In the Edinburgh Review for September, 1816 (vol. XXVII. pp. 58–67), appeared a review of Coleridge’s Christabel, as to the authorship of which there has been a good deal of discussion. Coleridge himself believed that it was written by Hazlitt. (See post, note to p. 155.) Hazlitt never acknowledged the authorship, and there is indeed no external evidence upon the subject. Mr. Dykes Campbell (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 225, note 1) regards the ascription of the review to Hazlitt as being ‘probably, though not certainly, correct.’ Neither Mr. Ireland nor Mr. W. C. Hazlitt ascribes it to Hazlitt. Quite recently the question of Hazlitt’s authorship, determined one way or the other by a consideration of the internal evidence, has been the subject of a controversy in Notes and Queries (9th Series, A. 388, 429: XI. 170, 269), to which reference should be made. Mr. Andrew Lang in his Life of J. G. Lockhart (vol. I. pp. 139–142) refers to the review at some length as a kind of set-off against Lockhart’s early indiscretions in Blackwood. Without discussing the authorship of the review, he is indignant with Jeffrey for having admitted it into the Edinburgh. The present editors are disposed to think that the review is substantially the work of Hazlitt, though, as in the case of the review of Rimini, it may be conjectured that Jeffrey used his editorial pen pretty freely. Since absolute certainty is not at present attainable, the review, instead of being printed in the text, is given below.
Christabel: Kubla Khan, a Vision. The Pains of Sleep. By S. T. Coleridge, Esq. London. Murray, 1816.
‘The advertisement by which this work was announced to the publick, carried in its front a recommendation from Lord Byron,—who, it seems, has somewhere praised Christabel, “as a wild and singularly original and beautiful poem.” Great as the noble bard’s merits undoubtedly are in poetry, some of his latest publications dispose us to distrust his authority, where the question is what ought to meet the public eye; and the works before us afford an additional proof, that his judgment on such matters is not absolutely to be relied on. Moreover, we are a little inclined to doubt the value of the praise which one poet lends another. It seems now-a-days to be the practice of that once irritable race to laud each other without bounds; and one can hardly avoid suspecting, that what is thus lavishly advanced may be laid out with a view to being repaid with interest. Mr. Coleridge, however, must be judged by his own merits.
‘It is remarked, by the writers upon the Bathos, that the true profound is surely known by one quality—its being wholly bottomless; insomuch, that when you think you have attained its utmost depth in the work of some of its great masters, another, or peradventure the same, astonishes you, immediately after, by a plunge so much more vigorous, as to outdo all his former outdoings. So it seems to be with the new school, or, as they may be termed, the wild or lawless poets. After we had been admiring their extravagance for many years, and marvelling at the ease and rapidity with which one exceeded another in the unmeaning or infantine, until not an idea was left in the rhyme—or in the insane, until we had reached something that seemed the untamed effusion of an author whose thoughts were rather more free than his actions—forth steps Mr. Coleridge, like a giant refreshed with sleep, and as if to redeem his character after so long a silence, (“his poetic powers having been, he says, from 1808 till very lately, in a state of suspended animation,” p. v.) and breaks out in these precise words—
“’Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awaken’d the crowing cock;
Tu—whit!——Tu—whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.
Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,