after a moment, that they are not the fictions of the begging-letter writer, but a kind of secretion, spontaneously and unconsciously evolved to pacify the stings of remorse. There are moments when he is querulous, but we must forgive them to the man who had been hopelessly distanced in popular fame by his inferiors; whose attempts at public utterance had utterly collapsed; whose 'Wallenstein' still encumbered his publisher's shelves; whose poetical copyrights had been deliberately valued at _nil_; and whose name was only mentioned in the chief reviews as a superlative for wilful eccentricity and absurdity. And then, at every turn, we come upon frequent gleams, not only of subtle thought and imaginative expression, but of shrewd common-sense, and even at times of a genuine humour, which seems to imply that Lamb was partly serious when he said that Coleridge had so much 'f-f-fun' in him. After reading many of the letters, which still remain unpublished, I may say that it is my own conviction that a life of Coleridge may still be put together by some judicious writer, who should take Boswell rather than the 'Acta Sanctorum' for his model, which would be as interesting as the great 'Confessions,' which should by turns remind us of Augustine, of Montaigne, and of Rousseau, and sometimes, too, of the inimitable Pepys or Boswell himself; which should show the blending of the many elements of a most complex character and a most versatile and opulent intellect; which should often call forth wonder, and smiles, and sighs, and indignation smothered by pity, in one of those unique combinations which it would take a Shakespeare to portray and act, and defy the skill of a psychologist to define.