For my purpose it is enough to ascertain the facts. I have not to decide whether Coleridge should receive excommunication or canonisation; whether he deserved to go straight to heaven or to pass a period—and, if so, how long a period—in purgatory. It is difficult to settle such questions satisfactorily. I desiderate an accurate diagnosis, not a judicial sentence. Coleridge sinned and repented. I take note of sin and of repentance as indications of character. I do not pretend to say whether in the eye of Heaven the repentance would be an adequate set-off for the sin. But I premise one apology for anything that may sound iconoclastic, and which I think is worth the consideration of the amiable persons who undertake to rehabilitate soiled reputations. A man's weakness can rarely be overlooked without underestimating his strength. If Coleridge's intellect were, as De Quincey said in his magniloquent way, 'the greatest and most spacious, the subtlest and most comprehensive, that has yet existed among men' (what a philosopher one must be to pronounce such a judgment!) why were the results so small? Because the ethereal soul was chained to a fleshly carcase. To deny this is to force us to assume that what he did was all that he could do. You must either exaggerate his actual achievements beyond all possible limits, or save your belief in his potential achievements by admitting that his intellect never had fair play. Let us consider the antecedents of the prophet of Highgate Hill. Was there ever a young man fuller of intellectual promise or of personal charm than the youth of twenty-five, who, in 1797, rambled through the Quantocks discussing and composing poetry with Wordsworth? Circumstances apparently unfavourable had only served to stimulate his intellectual growth. Separated from his family in infancy, to become one of the victims of our public school system—ill-fed, ill-nursed, and ill-taught at Christ's Hospital; urged upon the treadmill of a sound classical education by a rigid schoolmaster, he had assimilated with singular aptitude whatever intellectual food had drifted within his reach. He had caught glimpses of high metaphysical secrets; he had peered into the mysteries of medical practice; he had bolted a miscellaneous library whole; he had been infected with poetical enthusiasm by the study of that minute day-star, W. L. Bowles; and he had completed his training by falling desperately in love with the inevitable sister of a schoolfellow. It is a comfort to reflect that the best regulated systems of education break down somewhere. Coleridge, it would have seemed, ran every risk of being driven sheep-like along the dull high road of Latin grammar. Nature had prompted him to leap the fences, to expatiate in the wide fields of intellectual and imaginative pasture, and to derive a keener zest for his nourishment from the knowledge that the indulgence was illegitimate. Cambridge, the mother of poets, received