n his eloquence, to the same
company as Falstaff and Micawber. He was, to some extent, the invention of
a Scottish humourist named Boswell. "Burke," we read in Coleridge's _Table
Talk_, "said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in
talking than writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life."
Coleridge's conversation is not to the same extent a coloured expression
of personality. He speaks out of the solitude of an oracle rather than
struts upon the stage of good company, a master of repartees. At his best,
he becomes the mouthpiece of universal wisdom, as when he says: "To most
men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only
the track it has passed." He can give us in a sentence the central truth
of politics, reconciling what is good in Individualism with what is good
in Socialism in a score or so of words:

That is the most excellent state of society in which the patriotism
of the citizen ennobles, but does not merge, the individual energy
of the man.

And he can give common sense as well as wisdom imaginative form, as in the
sentence:

Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels
of error, lest you get your brains knocked out.

"I am, by the law of my nature, a reasoner," said Coleridge, and he
explained that he did not mean by this "an arguer." He was a discoverer of
order, of laws, of causes, not a controversialist. He sought after
principles, whether in politics or literature. He quarrelled with Gibbon
because his _Decline and Fall_ was "little else but a disguised collection
of ... splendid anecdotes" instead of a philosophic search for the
ultimate causes of the ruin of the Roman Empire. Coleridge himself
formulated these causes in sentences that are worth remembering at a time
when we are debating whether the world of the future is to be a vast
boxing ring of empires or a community of independent nations. He said:

The true key to the declension of the Roman Empire--which is not to
be found in all Gibbon's immense work--may be stated in two words:
the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the
_national_ character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a
nation.

One must not claim too much for Coleridge, however. He was a seer with his
head among the stars, but he was also a human being with uneven gait,
stumbling amid infirmities, prejudices, and unhappinesses. He himself
boast