Lectures and Notes on Shakspere and other English Poets

).

Collier, in his notes of Coleridge's conversation (November I, 1811), gives the substance, in all probability, of the attack on Campbell alluded to in the next letter. Coleridge said that

"neither Southey, Scott, nor Campbell would by their poetry survive much beyond the day when they lived and wrote. Their works seemed to him not to have the seeds of vitality, the real germs of long life. The two first were entertaining as tellers of stories in verse; but the last, in his Pleasures of Hope, obviously had no fixed design, but when a thought (of course, not a very original one) came into his head, he put it down in couplets, and afterwards strung the disjecta membra (not poetæ) together. Some of the best things in it were borrowed; for instance the line:

'And freedom shriek'd when Kosciusko fell,'

was taken from a much-ridiculed piece by Dennis, a pindaric on William III.:

'Fair Liberty shriek'd out aloud, aloud Religion groaned.'

It is the same production in which the following much-laughed-at specimen of bathos is found:

'Nor Alps nor Pyreneans keep him out,
Nor fortified redoubt.'

Coleridge had little toleration for Campbell, and considered him, as far as he had gone, a mere verse-maker "

'And freedom shriek'd when Kosciusko fell,'

'Fair Liberty shriek'd out aloud, aloud Religion groaned.'

'Nor Alps nor Pyreneans keep him out,
Nor fortified redoubt.'

(Ashe's Introduction to

Lectures on Shakspere

, pp. 16, 17).