rced at times to notice its author. Nor is this to
be regretted. We remember a line of Horace never yet properly
translated, viz:--

"Nec scutica dignum horribili sectere flagello."

The true translation of which, as we assure the unlearned reader,
is--"Nor must you pursue with the horrid knout of Christopher that man
who merits only a switching." Very true. We protest against all
attempts to invoke the exterminating knout; for _that_ sends a man to
the hospital for two months; but you see that the same judicious poet,
who dissuades an appeal to the knout, indirectly recommends the
switch, which, indeed, is rather pleasant than otherwise, amiably
playful in some of its little caprices, and in its worst, suggesting
only a pennyworth of diachylon.

We begin by professing, with hearty sincerity, our fervent admiration
of the extraordinary man who furnishes the theme for Mr Gillman's
_coup-d'essai_ in biography. He was, in a literary sense, our
brother--for he also was amongst the contributors to _Blackwood_--and
will, we presume, take his station in that Blackwood gallery of
portraits, which, in a century hence, will possess more interest for
intellectual Europe than any merely martial series of portraits, or
any gallery of statesmen assembled in congress, except as regards one
or two leaders; for defunct major-generals, and secondary
diplomatists, when their date is past, awake no more emotion than last
year's advertisements, or obsolete directories; whereas those who, in
a stormy age, have swept the harps of passion, of genial wit, or of
the wrestling and gladiatorial reason, become more interesting to men
when they can no longer be seen as bodily agents, than even in the
middle chorus of that intellectual music over which, living, they
presided.

Of this great camp Coleridge was a leader, and fought amongst the
_primipili_; yet, comparatively, he is still unknown. Heavy, indeed,
are the arrears still due to philosophic curiosity on the real merits,
and on the separate merits, of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge as a
poet--Coleridge as a philosopher! How extensive are those questions,
if those were all! and upon neither question have we yet any
investigation--such as, by compass of views, by research, or even by
earnestness of sympathy with the subject, can, or ought to satisfy, a
philosophic demand. Blind is that man who can persuade himself that
the interest in Coleridge, taken as a total object, is becoming a