenth century! Even so, in the very dawn of the late tempestuous day, when the revolutions of Corcyra, the proscriptions of the reformers Marius, Cæsar, &c., and the direful effects of the levelling tenets in the peasants' war in Germany (differenced from the tenets of the first French constitution only by the mode of

ples, I pretty generally left the facts to take care of themselves. I never could remember any passages in books, or the particulars of events, except in the gross. I can refer to them. To be sure, I must be a different sort of man from Herder, who once was seriously annoyed with himself, because, in recounting the pedigree of some German royal or electoral family, he missed some one of those worthies and could not recall the

name.

Schmidt * was a Romanist; but I have generally found him candid, as indeed almost

wording them, the figures of speech being borrowed in the one instance from theology, and in the other from modern metaphysics), were urged on the convention and its vindicators; the magi of the day, the true citizens of the world, the plusquam perfecti of patriotism, gave us set proofs that similar results were impossible, and that it was an insult to so philosophical an age, to so enlightened a nation, to dare direct the public eye towards them as to lights of warning.". Statesman's Manual, p. 14.

* Michael Ignatius Schmidt, the author of the History of the Germans. He died in the latter end of the last century. — ED.

all the Austrians are. They are what is ealled good Catholics, but, like our Charles the Second, they never let their religious bigotry interfere with their political welldoing. Kaiser is a most pious son of the church, yet he always keeps his papa in good order.

July 20. 1832.

PURITANS AND JACOBINS.

It was God's mercy to our age that our Jacobins were infidels and a scandal to all sober Christians. Had they been like the old Puritans, they would have trodden church and king to the dust at least for a time.

For one mercy I owe thanks beyond all utterance, that with all my gastric and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like the head of a mountain in blue air and sunshine.

July 21. 1832.

WORDSWORTH.

I HAVE often wished that the first two books of the Excursion had been published separately, under the name of "The Deserted Cottage." They would have formed, what indeed they are, one of the most beautiful poems in the language.

Can dialogues in verse be defended? I cannot but think that a great philosophical poet ought always to teach the reader himself as from himself. A poem does not admit argumentation, though it does admit development of thought. In prose there may be a difference; though I must confess that, even in Plato and Cicero, I am always vexed that the authors do not say what they have to say at once in their own persons. The introductions and little urbanities are, to be