In the next chapter, the eighteenth, Coleridge carries the fray farther still into the enemy’s country, hitting the blot that though W. W.'s _words_ may be quite ordinary, their arrangement is not. And after wheeling about in this way, he comes at last to the main attack, which he has so often feinted, on Wordsworth’s astounding dictum that “there neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.” After clearing his friend (and patient) from an insinuation of paradox, he becomes a little “metaphysical”— perhaps because he cannot help it, perhaps to give himself courage for the subsequent accusation of “sophistry” which he ventures to bring. Of course, he says, there are phrases which, beautiful in poetry, are quite inappropriate in prose. The question is, “Are there no others which, proper in prose, would be out of place in metrical poetry and _vice versa_?” And he has no doubt about answering this question in the affirmative, urging the origin of metre (for which, as we saw, Wordsworth did not attempt to account), and its effects of use and pleasure. He will not admit the appeal to nursery rhymes; and he confesses (a confession which must have given W. W. dire offence) that he should have liked _Alice Fell_ and the others much better in prose. On the whole, Coleridge still shows too great timidity. He is obviously and incomprehensibly afraid of acknowledging pleasure in the metre itself. But—in this differing more signally from Wordsworth than from Wordsworth’s uncompromising opponents—he says, “I write in metre, _because_ I am about to use a language different from that of prose.” And, though on grounds lower than the highest, he finally plucks up courage to declare that “Metre is the proper form of poetry: and poetry [is] imperfect and defective without metre.” ’Twill serve, especially when he brings up in support, triarian fashion, “the instinct of seeking unity by harmonious adjustment,” and “the practice of the best poets of all countries and of all ages.” [Sidenote: _Condemnation in form of Wordsworth’s theory._]