Et qua sit natura boni? summumque quid eius?’
It is not easy to conceive any thing better than this;—only the next passage beats it hollow, and is itself surpassed by the one after it, ‘as Alps o’er Alps arise.’
So far Mr. Coleridge has indulged himself in ‘a preparatory heat,’ and said nothing about the Bible. But now he girds himself up for his main purpose, places himself at the helm, and undertakes to conduct the statesman to his desired haven in Scripture prophecy and history. ‘But do you require some one or more particular passage from the Bible, that may at once illustrate and exemplify its applicability to the changes and fortunes of empires? Of the numerous chapters that relate to the Jewish tribes, their enemies and allies, before and after their division into two kingdoms, it would be more difficult to state a single one, from which some guiding light might not be struck.’ Does Mr. Coleridge then condescend to oblige us with any one? Nothing can be farther from his thoughts. He is here off again at a tangent, and does not return to the subject for the next seven pages. When he does—it is in the following explicit manner.—‘But I refer to the demand. Were it my object to touch on the present state of public affairs in this kingdom, or on the prospective measures in agitation respecting our sister island, I would direct your most serious meditations to the latter period of the reign of Solomon, and to the revolutions in the reign of Rehoboam, his successor. But I should tread on glowing embers: I will turn to the causes of the revolution, and fearful chastisement of France.’ Let the reader turn to the first book of Kings, in which the parallel passage to our own history at the present crisis stands, according to our author, so alarmingly conspicuous; and he will not be surprised that Mr. Coleridge found himself ‘treading on glowing embers.’ The insidious loyalty or covert Jacobinism of this same parallel, which he declines drawing on account of its extreme applicability, is indeed beyond our comprehension, and not a less ‘curious specimen of psychology,’ than the one immediately preceding it, in which he proves the doctrine of divine right to be revealed in an especial manner in the Hebrew Scriptures.
We should proceed to notice that part of the Sermon, where the orator rails at the public praises of Dr. Bell, and abuses Joseph Lancaster, con amore. Nothing more flat and vapid, in wit or argument, was ever put before the public, which he treats with such contempt. Of the wit, take the following choice sample.
‘But the phrase of the Reading Public, 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, The 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!”’
Mr. Coleridge’s wit and sentimentality do not seem to have settled accounts together; for in the very next page after this ‘third tier of wonders,’ he says—
‘And here my apprehensions point to two opposite errors. The first consists in a disposition to think, that as the peace of nations has been disturbed by the diffusion of a false light, it may be re-established by excluding the people from all knowledge and all prospect of amelioration. O! never, never! Reflection and stirrings of mind, with all their restlessness, and all the errors that result from their imperfection, from the Too much, because Too little, are come into the world. The powers that awaken and foster the spirit of curiosity, are to be found in every village: Books are in every hovel: The infant’s cries are hushed with picture-books: and the Cottager’s child sheds its first bitter tears over pages, which render it impossible for the man to be treated or governed as a child. Here, as in so many other cases, the inconveniences that have arisen from a thing’s having become too general, are best removed by making it universal.’ p. 49.
And yet, with Mr. Coleridge, a reading public is ‘voonders above voonders’—a strange phrase, and yet no fiction! The public is become a reading public, down to the cottager’s child; and he thanks God for it—for that great moral steam-engine, Dr. Bell’s original and unsophisticated plan, which he considers as an especial gift of Providence to the human race—thus about to be converted into one great reading public; and yet he utters his Profaccia upon it with a desponding sigh; and proposes, as a remedy, to put this spirit which has gone forth, under the tutelage of churchwardens, to cant against ‘liberal ideas,’ and ‘the jargon of this enlightened age;’—in other words, to turn this vast machine against itself, and make it a go-cart of corruption, servility, superstition and tyranny. Mr. Coleridge’s first horror is, that there should be a reading public: his next hope is to prevent them from reaping an atom of benefit from ‘reflection and stirrings of mind, with all their restlessness.’
The conclusion of this discourse is even more rhapsodical than the former part of it; and we give the pulpit or rostrum from which Mr. Coleridge is supposed to deliver it, ‘high enthroned above all height,’ the decided preference over that throne of dulness and of nonsense which Pope did erst erect for the doubtful merits of Colley and Sir Richard.
The notes are better, and but a little better than the text. We might select, as specimens of laborious foolery, the passage in which the writer defends second sight, to prove that he has unjustly been accused of visionary paradox, or hints that a disbelief in ghosts and witches is no great sign of the wisdom of the age, or that in which he gives us to understand that Sir Isaac Newton was a great astrologer, or Mr. Locke no conjurer. But we prefer (for our limits are straitened) the author’s description of a green field, which he prefaces by observing, that ‘the book of Nature has been the music of gentle and pious minds in all ages; and that it is the poetry of all human nature to read it likewise in a figurative sense, and to find therein correspondences and symbols of a spiritual nature.’