cal Ballads_ were an experiment
about to be tried by him and Wordsworth, to see how far the public
taste would endure poetry written in a more natural and simple style
than had hitherto been attempted; totally discarding the artifices of
poetical diction, and making use only of such words as had probably
been common in the most ordinary language since the days of Henry II.
Some comparison was introduced between Shakespeare and Milton. He said
'he hardly knew which to prefer. Shakespeare appeared to him a mere
stripling in the art; he was as tall and as strong, with infinitely
more activity than Milton, but he never appeared to have come to man's
estate; or if he had, he would not have been a man, but a monster.' He
spoke with contempt of Gray, and with intolerance of Pope. He did not
like the versification of the latter. He observed that 'the ears of
these couplet-writers might be charged with having short memories,
that could not retain the harmony of whole passages.' He thought
little of Junius as a writer; he had a dislike of Dr. Johnson; and a
much higher opinion of Burke as an orator and politician, than of Fox
or Pitt. He however thought him very inferior in richness of style and
imagery to some of our elder prose-writers, particularly Jeremy
Taylor. He liked Richardson, but not Fielding; nor could I get him to
enter into the merits of _Caleb Williams_.[16] In short, he was
profound and discriminating with respect to those authors whom he
liked, and where he gave his judgement fair play; capricious,
perverse, and prejudiced in his antipathies and distastes. We loitered
on the 'ribbed sea-sands', in such talk as this, a whole morning, and
I recollect met with a curious sea-weed, of which John Chester told us
the country name! A fisherman gave Coleridge an account of a boy that
had been drowned the day before, and that they had tried to save him
at the risk of their own lives. He said 'he did not know how it was
that they ventured, but, Sir, we have a _nature_ towards one another.'
This expression, Coleridge remarked to me, was a fine illustration of
that theory of disinterestedness which I (in common with Butler) had
adopted. I broached to him an argument of mine to prove that
_likeness_ was not mere association of ideas. I said that the mark in
the sand put one in mind of a man's foot, not because it was part of a
former impression of a man's foot (for it was quite new) but because
it was like the shape of a man's