"Of this day and the one following," Allsop says, "I have a few notes, which appear to me of interest. It must be borne constantly in mind, that much of what is preserved has relation to positions enforced by others, which Coleridge held to be untenable on the particular grounds urged, not as being untrue in themselves." * * * * * Had Lord Byron possessed perseverance enough to undergo the drudgery of research, and had his theological studies and attainments been at all like mine, he would have been able to unsettle all the evidences of Christianity, upheld as it is at present by simple confutation. Is it possible to assent to the doctrine of redemption as at present promulgated, that the moral death of an _unoffending_ being should be a consequence of the transgression of humanity[119] _and its atonement_? * * * * * Walter Scott's novels are chargeable with the same faults as Bertram, _et id omne genus_, viz., that of ministering to the depraved appetite for excitement, and, though in a far less degree, creating sympathy for the vicious and infamous, solely because the fiend is _daring_. Not twenty lines of Scott's poetry will ever reach posterity; it has relation to nothing. * * * * * When I wrote a letter upon the scarcity, it was generally said that it was the production of an immense cornfactor, and a letter was addressed to me under that persuasion, beginning "Crafty Monopolist." * * * * * It is very singular that no _true poet_ should have arisen from the lower classes, when it is considered that every peasant who can read knows more of books now than did Æschylus, Sophocles, or Homer; yet if we except Burns, none[120] such have been. * * * * * Crashaw seems in his poems to have given the first ebullience of his imagination, unshapen into form, or much of, what we now term, sweetness. In the poem, _Hope_, by way of question and answer, his superiority to Cowley is self-evident. In that on the name of Jesus equally so; but his lines on St. Theresa are the finest. Where he does combine richness of thought and diction nothing can excel, as in the lines you so much admire--