That De Quincey did this maliciously, I do not pretend to state; what I know of its animus I gather from the paper itself. But I can truly say, in the language of Julius Hare, "God save all honest men from such foremost admirers." Whether he wanted to injure Coleridge or not, the result is the same--he _did_ injure him. I am inclined to believe, however, that De Quincey's article was well intended by him, but from defective sensibility his judgment was corrupted; he thought the honey he would infuse into the gall would annihilate its bitterness and leave the decoction sweet. He was mistaken. After proving Coleridge to be guilty of robbery, he could not convince the ordinary mind that he was an honest man. After having declared him to be guilty of a "large variety of trivial thefts" in literature, he could not induce people generally to believe him to have been "entirely original." On De Quincey's hypothesis, Coleridge was a thief and an honest man, a plagiarist and entirely original, at one and the same instant. This, ordinary readers would naturally have some difficulty in swallowing. But De Quincey might have spared himself this undertaking, and himself and Coleridge its injurious results (as it proved to be a two-edged sword and cut both ways), by making his early reading in the "Biographia Literaria" a trifle more extensive. There he would have seen that the "real and palpable case of plagiarism" was fully met and anticipated--averted, confounded, and explained; having noticed this, he might have thought these "trivial thefts" unworthy of mention. However, as the result stands to-day, Coleridge is a classic, and those who have any interest whatever in his compositions, being persons generally of some literary acquirements and judgment, are capable of judging of the originality and genuineness of his works, as he himself pertinently remarks, "by better evidence than mere reference to dates." I subjoin a copy of the prefatory remarks to which De Quincey refers, in stating that Coleridge, "aware of his coincidence with Shelling, declares his willingness to acknowledge himself indebted to so great a man in any case where the truth would allow him to do so," etc. The reader will perceive that there is no such language in them; but he will see in them a complete refutation of the charge of plagiarism from Shelling, and an honorable acknowledgment of his indebtedness to that author.