The few contributions, shortly supplemented from MS., to Southey’s _Omniana_ give little, but the volume now entitled _Miscellanies, Æsthetic and Literary_, is very nearly all ours. Much of it, however, is repetition in apparent title, and a good deal of the rest does not quite answer expectations. The general _Essays on the Fine Arts_ with which it opens (and of which the author, who had lost them, entertained that perhaps rather exaggerated idea which we usually entertain of lost loves, books, fishes, &c.) possess in abundance Coleridge’s uniquely stimulating quality, but, perhaps in not much less abundance, his extreme desultoriness and want of definition, save of the most indefinite character. The essay on the _Prometheus_ which follows excites (though hardly in the wary mind, Estesianly “alphabeted,” as he would himself say) great expectations. But it is scarcely too much to say that on this—the most purely poetical of all extant Greek dramas, a miracle of sublimity and humanity mingled, and the twin pillar, with the _Agamemnon_, of its author’s claim to be one of the greatest poets of the world—Coleridge has not a word to say that even touches the poetry. He is philosophico-mythological from the egg to the apple; and one is bound to add that he here shows one of his gravest drawbacks as a critic. The new fragments, however, of the 1818 lectures are full of good matter, on Cervantes especially, perhaps a little less specially on Dante, on Robinson Crusoe very particularly indeed, on Rabelais and Sterne and Donne: while these are taken up and multiplied in interest by the “Marginalia,” with which the literary part of the book concludes, and which contain, on Daniel and Chapman and Selden, Browne and Fuller, Fielding and Junius, some of the best known and nearly of the best of their author’s critical work. Here also, and here only, do we find much on Milton, Coleridge’s rather numerous lectures on him having left surprisingly little trace. He is, though a fervent admirer, not quite at his happiest. [Sidenote: _The Lecture_ On Style.]