age"--mind the object before you. Dr Alison, a wise man,
"_hoc_ egit:" Coleridge "_aliud_ egit." And we see the result. In a
case which suited him, by interesting his peculiar feeling, Coleridge
could command

"Attention full ten times as much as there needs."

But search documents, value evidence, or thresh out bushels of
statistical tables, Coleridge could not, any more than he could ride
with Elliot's dragoons.

Another instance of Coleridge's inaptitude for such studies as
political economy is found in his fancy, by no means "rich and rare,"
but meagre and trite, that taxes can never injure public prosperity by
mere excess of quantity; if they injure, we are to conclude that it
must be by their quality and mode of operation, or by their false
appropriation, (as, for instance, if they are sent out of the country
and spent abroad.) Because, says Coleridge, if the taxes are exhaled
from the country as vapors, back they come in drenching showers.
Twenty pounds ascend in a Scotch mist to the Chancellor of the
Exchequer from Leeds; but does it evaporate? Not at all: By return of
post down comes an order for twenty pounds' worth of Leeds cloth, on
account of Government, seeing that the poor men of the ----th regiment
want new gaiters. True; but of this return twenty pounds, not more
than four will be profit, _i. e._, surplus accruing to the public
capital; whereas, of the original twenty pounds, every shilling was
surplus. The same unsound fancy has been many times brought forward;
often in England, often in France. But it is curious, that its first
appearance upon any stage was precisely two centuries ago, when as yet
political economy slept with the pre-Adamites, viz. in the Long
Parliament. In a quarto volume of the debates during 1644-5, printed
as an independent work, will be found the same identical doctrine,
supported very sonorously by the same little love of an illustration
from the see-saw of mist and rain.

Political economy was not Coleridge's forte. In politics he was
happier. In mere personal politics, he (like every man when reviewed
from a station distant by forty years) will often appear to have
erred; nay, he will be detected and nailed in error. But this is the
necessity of us all. Keen are the refutations of time. And absolute
results to posterity are the fatal touchstone of opinions in the past.
It is undeniable, besides, that Coleridge had strong personal
antipathies, for instance, to Messrs Pi