In this instance, we think the writer’s modesty has led him into a degree of unnecessary precaution. We see no sort of difference between his published and his unpublished compositions. It is just as impossible to get at the meaning of the one as the other. No man ever yet gave Mr. Coleridge ‘a penny for his thoughts.’ His are all maiden ideas; immaculate conceptions. He is the ‘Secret Tattle’ of the press. Each several work exists only in the imagination of the author, and is quite inaccessible to the understandings of his readers—‘Yet virgin of Proserpina from Jove.’—We can give just as good a guess at the design of this Lay-Sermon, which is not published, as of _the Friend_, the Preliminary Articles in _the Courier_, _the Watchman_, _the Conciones ad Populum_, or any of the other courtly or popular publications of the same author. Let the experiment be tried, and if, on committing the manuscript to the press, the author is caught in the fact of a single intelligible passage, we will be answerable for Mr. Coleridge’s loss of character. But we know the force of his genius too well. What is his _Friend_ itself but an enormous title-page; the longest and most tiresome prospectus that ever was written; an endless preface to an imaginary work; a table of contents that fills the whole volume; a huge bill of fare of all possible subjects, with not an idea to be had for love or money? One number consists of a grave-faced promise to perform something impossible in the next; and the next is taken up with a long-faced apology for not having done it. Through the whole of this work, Mr. Coleridge appears in the character of the Unborn Doctor; the very Barmecide of knowledge; the Prince of preparatory authors! ‘He never is—but always to be _wise_.’