ut 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 Shakspeare and Milton. He said "he hardly knew which to
prefer. Shakspeare 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_.[145] In
short, he was profound and discriminating with respect to those authors
whom he liked, and where he gave his judgment 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
foot. He assented to the justness of th