Political economy was not Coleridge's forte. In politics he was happier. In mere personal politics, he (like every man when reviewed from a station distant by forty years) will often appear to have erred; nay, he will be detected and nailed in error. But this is the necessity of us all. Keen are the refutations of time. And absolute results to posterity are the fatal touchstone of opinions in the past. It is undeniable, besides, that Coleridge had strong personal antipathies, for instance, to Messrs. Pitt and Dundas. Yet _why_, we never could understand. We once heard him tell a story upon Windermere, to the late Mr. Curwen, then M. P. for Workington, which was meant, apparently, to account for this feeling. The story amounted to this; that, when a freshman at Cambridge, Mr. Pitt had wantonly amused himself at a dinner party in Trinity, in smashing with filberts (discharged in showers like grape-shot) a most costly dessert set of cut glass, from which Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued a principle of destructiveness in his _cerebellum_. Now, if this dessert set belonged to some poor suffering Trinitarian, and not to himself, we are of opinion that he was faulty, and ought, upon his own great subsequent maxim, to have been coerced into 'indemnity for the past, and security for the future.' But, besides that this glassy _mythus_ belongs to an æra fifteen years earlier than Coleridge's so as to justify a shadow of scepticism, we really cannot find, in such an _escapade_ under the boiling blood of youth, any sufficient justification of that withering malignity towards the name of Pitt, which runs through Coleridge's famous _Fire, Famine, and Slaughter_. As this little viperous _jeu-d'esprit_ (published anonymously) subsequently became the subject of a celebrated after-dinner discussion in London, at which Coleridge (_comme de raison_) was the chief speaker, the reader of this generation may wish to know the question at issue; and in order to judge of _that_, he must know the outline of this devil's squib. The writer brings upon the scene three pleasant young ladies, viz., Miss Fire, Miss Famine, and Miss Slaughter. 'What are you up to? What's the row?'--we may suppose to be the introductory question of the poet. And the answer of the ladies makes us aware that they are fresh from larking in Ireland, and in France. A glorious spree they had; lots of fun; and laughter _a discretion_. At all times _gratus puellæ risus ab angulo_; so that we listen to their little gossip with interest. They had been setting men, it seems, by the ears; and the drollest little atrocities they do certainly report. Not but we have seen better in the Nenagh paper, so far as Ireland is concerned. But the pet little joke was in La Vendee. Miss Famine, who is the girl for our money, raises the question--whether any of them can tell the name of the leader and prompter to these high jinks of hell--if so, let her whisper it.