PREFACE. "Things of this nature scarce survive that night Is scarce aught can be said, but that they were." HIS was a favourite quotation with Mr. Coleridge; he used it more than once in reference to those same newspaper writings, contributions to the Morning Post and the Courier-which are here restored to the Public, or rather presented to a new and somewhat different Public, under the name of Essays on his own Times, a title devised to express, as compendiously as may be, their general character and content. The author himself, I believe, never dreamed of their being fished up from the abysses of the Past, and at times, while engaged in this "pious but not profitable labour," as the preventive criticism of some of my friends has termed it, I have fancied I saw him with a well known smile on his face, affectionate, yet with just a tincture of disdain for the thing done, not the person doing it, at the pains I was taking to recover entire and rescue from oblivion, what he doubtless composed, with far greater ease and rapidity than I have reproduced it, in a few hours scattered over a few years of his ever-varying life.-Such truly his life was, during all but the last part of it, comprising his abode at Highgate; and this is readily intelligible; for want of sufficient health and sufficient means is apt to render a man restless,-full of tossings to and fro till the dawning of the day,—or to use the words of a later poet than Job, Simigliante a quella 'nferma, Che non può trovar posa in su le piume, —A night it was indeed that gave birth to these writings a season of comparative obscurity to his fame and of perplexity to his health-seeking steps. That the rolling stone gathers no moss is as true with regard to literary as to pecuniary advancement. But I must not launch out into this theme of my father's difficulties and neglected merits, neglected while he might have enjoyed the recognition of them—which some may describe to themselves as spreading out before me like a sea without a shore!" 66 It has been elsewhere observed how he was ever bent on speeding forward, finding the Past renewed and formed anew in the Present, continually casting his old thoughts into the Medean chaldron of energetic reflection; though, in some instances, when the matter could not be modified nor the manner amended, he introduced former sentences into a fresh publication without attempting, by any disguise or artifice, to make them appear new. Writings for the day by a thinker of this cast, who, though not originally devoid of popular talent, was unfitted to please his day by reason of the nature of his intellect and his irrepressible tendency to systematize on so large a scale, that he could with difficulty adjust and proportion himself to a narrow one, may perhaps be deemed less unworthy of republication than essays, however finished and brilliant, which are for the day in a more exclusive sense, and may have better pleased their day, as more absolutely devoted to its service. With my Father the subject on which he wrote was engrossing and pursued for its own sake, the occasion and immediate object of publication being in some degree lost sight of. But though many will assent to this remark, and some do eagerly assert that nothing which he deliberately composed should be suffered to perish, let it not be imagined that these volumes are published in the expectation of their exciting a general interest even in that class of studious readers, with whom the author's more finished and methodized works find acceptance. It is rather with a view to the wants and wishes of those who now are, or those who hereafter shall be, concerned in my Father's personal history, both his literal descendants and all who are as children to him in affectionate reverence for his mind, that I have brought together what must, at all events, form an important stock of material toward his biography— toward the understanding of his life at least, whether any regular narrative of it be composed or no. For this publication will present, in the most authentic and living form, a part of his personal career; it will show how certain portions of his time and energies were employed, and will exhibit the progress and formation of his political system more vividly and accurately than it would appear in any sketch or summary. The interests of some future biographer indeed have been present to my mind in all that I have done for editions of my Father's writings, and from this motive I have seized opportunities of recording my contemporary knowledge and impressions on certain points, regardless of probable cavils from those rash critics, the indifferent and unconcerned, against encumbering the book with commentary, feeling that, as Hooker says on a like subject, any trouble thus put in the reader's way he may absolve himself from if he chooses it, though, admitting that foot-notes are, after a sort, an evil to be endured only in case of necessity, I have in later instances banished the annotations of whatever kind, some very brief ones excepted, to the end of the volume, leaving the margin uninvaded except by notes of the author, and perusers of the work more free to omit these additions, than if they caught the eye from the bottom of the page, and connected themselves as part, yet not part, of the text. In the Appendix to the Biographia Literaria I have already given extracts on the subject of my Father's politics from a disquisition by Mr. Dequincey, and I shall not scruple to quote part of those extracts again; for assuredly, if there be any periods of modern pens which, for happy construction and graceful use of our mother tongue, are worthy of repeated perusal, those of the writer just named are worthy. "Worlds of fine thinking," he says of the daily press, "lie buried in that vast abyss, never to be disentombed, or restored to human admiration. Like the sea it has swallowed treasures without end, that no diving bell will bring up again. But no where, throughout its shoreless magazines of wealth, does there lie such a bed of pearls, confounded with the rubbish and "purgamenta" of ages, as in the political papers of Coleridge. No more appreciable monument could be raised to the memory of Coleridge than a re-publication of his essays in The Morning Post, but still more of those afterwards published in The Courier." Perhaps Mr. Dequincey, when he spoke thus, was hardly yet capable of viewing the essays commended apart from the illuminative glow of contemporary interest, which oft, like the candle behind the transparency, imparts a splendour and significance to sketches otherwise cold and poor, enriching the bare outline with multitudinous details,-which it recalls though it does not describe, heightening its colours by an infusion of yet extant passion, the |