Aside from the Chaldee, there were two other distinct and decided Sensations in this memorable number, both too well known to demand detailed attention. They were Wilson’s attack on Coleridge, “Observations on Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria”,[80] the leading article and a long one; and Lockhart’s paper “On the Cockney School of Poetry”[81]. The former is an inexcusable, ranting thing which concludes that Mr. Coleridge’s Literary Life strengthens every argument against the composition of such Memoirs”[82], ... that it exhibits “many mournful sacrifices of personal dignity, after which it seems impossible that Mr. Coleridge can be greatly respected either by the Public or himself.”[83] Such words were strong enough in their own day, but seem doubly presumptuous in the light of our present hero-worship,--especially as the article continues with verdicts like the following: “Considered merely in a literary point of view, the work is most execrable.... His admiration of Nature or of man,--we had almost said his religious feelings toward his God,--are all narrowed, weakened, and corrupted and poisoned by inveterate and diseased egotism.”...[84] [80] Ibid., V. ii, p. 3 [81] Ibid., V. ii, p. 38 [82] Ibid., V. ii, p. 5 [83] Same [84] Same This was a sin for which “Maga” later atoned by repeated tributes to his genius, to his poetry and its beauty in many subsequent numbers of the periodical. Lockhart two years afterwards spoke of it as “a total departure from the principles of the Magazine”[85]--“a specimen of the very worst kind of spirit which the Magazine professed to be fighting in the _Edinburgh Review_.”[86] “This is indeed the only one of the various sins of this Magazine for which I am at a loss to discover--not an apology--but a motive. If there be any man of grand and original genius alive at this moment in Europe, such a man is Mr. Coleridge.”[87] And two months after this paper, in the issue for December 1817 appeared a “Letter to the Reviewer of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria”, beginning with the words: “To be blind to our failings and alive to our prejudices, is the fault of almost every one of us.... It is the same with me, the same with Mr. Coleridge, and it is, I regret to state it, the same with his reviewer!”[88]... And this writer, who signs, himself J. S., sums up his valiant defense, declaring “it is from a love I have for generous and fair criticism, and a hate to everything which appears personal and levelled against the man and not his subject--and your writing is glaringly so--that I venture to draw daggers with a reviewer. You have indeed imitated, with not a little of its power and ability, the worst manner of the _Edinburgh Review_ critics. Forgetting ... that freedom of remark does not exclude the kind and courteous style, you have entirely sunk the courteousness in the virulency of it.”[89] Thus “Maga” redeemed itself and Coleridge was avenged. [85] J. G. Lockhart: _Peter’s Letters_, V. ii, p. 218 [86] Same