[814]. Carlyle, in a very fine passage, admits their acceptance of “all true singers of every age and clime.” I fear the Devil’s Advocate’s devil, if you gave him a little time, could collect a curious dossier of contrary instances: but this matters little. They are entitled to credit for maintaining and spreading this catholic faith. But even Dryden, according to his lights, had championed it a century earlier; Gray, if he could have shaken off the deadly sin of Accidia—the deadliest to the man of letters—would have been Herder + either Schlegel, and more also, long before any of them; and Coleridge is Coleridge, however much he may have annoyed Carlyle at Highgate.
[815]. P. 233 of the vol. for the University—year 1902-3.
[816]. The rest of this Interchapter may be taken—like the two Appendices—as a sample of that fourth volume of “Critical Excursus” which I should have liked to give, had I thought that readers would endure it.
[817]. Add some other blessings, as that the periodical can contradict itself—which the book sometimes does, but should not.
[818]. I beg pardon: when I wrote the above I had not read the boast of the gentleman who could “come to a pile of new books, tear the entrails out of them, and write a 1500-word causerie, passably stylistic, all within sixty minutes”! But perhaps this also was irony?
[819]. I take my examples as usual from English; but, as usual, nothing but the consideration of space prevents me from adducing French and German parallels.
[820]. It was originally published, remember, before the death of Coleridge, and well within the period of our Book, even as to English.
[821]. It is of course impossible to appreciate this stanza fully except as a modification, and in comparison with other modifications, of the normal decasyllabic quatrain of Gondibert and Annus Mirabilis. Yet persons calling themselves critics have sometimes been amusingly indignant at the suggestion of this obvious fact.
[822]. The original form of this, in 1832-33, was less perfect, but the aim and the principle are there already.
[823]. Mr Hall Caine, in his Cobwebs of Criticism (London, 1883); Mr E. Stevenson, in a useful and unpretentious collection of Early Reviews (London, n. d.), &c., &c.