Coleridge never admires Shakespeare too much; but the Devil’s Advocate may perhaps make something of a count against him that he is often apt to depress others by a comparison, which is not in the least necessary. On Ben Jonson he is rather inadequate than unjust; but he is certainly unjust to Beaumont and Fletcher, and I almost fear that his injustice, like his more than justice to Massinger, may be set down to extra-literary causes. It is extraordinary that such a critic should have used the language that he uses of Florimel in _The Maid of the Mill_.[386] Her devices to preserve her honour are extravagant: this extravagance, as compared with the perfect _naturalness_ of Shakespeare, is the constant note of “the twins”; and if Coleridge had confined himself to bringing it out, there would have been no more to be said. But his remarks are here not merely unjust, they are silly. And yet here, too, we could find the priceless _obiter dicta_, that on words that have made their way despite precisian objection,[387] those on metre[388] almost always, and others. [Sidenote: _The_ Table Talk.] The motes fly thick for us in the _Table Talk_; and as they are clearly headed and indexed in the edition referred to, there is the less need of additional specification, while there is, here as everywhere, a good deal of repetition.[389] But one must point in passing to the striking contrast of Schiller’s “material sublime”[390] (and Coleridge was not inclined to undervalue Schiller[391]) with Shakespeare’s economy of means; the pertinent, though by no means final, question, “If you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him?”[392] the remarks on Spenser’s “swan-like movement”;[393] a remarkable cluster of literary dicta in the entry for Midsummer-Day 1827 (when H. N. says that his uncle talked “a volume”), to be supplemented by another sheaf on July 12; the contrast of Milton and Shakespeare;[394] the remarks on Rabelais;[395] the wonderfully pregnant one as to the “three silent revolutions in England”;[396] those on Latin Literature;[397] on the evolutionary quality of genius;[398] another great _obiter dictum_,[399] that “Great minds are never in the wrong, but in consequence _of being in the right imperfectly_,” which is truest of all in criticism itself; yet another,[400] “To please me, a poem must be either music or sense: if it is neither, I confess I cannot interest myself in it”; and, above all, that on Tennyson[401]—one of the _loci classici_ of warning to the greatest critics to distrust themselves when they are judging the poetry of the “younger generations.” And if we cannot help reproachfully ejaculating “Æschylus!” when he denies[402] sublimity to the Greeks, let us again remember that Æschylus was strangely _occulted_ to the whole Neo-classic age, and that it is very much Coleridge’s own doing that we of the last two or three generations have re-discovered him. [Sidenote: _The_ Miscellanies.]