have overlooked." The idea that laudanum was known and used in Paradise, on the authority of the Paradise Lost of Milton, is as bad as the foolish opinions of some over-wise persons that Shakespeare's Hamlet was really insane. NOTE No. 4.--SECOND NOTE ON COLERIDGE AND PLAGIARISM. De Quincey, in his essay on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, while treating of the subject of Plagiarism, several minor charges of which he had just been firing off in his blind endeavor to do Coleridge good by destroying his good name forever, admits that said minor charges amount to nothing as plagiarism; but says, that "now we come to a case of real and palpable plagiarism." The case arises in the "Biographia Literaria." De Quincey says, regarding a certain essay on the esse and the cogitare, that Coleridge had borrowed it from beginning to end from Shelling. But that before doing so, being aware of the coincidence, he remarks that he would willingly give credit to so great a man when the truth would allow him to do so, but that in this instance he had thought out the whole matter himself, before reading the works of the German philosopher. Now the truth is, Coleridge said nothing of the kind. He first warned his readers that an identity of thought or expression, would not always be evidence that the ideas were borrowed from Shelling, or that the conceptions were originally learned from him. They (Coleridge and Shelling) had taken about the same course in their philosophical studies, etc. He says: "God forbid that I should be suspected of a wish to enter into a rivalry with Shelling for honors so unequivocally his right, not only as a great and original genius, but as the founder of the philosophy of nature, and the most successful improver of the dynamic system," etc. He then says: "For readers in general, let whatever coincides with or resembles the doctrines of my German predecessor, though contemporary, be wholly attributed to him, provided that the absence of direct references to his works, which I could not always make with truth, as designating thoughts or citations actually derived from him, and which, with this general acknowledgment, I trust would be unnecessary, be not charged on me as intentional plagiarism or ungenerous concealment." This is what he did say, and a sufficient acknowledgment for anything borrowed from Shelling. He then says that he had been able to procure but two of Shelling's books, in addition to a small pamphlet against Fichte. The above is from the prefatory remarks to which De Quincey alludes, but his memory must have been gone on a "wool-gathering" at the time. Instead of gaining, Coleridge is the loser by adopting the _language_ of Shelling in his treatise on the transcendental philosophy in the "Biographia Literaria." Having made over to Shelling everything that resembled or coincided with the doctrines of the latter, he lost much of the most important labors of his life.