of any such reaction. I prefer my own grandfathers to their grandfathers, and myself—including you and me—to my grandfathers. I am quite sure that, if I did not, I could not make time run backwards. We are far enough off to be just to the maligned eighteenth century, and to keep all our uncharitableness for our contemporaries—it may do them some good. I would never abuse the century which loved common-sense and freedom of speech, and hated humbug and mystery; the century in which first sprang to life most of the social and intellectual movements which are still the best hope of our own; in which science and history and invention first took their modern shape; the century of David Hume, and Adam Smith, and Gibbon, and Burke, and Johnson, and Fielding, and many old friends to whom I aver incalculable gratitude; but I admit that, like other centuries, it had its faults. It was, no doubt, unpoetical at its close—almost as unpoetical as the latter half of the nineteenth; and somehow it had fallen into that queer blunder of judging poetry by the canons of science. The old symbolism of an earlier generation had faded, and for Pagan or Christian imagery we had frigid personifications, such even as Coleridge quotes from some prize poem: 'Inoculation, heavenly maid!' a deity who could be only adored in a rhymed medical treatise. And Coleridge's charge against the philosophy of the time was really identical with his charge against the poetry. Poetry, without the mystic or spiritual element, meant Darwin's 'Botanic Garden'—an ice-palace, as he called it, a heap of fine phrases and sham personifications. Take the same element from theology, and you have Paley's 'Evidences;' from morals, and the residuum is Bentham's utilitarianism. Coleridge's nomenclature expressed this, in a fashion. He was fond of saying that all men were born Aristotelians or Platonists: Platonists, if, in his favourite distinction, the reason and the imagination dominated in them, and Aristotelians, if they had only the understanding, the almost vulpine cunning, which was shared even by the lower animals, which meant prudence in morality, reliance upon mere external evidence in theology, and pure expediency in politics. How the Aristotelians had come to rule the world ever since the opening of the eighteenth century is a question which, so far as I know, he never answered. But the effect of their dominion was equally to dethrone reason as to asphyxiate imagination. The two were allies, if not an incarnation of the same faculty. Inversely the Benthamites, till Mill was converted by Wordsworth, regarded poetry as equivalent to mere tintinnabulation and lying, or, as Carlyle's friend put it, the 'prodooction of a rude age.' It was as much in his character of poet as of philosopher that Coleridge hated political economy, the favourite science of the Benthamites; for, according to him, it was an illustration of their destructive method. The economist deals with mere barren abstractions,