COLERIDGE'S UNPUBLISHED MSS.
(Vol. iv., p. 411.; Vol. vi., p. 533.; Vol. viii., p. 43.)
When I sent you my Note on this subject at the last of the above references, I had not read Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, Moxon, 1836. The subjoined extracts from that work confirm that note, vol. i, pp. 104. 156. 162.
August 8, 1820. Coleridge:
"I at least am as well as I ever am, and my regular employment, in which Mr. Green is weekly my amanuensis, [is] the work on the books of the Old and New Testaments, introduced by the assumptions and postulates required as the preconditions of a fair examination of Christianity as a scheme of doctrines, precepts, and histories, drawn or at least deducible from these books."
January, 1821. Coleridge:
"In addition to these —— of my GREAT WORK, to the preparation of which more than twenty years of my life have been devoted, and on which my hopes of extensive and permanent utility, of fame, in the noblest sense of the word, mainly rest, &c. Of this work, &c., the result must finally be revolution of all that has been called Philosophy or Metaphysics in England and France since the era of the commencing predominance of the mechanical system at the restoration of our second Charles, and with the present fashionable views, not only of religion, morals, and politics, but even of the modern physics and physiology.... Of this work, something more than a volume has been dictated by me, so as to exist fit for the press, to my friend and enlightened pupil, Mr. Green; and more than as much again would have been evolved and delivered to paper, but that for the last six or eight months I have been compelled to break off our weekly meeting," &c.
Vol. ii. p. 219. Editor:
"The prospectus of these lectures (viz. on Philosophy) is so full of interest, and so well worthy of attention, that I subjoin it; trusting that the Lectures themselves will soon be furnished by, or under the auspices of Mr. Green, the most constant and the most assiduous of his disciples. That gentleman will, I earnestly hope—and doubt not—see, feel, the necessity of giving the whole of his great master's views, opinions, and anticipations; not those alone in which he more entirely sympathises, or those which may have more ready acceptance in the present time. He will not shrink from the great, the sacred duty he has voluntarily undertaken, from any regards of prudence, still less from that most hopeless form of fastidiousness, the wish to conciliate those who are never to be conciliated, inferior minds smarting under a sense of inferiority, and the imputation which they are conscious is just, that but for Him they never could have been; that distorted, dwarfed, changed, as are all his views and opinions, by passing athwart minds with which they could not assimilate, they are yet almost the only things which give such minds a status in literature."