Here is the doctrine and practice of divine right, with a vengeance. We do not wonder Mr. Coleridge was shy of instances from his Statesman’s Manual, as the rest are like this. He does not say (neither shall we, for we are not salamanders any more than he, to tread on glowing embers) whether he approves of the conduct of all Israel in this case, or of the grand, magnificent, and gracious answer of the son of Solomon; but this we will say, that his bringing or alluding to a passage like this immediately after his inuendo (addressed to the higher classes) that the doctrine of divine right is contained par excellence in the Scriptures alone, is we should suppose, an instance of a power of voluntary self-delusion, and of a delight in exercising it on the most ticklish topics, greater than ever was or ever will be possessed by any other individual that ever did or ever will live upon the face of the earth. ‘Imposture, organised into a comprehensive and self-consistent whole, forms a world of its own, in which inversion becomes the order of nature.’ Compared with such powers of inconceivable mental refinement, hypocrisy is a great baby, a shallow dolt, a gross dunce, a clumsy devil!
Among other passages, unrivalled in style and matter by any other author, take the following:—
‘When I named this Essay a Sermon, I sought to prepare the inquirers after it for the absence of all the usual softenings suggested by worldly prudence, of all compromise between truth and courtesy. But not even as a Sermon would I have addressed the present Discourse to a promiscuous audience: and for this reason I likewise announced it in the title-page, as exclusively ad clerum, i.e. (in the old and wide sense of the word[[25]]) to men of clerkly acquirements, of whatever profession.’ [All that we know is, that there is no such title-page to our copy.] ‘I would that the greater part of our publications could be thus directed, each to its appropriate class of readers. But this cannot be! For among other odd burs and kecksies, the misgrowth of our luxuriant activity, we have a Reading Public, as strange a phrase, methinks, as ever forced a splenetic smile on the staid countenance of meditation; and yet no fiction! For our readers have, in good truth, multiplied exceedingly, and have waxed proud. It would require the intrepid accuracy of a Colquhoun’—[Intrepid and accurate applied to a Colquhoun! It seems that whenever an objection in matter of fact occurs to our author’s mind, he instinctively applies the flattering unction of words to smooth it over to his conscience, as you apply a salve to a sore]—‘to venture at the precise number of that vast company only, whose heads and hearts are dieted at the two public ordinaries of literature, the circulating libraries and the periodical press. But what is the result? Does the inward man thrive on this regimen? Alas! if the average health of the consumers may be judged of by the articles of largest consumption’—[Is not this a side-blow at the Times and Courier?]—‘if the secretions may be conjectured from the ingredients of the dishes that are found best suited to their palates; from all that I have seen, either of the banquet or the guests, I shall utter my profaccia’—[‘Oh thou particular fellow!‘]—‘with a desponding sigh: From a popular philosophy, and philosophic populace, good sense deliver us!’
Why so, any more than from a popular religion or a religious populace, on Mr. Coleridge’s own principle, p. 12, ‘Reason and religion are their own evidence’? We should suspect that our unread author, the ‘Secret Tattle’ of the Press, is thus fastidious, because he keeps an ordinary himself which is not frequented. He professes to be select: but we all know the secret of ‘seminaries for a limited number of pupils.’ Mr. Coleridge addresses his Lay-Sermon ‘to the higher classes,’ in his printed title-page: in that which is not printed he has announced it to be directed ad clerum, which might imply the clergy, but no: he issues another EXTENT for the benefit of the Reading Public, and says he means by the annunciation ad clerum, all persons of clerkly acquirements, that is, who can read and write. What wretched stuff is all this! We well remember a friend of his and ours saying, many years ago, on seeing a little shabby volume of Thomson’s Seasons lying in the window of a solitary ale-house, at the top of a rock hanging over the British Channel,—‘That is true fame!’ If he were to write fifty Lay-Sermons, he could not answer the inference from this one sentence, which is, that there are books that make their way wherever there are readers, and that there ought every where to be readers for such books!
To the words Reading Public, in the above passage, is the following note, which in wit and humour does not fall short of Mr. Southey’s ‘Tract on the Madras System’:—
‘Some participle passive in the diminutive form, eruditorum natio for instance, might seem at first sight a fuller and more exact designation: but the superior force and humour of the former become evident whenever the phrase occurs, as a step or stair in the climax of irony.... Among the revolutions worthy of notice, the change in the introductory sentences and prefatory matter in serious books is not the least striking. The same gross flattery, which disgusts us in the dedications to individuals, in the elder writers, is now transferred to the nation at large, or the Reading Public; while the Jeremiads of our old moralists, and their angry denunciations against the ignorance, immorality, and irreligion of the people appear (mutatis mutandis, and with an appeal to the worst passions, envy, discontent, scorn, vindictiveness,[[26]] &c.) in the shape of bitter libels on ministers, parliament, the clergy; in short, on the state and church, and all persons employed in them. Likewise, I would point out to the reader’s attention the marvellous predominance at present of the words, Idea and Demonstration. Every talker now-a-days has an Idea; aye, and he will demonstrate it too! A few days ago, I heard one of the Reading Public, a thinking and independent smuggler, euphonise the latter word with much significance, in a tirade against the planners of the late African expedition: “As to Algiers, any man that has half an Idea in his skull must know, that it has been long ago dey-monstered, I should say, dey-monstrified,” &c. But the phrase, which occasioned this note, brings to my mind the mistake of a lethargic Dutch traveller, who, returning highly gratified from a showman’s caravan, which he had been tempted to enter by the words Learned Pig, gilt on the pannels, met another caravan of a similar shape, with the Reading Fly on it, in letters of the same size and splendour. “Why, dis is voonders above voonders,” exclaims the Dutchman, takes his seat as first comer, and soon fatigued by waiting, and by the very hush and intensity of his expectation, gives way to his constitutional somnolence, from which he is roused by the supposed showman at Hounslow, with a “In what name, Sir, was your place taken? are you booked all the way for Reading?” Now a Reading Public is (to my mind) more marvellous still, and in the third tier of “Voonders above voonders.“‘
A public that could read such stuff as this with any patience would indeed be so. We do not understand how, with this systematic antipathy to the Reading Public, it is consistent in Mr. Coleridge to declare of ‘Dr. Bell’s original and unsophisticated plan,’ that he ‘himself regards it as an especial gift of Providence to the human race, as an incomparable machine, a vast moral steam-engine.’ Learning is an old University mistress, that he is not willing to part with, except for the use of the church of England; and he is sadly afraid she should be debauched by the ‘liberal ideas’ of Joseph Lancaster! As to his aversion to the prostitution of the word Idea to common uses and in common minds, it is no wonder, from the very exalted idea which he has given us of this term.
‘What other measures I had in contemplation it has been my endeavour to explain elsewhere.... O what treasures of practical wisdom would be once more brought into open day by the solution of this problem,’ to wit, ‘a thorough recasting of the moulds in which the minds of our gentry, the characters of our future land-owners, magistrates, and senators, are to receive their shape and fashion. Suffice it for the present to hint the master-thought. The first man, on whom the light of an Idea dawned did in that same moment receive the spirit and the credentials of a Lawgiver; and as long as man shall exist, so long will the possession of that antecedent knowledge which exists only in the power of an idea, be the one lawful qualification for all dominion in the world of the senses,’ p. 52. Now we do think this a shorter cut towards the undermining of the rotten boroughs, and ousting the present ministry, than any we have yet heard of. One of the most extraordinary ideas in this work is where the Author proves the doctrine of free will from the existence of property; and again, when he recommends the study of the Scriptures, from the example of Heraclitus and Horace. To conclude this most inconclusive piece of work, we find the distant hopes and doubtful expectations of the writer’s mind summed up in the following rare rhapsody. ‘Oh what a mine of undiscovered treasures, what a new world of power and truth would the Bible promise to our future meditation, if in some gracious moment one solitary text of all its inspired contents should but dawn upon us in the pure untroubled brightness of an IDEA, that most glorious birth of the godlike within us, which even as the light, its material symbol, reflects itself from a thousand surfaces, and flies homeward to its parent mind, enriched with a thousand forms, itself above form, and still remaining in its own simplicity and identity! O for a flash of that same light, in which the first position of geometric science that ever loosed itself from the generalizations of a groping and insecure experience, did for the first time reveal itself to a human intellect in all its evidence and in all its fruitfulness, Transparence without Vacuum, and Plenitude without Opacity! O! that a single gleam of our own inward experience would make comprehensible to us the rapturous Eureka, and the grateful hecatomb of the philosopher of Samos: or that vision which, from the contemplation of an arithmetical harmony, rose to the eye of Kepler, presenting the planetary world, and all their orbits in the divine order of their ranks and distances; or which, in the falling of an apple, revealed to the ethereal intuition of our own Newton the constructive principle of the material universe. The promises which I have ventured to hold forth concerning the hidden treasures of the Law and the Prophets will neither be condemned as paradox, or as exaggeration, by the mind that has learnt to understand the possibility that the reduction of the sands of the sea to number should be found a less stupendous problem by Archimedes than the simple conception of the Parmenidean One. What, however, is achievable by the human understanding without this light may be comprised in the epithet κενόσπουδοι and a melancholy comment on that phrase would the history of the human Cabinets and Legislatures for the last thirty years furnish! The excellent Barrow, the last of the disciples of Plato and Archimedes among our modern mathematicians, shall give the description and state the value; and, in his words, I shall conclude:—
‘Aliud agere, to be impertinently busy, doing that which conduceth to no good purpose, is, in some respect, worse than to do nothing. Of such industry we may understand that of the Preacher, “The labour of the foolish wearieth every one of them.”’
A better conclusion could not be found for this Lay-Sermon: for greater nonsense the author could not write, even though he were inspired expressly for the purpose.