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obsolete interest. We are of opinion that even Milton, now viewed from
a distance of two centuries, is still inadequately judged or
appreciated in his character of poet, of patriot and partisan, or,
finally, in his character of accomplished scholar. But, if so, how
much less can it be pretended that satisfaction has been rendered to
the claims of Coleridge? for, upon Milton, libraries have been
written. There has been time for the malice of men, for the jealousy
of men, for the enthusiasm, the scepticism, the adoring admiration of
men, to expand themselves! There has been room for a Bentley, for an
Addison, for a Johnson, for a wicked Lauder, for an avenging Douglas,
for an idolizing Chateaubriand; and yet, after all, little enough has
been done towards any comprehensive estimate of the mighty being
concerned. Piles of materials have been gathered to the ground; but,
for the monument which should have risen from these materials, neither
the first stone has been laid, nor has a qualified architect yet
presented his credentials. On the other hand, upon Coleridge little,
comparatively, has yet been written, whilst the separate characters on
which the judgment is awaited, are more by one than those which Milton
sustained. Coleridge, also, is a poet; Coleridge, also, was mixed up
with the fervent politics of his age--an age how memorably reflecting
the revolutionary agitations of Milton's age ________ridge, also, was
an extensive and brilliant scholar. Whatever might be the separate
proportions of the two men in each particular department of the three
here noticed, think as the reader will upon that point, sure we are
that either subject is ample enough to make a strain upon the amplest
faculties. How alarming, therefore, for any _honest_ critic, who
should undertake this later subject of Coleridge, to recollect that,
after pursuing him through a zodiac of splendours corresponding to
those of Milton in kind, however different in degree--after weighing
him as a poet, as a philosophic politician, as a scholar, he will have
to wheel after him into another orbit, into the unfathomable _nimbus_
of transcendental metaphysics. Weigh him the critic must in the golden
balance of philosophy the most abstruse--a balance which even itself
requires weighing previously, or he will have done nothing that can be
received for an estimate of the composite Coleridge. This astonishing
man, be it again remembered, besides being an exquisite poe