However all this may be, there is no doubt about the importance of the discussion of Wordsworth’s literary theories, in chaps. xiv. to xxii. of the _Biographia_. Some have held that Coleridge could not write a book; more have laid it down that he never did write one. Certainly the title is to be allowed to the _Biographia_ as a whole only by the most elastic allowance, while large parts of it are at best episodes, and at worst sheer divagations. But, if books were not sacred things, it would be possible, and of no inconsiderable advantage, to sub-title this part of the book _A Critical Enquiry into the Principles which guided the Lyrical Ballads, and Mr Wordsworth’s Account of Them_, to print this alone as substantive text,[355] and to arrange all the rest as notes and appendices. [Sidenote: _Analysis of it._] The examination begins with an interesting, and (whether Epimethean or not) quite probable and very illuminative account of the actual plan of the _Ballads_, and the principle on which the shares were allotted. He and his friend, he tells us, had, during their neighbourly intercourse in Somerset, often talked of the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. And he illustrates this finely, by instancing the sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, of moonlight or sunset, communicate to familiar objects. [Sidenote: _The “suspension of disbelief.”_] The _Ballads_ were to illustrate both kinds: and the poets were to divide the parts generally on the principle of Coleridge endeavouring to make the unfamiliar credible,[356] and Wordsworth the familiar charming. And with a charity which, I fear, the _Preface_ will not bear, he proceeds to represent its contentions as applying _only_ to the practical poetical attempt which Wordsworth, in accordance with the plan, was on this occasion making. He admits however, that Wordsworth’s expressions are at any rate sometimes equivocal, and indicates his own standpoint pretty early and pretty decisively by calling the phrase “language of real life” _unfortunate_. And then he proceeds to state his own view with very frequent glances—and more than glances—at his companion’s. [Sidenote: _Attitude to metre._]