, that he sacrificed truth to piquancy in his narrations. Still it is a
heavy charge to suspect so gross a deviation, as that of inventing the
description of an ascent which he never accomplished; especially when the
ascent is a feat not at all difficult. The evidence for this disbelief must
be derived from a series of errors in the account, which I do not remember
to have observed while reading him on the spot. The charitable supposition
of MR. MACRAY, that he mistook the summit, is hardly compatible with so
defined a cone as that of Etna; but all must agree with his just estimate
of that description, and which the _Biographie Universelle_ itself terms
"chef d'oeuvre de narration." Brydone, no doubt, is as unsafe for the road
as he is amusing for the study, and perhaps from that very reason.

MONSON.

Gatton Park.

* * * * *

COLERIDGE'S UNPUBLISHED MSS.

(Vol. iv., p. 411.; Vol. vi., p. 533.; Vol. viii., p. 43.)

When I sent you my Note on this subject at the last of the above
references, I had not read _Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of
S. T. Coleridge_, Moxon, 1836. The subjoined extracts from that work
confirm that note, vol. i, pp. 104. 156. 162.

August 8, 1820. Coleridge:

"I at least am as well as I ever am, and my regular employment, in
which Mr. Green is weekly my amanuensis, [is] the work on the books of
the Old and New Testaments, introduced by the assumptions and
postulates required as the preconditions of a fair examination of
Christianity as a scheme of doctrines, precepts, and histories, drawn
or at least deducible from these books."

January, 1821. Coleridge:

"In addition to these ---- of my GREAT WORK, to the preparation of
which more than twenty years of my life have been devoted, and on which
my hopes of extensive and permanent utility, of fame, in the noblest
sense of the word, mainly rest, &c. Of this work, &c., the result must
finally be revolution of all that has been called _Philosophy_ or
Metaphysics in England and France since the era of the commencing
predominance of the mechanical system at the restoration of our second
Charles, and with the present fashionable views, not only of religion,
morals, and politics, but even of the modern physics and physiology....
Of this work, something more than a volume has been {497} dictated by
me, so as to exist fit for the press, to m