And if any one is still dissatisfied with particular critical utterances, and even with the middle axioms interspersed among them, let him remember that Coleridge—not Addison, not the Germans, not any other— is the real introducer into the criticism of poetry of the realising and disrealising Imagination as a criterion. Even now, a hundred years after his earliest day as a critic, the doctrine, though much talked of, is apparently little understood. Even such a critic as the late Mr Traill, while elsewhere[431] admitting that “on poetic _expression_” Coleridge “has spoken the absolutely last word,” almost apologised[432] for his putting on a level “lending the charm of imagination to the real” and “lending the force of reality to the imaginary.” He confessed that, “from the point of view of the highest conception of the poet’s office there can be no comparison”—where indeed I might also “say ditto to Mr Burke,” but in a sense opposite to his. And if, on such a mind and such an appreciation as Mr Traill’s, this one-sided interpretation of “the _esenoplastic_ faculty” had hold, how much more on others in increasing measure to the present day? The fallacy is due, first, to the hydra-like vivacity of the false idea of _mimesis_, the notion that it is not re-presentation, re-creation _adding_ to Nature, but copying her; and, secondly, to the Baconian conception of poetry as a _vinum dæmonum_, a poison with some virtue as a medicine. What power these errors have all our history has shown,—all Histories of Criticism that ever can be written will show if they are written faithfully. But Coleridge has provided—once for all, if it be not neglected—the safeguard against this in his definitions of the two, the co-equal, the co-eternal functions of the exercise of the poetic Imagination. [Sidenote: _The “Companions.”_] In the title of the present chapter I have used the word “companions” in a double sense—the first and special application of it being that in which it is technically applied to the Companions of the Prophet—to the early coadjutors of Mahomet in his struggle with the Koreish. Of these the chief are Southey, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Hazlitt, with perhaps as an even closer ally—though unknowing and unknown—William Blake. Then follow companions in the wider sense—associates in the work, who varied from nearly complete alliance, as with Scott, to very distant and lukewarm participation, as in Campbell, and (in literary position) from the captaincy of Scott again and of Shelley to the more than respectable full-privateship of the contributors to the _Retrospective Review_. As for the “Adversaries,” they can be more briefly dealt with, for their work was mostly “wood, hay, stubble”; but Gifford and Jeffrey at least could not be excluded here, and a few more may deserve notice. So let the inquiry proceed in this order. [Sidenote: _Southey._]