[374]. Satyrane’s Letters themselves contain a good deal of criticism in and out of the interview with Klopstock (p. 270 sq., ed. cit.), where the credit is claimed by some for Wordsworth. The Critique on Bertram opens well on the “Don Juan” story, but the rest of it is not muy hermosa cosa, combining, as it does, that snarling and carping tone, against which Coleridge is always and justly protesting, with more than a suspicion of personal spite. For Bertram had been preferred to Zapolya.
[375]. The usually known reprint of the 2nd ed. of 1818 is very different from the original, published in the extraordinary fashion described by Coleridge himself in the Biographia, during 1809-10, and collected in volume form thereafter. This latter is perhaps the better worth reading. It is at any rate a confirmation of the at first sight immoral maxim that you should always buy a book you want, whether you can afford it or not. Twenty years ago it was not common but comparatively cheap; now, alas! it is both uncommon and very dear.
[376]. The editor of these, the late Mr Thomas Ashe (author of a poem far too little read—The Sorrows of Hypsipyle), took much pains with them; and if he could have kept back a few flings, would have deserved unqualified thanks. “Never mind God’s will” may be noble counsel, or an unlucky advice to run worse than your head against worse than a stone wall. But it is certainly out of place in very brief and rare notes on a classical author.
[377]. The question—a puzzle like other Quæstiones Estesianæ—about the exact numbers and dates of Coleridge’s Shakespearian courses is not for us. It is enough to say that our extant materials (consisting, in regard to some lectures, of notes and reports from several different sources) chiefly, if not wholly, concern two courses delivered in London (1811-12 and 1818), and one at Bristol, 1813-14. Of the Royal Institution Lectures of 1806-7, on which he relied (throwing them even farther back) to prove his priority to Schlegel, nothing at all, unluckily, is preserved. Indeed Mr Dykes Campbell insisted, and seems to have almost proved, that none at all were delivered till Jan. 1808. And of these we have only Crabb Robinson’s brief references.
[378]. This perhaps should, and can very shortly, be demonstrated:—Observation may be either broad and sweeping, or minute and concentrated; Johnson specifies the former kind in the last half of the first line. Observation may be directed to men, to things, &c.; it is to mankind that he wishes it directed, and he says so in the first half of the second. Further, as this is too abstract, he gives the poetic and imaginative touch by filling in the waste atlas, with “China” and “Peru,” with the porcelain and the pigtails, the llamas and the gold associated with mankind in these countries. And in the name of Logic, and Rhetoric and Poetry into the bargain, “What for no?”
[379]. P. 73, ed. cit. Goethe, of course, was of the same opinion.
[380]. P. 89.
[381]. P. 138.
[382]. P. 139 sq.
[383]. E.g., p. 152 sq.