is all from the brain, and lacks the true ring that comes from the healthy overflowing of nature. He has cold, steel-like wit, that comes from the head. My recollection of his "Antigone of Sophocles," is as of a man jumping upon horseback and riding the animal to death, unless the journey's end be reached previously. There is no resting-place--on the reader goes after the idea till the end, and it is a long and barren road to travel. He (De Quincey) seems nervous--highly so; too much so to allow his reader peace and ease in reading this paper and others, and parts of other long ones, I judge. I fear the reader would fain cry out, "What, in the name of Judas Iscariot, is the man after, and when is he going to catch up to it? I am out of breath." This "Greek Tragedy" paper, as it is called elsewhere,[6] seemed lean and very wordy to me. Still, with all his faults, De Quincey was a brilliant writer, and _generally_ on the right side of questions--humane, and upholding the down-trodden whenever opportunity offered. NOTE No. 6.--THIRD NOTE ON COLERIDGE AND PLAGIARISM. De Quincey, in his article entitled "Samuel Taylor Coleridge," descants as follows: "Coleridge's essay in particular is prefaced by a few words, in which, aware of his coincidence with Shelling, he declares his willingness to acknowledge himself indebted to so great a man, in any case where the truth would allow him to do so; but, in this particular case, insisting on the impossibility that he could have borrowed arguments which he had first seen some years after he had thought out the whole hypothesis _pro pria marte_. After this, what was my astonishment, to find that the entire essay, from the first word to the last, is a _verbatim_ translation from Shelling, with no attempt in a single instance to appropriate the paper, by developing the arguments, or by diversifying the illustrations. Some other obligations to Shelling, of a slighter kind, I have met with in the 'Biographia Literaria:' but this was a barefaced plagiarism, which could in prudence have been risked only by relying too much upon the slight knowledge of German literature in this country, and especially of that section of the German literature." De Quincey goes on to say, in the way of extenuation of his charge of plagiarism against Coleridge, that Coleridge did not do this from poverty of intellect. "Not at all." He denies that flat. "There lay the wonder," he says. "He spun daily and at all hours," proceeds De Quincey, "for mere amusement of his own activities, and from the loom of his own magical brain, theories more gorgeous by far, and supported by a pomp and luxury of images such as Shelling--no, nor any German that ever breathed, not John Paul--could have emulated in his dreams." There you go again De Quincey--the demon of hyperbole again driving you to extremes; forever denouncing beyond reason or praising beyond desert. No one else ever claimed so much for Coleridge.