might
crumple a delicate and beautifully wrought fabric to prove that it has
not the wearing qualities of a blacksmith's apron, Hazlitt seized upon
the ethereal story of _Christabel_, with its wealth of mediaeval and
romantic imagery, and held up to ridicule the incidents that did not
conform to modern English conceptions of life. It requires no great art
to produce such a critique; the same method was applied to _Christabel_
with hardly less success by the anonymous hack of the _Anti-Jacobin_.
Whatever may have been Hazlitt's motives, we cannot understand how a
critic of his unquestioned ability could quote with ridicule some of the
very finest lines of _Kubla Khan_, and expect his readers to concur with
his opinion. The lack of taste was more apparent because he quoted, with
qualified praise, six lines of no extraordinary merit from _Christabel_
and insisted, that with this one exception, there was not a couplet in
the whole poem that achieved the standard of a newspaper poetry-corner
or the effusions scratched by peripatetic bards on inn-windows. An
interesting discussion between Mr. Thomas Hutchinson and Col. Prideaux
concerning Hazlitt's responsibility for this and other critiques on
Coleridge in the _Edinburgh Review_ will be found in _Notes and Queries_
(Ninth Series), X, pp. 388, 429; XI, 170, 269.

The other reviews of _Christabel_ were all unfavorable. Most extravagant
was the utterance of the _Monthly Magazine_, XLVI, p. 407, in 1818, when
it declared that the "poem of Christabel is only fit for the inmates of
Bedlam. We are not acquainted in the history of literature with so great
an insult offered to the public understanding as the publication of that
r[h]apsody of delirium."

Hazlitt's primitive remarks on the metre of _Christabel_ are of little
interest. Coleridge was, of course, wrong in stating that his metre was
founded on a new principle. The irregularly four-stressed line occurs in
Spenser's _Shepherd's Calender_ and can be traced back through the
halting tetrameters of Skelton. Coleridge himself alludes to this fact
in his note to his poem _The Raven_, and elsewhere.

Coleridge's earlier poetical publications were received with commonplace
critiques usually mildly favorable. For reviews of his _Poems_ (1796)
see _Monthly Rev._, XX, n.s., p. 194; _Analytical Rev._, XXIII, p. 610;
_British Critic_, VII, p. 549; and _Critical Rev._, XVII, n.s., p. 209;
the second edition of _Poems_ (1797) is noticed