d, unaccountably, he chose to
exhibit his whimsical partialities by dressing up, as it were, in his
own clothes, such a set of scarecrows as eye has not beheld. Heavens!
what an ark of unclean beasts would have been Coleridge's private
_menagerie_ of departed philosophers, could they all have been trotted
out in succession! But did the reader feel them to be the awful bores
which, in fact, they were? No; because Coleridge had blown upon these
withered anatomies, through the blowpipe of his own creative genius, a
stream of gas that swelled the tissue of their antediluvian wrinkles,
forced colour upon their cheeks, and splendour upon their sodden eyes.
Such a process of ventriloquism never _has_ existed. He spoke by their
organs. They were the tubes; and he forced through their wooden
machinery his own Beethoven harmonies.

First came Dr Andrew Bell. We knew him. Was he dull? Is a wooden spoon
dull? Fishy were his eyes; torpedinous was his manner; and his main
idea, out of two which he really had, related to the moon--from which
you infer, perhaps, that he was lunatic. By no means. It was no craze,
under the influence of the moon, which possessed him; it was an idea
of mere hostility to the moon. The Madras people, like many others,
had an idea that she influenced the weather. Subsequently the
Herschels, senior and junior, systematized this idea; and then the
wrath of Andrew, previously in a crescent state, actually dilated to a
plenilunar orb. The Westmoreland people (for at the lakes it was we
knew him) expounded his condition to us by saying that he was
"maffled;" which word means "perplexed in the extreme." His wrath did
not pass into lunacy; it produced simple distraction; an uneasy
fumbling with the idea; like that of an old superannuated dog who
longs to worry, but cannot for want of teeth. In this condition you
will judge that he was rather tedious. And in this condition Coleridge
took him up. Andrew's other idea, because he _had_ two, related to
education. Perhaps six-sevenths of that also came from Madras. No
matter, Coleridge took _that_ up; Southey also; but Southey with his
usual temperate fervour. Coleridge, on the other hand, found celestial
marvels both in the scheme and in the man. Then commenced the
apotheosis of Andrew Bell; and because it happened that his opponent,
Lancaster, between ourselves, really _had_ stolen his ideas from Bell,
what between the sad wickedness of Lancaster and the celestial
tra