[364]. Four-and-thirty closely printed pages in the Bohn ed.
[366]. Yet there are curious lapses even here. Take the extreme example, Alice Fell, of whom even her author was half-ashamed as mean and homely. How about “fierce career,” and “smitten with a startling sound,” and the inversion of “Proud creature was she”?
[367]. My friend Prof. Raleigh, in his brilliant and (for that word hath something derogated) really critical study of Wordsworth (London, 1903), is of a different opinion: but I hold my own. And I do not enter into controversy on the point, because I have nothing to add to the text, written before Prof. Raleigh’s book appeared.
[368]. I am well acquainted with the glosses on this famous phrase.
[369]. “Concluding” in strictness they are not; for Coleridge, in one of his whims, chose to transfer Satyrane’s Letters from The Friend to be a sort of coda to the Biographia, tipped it with the rather brutish sting of the Critique on Bertram, and attempted Versöhnung with a mystical peroration. But the thing really and logically ends with the words “Betty Foy,” sub fin., chap. xxi.
[370]. He somewhere sighs for Southey’s command of terse crisp sentences, and compares his own to “Surinam toads with young ones sprouting and hanging about them as they go.”
[371]. An agreeable American critic, Miss Agnes Repplier, once remarked that Coleridge must have been “a very beatable child.” This beatability continued till his death: you can only worship him in the spirit of the Portuguese sailor towards his saints.
[372]. Mrs General Baynes of the Honourable Mrs Boldero in The Adventures of Philip, chap. xx.
[373]. Mr Dykes Campbell (whose threading of the maze and piecing of the ends of Coleridgiana is a standing marvel) thought, or seemed to think, that the Introduction grew into the Biographia itself.