Mr. Coleridge, in his prospectus, modestly observed, that the attending his course of Lectures on Poetry, and ‘those fair parts that there adjacent lie,’ would enable any grown gentleman to talk on all subjects of polite conversation, except religion and politics. By the above extract, and from what we have heard, it should appear that Mr. Coleridge has gone beyond his engagement, and given his grown gentleman a slice of religion and politics in the same dish with his account of the Dark Ages. Not like a lady who puts her mind into the postscript, Mr. C. does that first which he promised last. Whatever may be the case with his metaphysical hypercriticisms, his religious and political opinions seem pretty transparent. As he has sent a passage against Jacobinism to his friend Mr. Stuart, of the Courier, we wonder that he could not (as he still retains all his old sentiments, with only the advantage of new light added to them) have vamped up a sly passage from his Conciones ad Populum, in favour of the so-called Jacobin principles he formerly professed, to have sent it to us. We should gladly do all in our power to assist Mr. Coleridge in publishing a harmony of his opinions, which are, we suspect, too liberal and multifarious to be comprised, in all their speculative and practical bearings, in a shabby Evening Paper. As to this argument about Caliban, we suspect it must have been sadly curtailed and scissarsed by Mr. Stuart, in order to fit his cloth to his coat, and to bring Mr. Coleridge’s ‘unhouselled free conditions into the circumscription and confine’ of the Editor’s party politics. Caliban is so far from being a prototype of modern Jacobinism, that he is strictly the legitimate sovereign of the isle, and Prospero and the rest are usurpers, who have ousted him from his hereditary jurisdiction by superiority of talent and knowledge. ‘This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother;’ and he complains bitterly of the artifices used by his new friends to cajole him out of it. He is the Louis XVIII. of the enchanted island in The Tempest: and Dr. Stoddart would be able to prove by the civil law, that he had the same right to keep possession of it, ‘independently of his conduct or merits, as Mr. Coke has to his estate at Holkham.’ Even his affront to the daughter of that upstart philosopher Prospero, could not be brought to bar his succession to the natural sovereignty of his dominions. His boast that ‘he had peopled else this isle with Calibans,’ is very proper and dignified in such a person; for it is evident that the right line would be supplanted in failure of his issue; and that the superior beauty and accomplishments of Ferdinand and Miranda could no more be opposed to the legitimate claims of this deformed and loathsome monster, than the beauty and intellect of the Bonaparte family can be opposed to the bloated and ricketty minds and bodies of the Bourbons, cast, as they are, in the true Jus Divinum mould! This is gross. Why does Mr. Coleridge provoke us to write as great nonsense as he talks? Why also does he not tell, in his general ‘lunes and abstractions,’ what to think of Prospero’s brother, the Duke, who usurped his crown, and drove him into banishment; or of those finished Court-practitioners, Sebastian and Antonio, who wanted to murder the sleeping King? Were they Jacobins like Caliban, or legitimate personages, like Mr. Coleridge? Did they belong to the new school or the old? That is the question; but it is a question which our lay-preacher will take care not to answer. Shakespear, says Mr. Coleridge, always spoke of mobs with contempt, but with kindness. Mr. Coleridge does better: he speaks of mobs with contempt, and of Courts with kindness. Again, says this critical discoverer of a meaning in a millstone, Caliban had that envy of superior genius and virtue, which was a mark of the true Jacobins in the time of the French Revolution. We are sorry to hear, that on one occasion Mr. C. was interrupted in a tirade upon this favourite topic, on which he was led out of pure generosity, to enlighten the grown gentlemen who came to hear him, by a person calling out in good broad Scotch, ‘But you once praised that Revolution, Mr. Coleridge!’ The worst is, that Mr. Coleridge praised that Revolution when it was triumphant, going on ‘conquering and to conquer,’ as it was thought; and now that it is fallen, this man of mighty mind,—of gigantic genius, and superiority to interested motives and mob-sycophancy, insults over it,—tramples on the carcase,—kicks it with his asinine hoofs,—and brays a long, loud, dreary, doleful bravura over it. Of what the Jacobins were in the year 1793, this person has a right to speak, both from experience and observation. The worst he can say of them is, that he was once one of the set. He says that Jacobins are envious people,—and that envious people, not being able to praise themselves openly, take an indirect method of doing this, by depreciating and secretly slandering others. Was it upon this principle that the reformed Jacobin, Mr. Coleridge (what is bred in the bone will never come out of the flesh) took such pains, two years ago, to praise himself by depreciating and canting profound German mysticism against Mr. Maturin’s successful tragedy of Bertram, which he proved, being himself in the secret, to be ultra-Jacobinism, and quite different in its philosophical and poetical tendency from his own sweet injured Zapolya,—the harbinger of Legitimacy and the Bourbons, which was offered to Mr. Whitbread for his acceptance, as a piece of ultra-Royalism, and accordingly rejected by that friend of constitutional government and the people; but which any one may see represented to the life at the Royal Circus, accompanied with music, and compressed into three acts, to make it ‘tedious and brief.’ Or was it from the remains of the Jacobin leaven in our philosophical poet, that in a public library at Bristol he endeavoured to advance his own reputation on the ruins of that of a friend, by that lofty panegyric which he pronounced on our laurel-honouring laureat:—‘The man may indeed be a reviewer, but God help him if he fancies himself a poet?’ And is this the man to talk about the envy of the people towards hereditary virtue and wisdom, as the cause and root of Jacobinism? This—
‘Fie, Sir! O fie! ’tis fulsome,
Sir, there’s a soil for that rank weed flattery
To trail its poisonous and obscene clusters:
A poet’s soul should bear a richer fruitage—
The aconite grew not in Eden. Thou,
That thou, with lips tipt with the fire of Heaven,
’Th’ excursive eye, that in its earth-wide range
Drinks in the grandeur and the loveliness,
That breathes along this high-wrought world of man,