can he bring that any writer or theorist has overlooked this fact, which would not apply (with reverence be it spoken) to the Almighty Himself when He pronounced the awful command, ‘Increase and multiply’?” From some of the phrases dropped in the course of these comments, we should infer they were the preparation for a formal review of the book by Coleridge himself. It is therefore extremely puzzling to find the whole comments printed almost word for word and letter for letter in a review[866] hitherto considered by every one (Southey included) to be Southey’s. This applies to the subsequent MS. notes, which are happily briefer. Coleridge finds fault with Malthus (p. 11) for using the words virtue and vice without defining them, apparently overlooking the footnote under his very eyes (p. 11 n.) which says, “The general consequence of vice is misery, and this consequence is the precise reason why an action is termed vicious.”[867] Coleridge says, in relation to the list of irregularities given in the last paragraph but one of the page (11): “That these and all these are vices in the present state of society, who doubt? So was Celibacy in the patriarchal ages. Vice and Virtue subsist in the agreement of the habits of a man with his reason and conscience, and these can have but one moral guide, Utility, or the Virtue[868] and Happiness of Rational beings. We mention this not under the miserable notion that any state of society will render those actions capable of being performed with conscience and virtue, but to expose the utter unguardedness of this speculation.” Then after some remarks on New Malthusians (as they would be now called) he goes on: “All that follows to the three hundred and fifty-fifth page[869] may be an entertaining farrago of quotations from books of travels, &c., but surely very impertinent in a philosophical work. Bless me, three hundred and forty pages—for what purpose! A philosophical work can have no legitimate purpose but proof and illustration, and three hundred and fifty pages to prove an axiom! to illustrate a self-evident truth! It is neither more nor less than bookmaking!” He thinks, however, that what Malthus wrote of Condorcet applies to himself;—though his paradox is very absurd, it must be refuted, or he will think the toleration of his contemporaries due to their mental inferiority and his own sublimity of intellect.[870] The remaining marginal notes are chiefly of an interjectional character,[871] many of them not very refined. Malthus himself never falls into coarseness; but his opponents seldom avoid it, and Coleridge (or Southey) is no exception to the rule.[872] Except for the interest attaching even to the foolish words of a great man, it would not have been worth while to revive his _obiter scripta_ on a matter beyond his ken.