The great storehouse next to the _Biographia_ is, of course, the _Lectures on Shakespeare_ with their satellite fragments, unsatisfactory as are the conditions under which we have all these things. There is perhaps no more astounding example of the tricks of self-deception than Coleridge’s statement to Allsop that he had “_written_” three volumes of five hundred pages each, containing a complete critical history of the English drama, and “requiring neither addition, omission, nor correction—nothing but mere arrangement.” What we actually have of his whole critical work, outside the _Biographia_, consists of perhaps one-third that amount of his own and other people’s notes of Lectures, very rarely consecutive at all, requiring constant omission because of repetition, and defying the art of the most ingenious _diaskeuast_ to get them into anything like order, and of a smaller but still considerable mass of _Marginalia_, pocket-book entries, and fragments of the most nondescript kinds. And we know from indisputable testimony by persons who actually heard the _Lectures_ which these notes represent, that if we possessed reports _in extenso_ by the most accurate and intelligent of reporters, things would be not so very much better, because of Coleridge’s incurable habit of apology, digression, anticipation, and repetition. That he found a written lecture an intolerable trammel, and even notes irksome, if he stuck close to them, we can readily believe. Many, if not most, lecturers would agree with him. But it is given to few people, and certainly was not given to him, to speak _ex-tempore_ on such subjects in a fashion which will bear printing. And his lectures have, as we have said, only very rarely had even the chance of standing this. [Sidenote: _Their chaotic character_] Nevertheless, we are perhaps not in reality so very much worse off. Extreme method in criticism is something of a superstition, and, as we have seen, the greatest critical book of the world, that of Longinus, has, as we possess it, very little of this, and does not appear ever to have had very much. The critic does his best work, not in elaborating theories which will constantly break down or lead him wrong when they come into contact with the myriad-sided elusiveness of Art and Humanity, but in examining individual works or groups of work, and in letting his critical steel strike the fire of mediate axioms and _aperçus_ from the flint of these. It does the recipient rather good than harm to have to take the trouble of selecting, co-ordinating, and adjusting such things for himself; at any rate, he escapes entirely the danger of that deadly bondage to a cut-and-dried scheme which was the curse of the Neo-classic system. And there is no critic who provides these examinations and _aperçus_ and _axiomata media_ more lavishly than Coleridge.[377] [Sidenote: _and preciousness._]