How much better Coleridge comes out of this affair has already been partly said. But these concluding chapters[369] of the _Biographia_, though certainly his capital critical achievement, are very far from being his only one. Indeed, next to his poetical, his critical work is Coleridge’s greatest: and with all his everlasting faults of incompleteness, digression, cumbrousness of style,[370] and what not, it gives him a position inferior to no critic, ancient or modern, English or foreign. But it is scattered all over his books, and it would not be ill done if some one would extract it from the mass and set it together. In surveying such examples of it as are here most important, we shall take the convenient Bohn edition of Coleridge’s Prose, following the contents of its volumes, but supplementing them to no small extent with the very interesting and only recently printed notes which Mr Ernest Coleridge published as _Anima Poetæ_, and with a glance at the _Letters_. [Sidenote: _The rest of the_ Biographia.] Coleridge himself, at the very beginning of the _Biographia_, has indicated the discussion of the question of Poetic Diction as the main point which he had in view; but, with all its gaps and all its lapses, the whole book is among the few which constitute the very Bible of Criticism. The opening, with its famous description of the author’s education in the art under the merciless and yet so merciful ferule of Boyer or Bowyer; the reference to Bowles—so little important in himself and on Arnoldian principles, so infinitely important to “_them_,” and so to history and to us, the “us” of every subsequent time; the personal digressions on himself and on Wordsworth and on Southey—are among “the topmost towers of Ilion,” the best illustrations of that “English fashion of criticism” of which, as has been said, Dryden laid the foundations nearly a century and a half earlier by uniting theory with elaborate, and plentiful, and apparently indiscriminate, examples from practice. [Sidenote: The Friend.]