‘When Adam delved, and Eve span, Where was then the gentleman?’ (—or the poet laureat either, we may ask?)—In Mr. Coleridge’s Ode to an Ass’s Foal, in his Lines to Sarah, his Religious Musings; and in his and Mr. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, _passim_. Of Mr. Southey’s larger epics, I have but a faint recollection at this distance of time, but all that I remember of them is mechanical and extravagant, heavy and superficial. His affected, disjointed style is well imitated in the Rejected Addresses. The difference between him and Sir Richard Blackmore seems to be, that the one is heavy and the other light, the one solemn and the other pragmatical, the one phlegmatic and the other flippant; and that there is no Gay in the present time to give a Catalogue Raisonné of the performances of the living undertaker of epics. Kehama is a loose sprawling figure, such as we see cut out of wood or paper, and pulled or jerked with wire or thread, to make sudden and surprising motions, without meaning, grace, or nature in them. By far the best of his works are some of his shorter personal compositions, in which there is an ironical mixture of the quaint and serious, such as his lines on a picture of Gaspar Poussin, the fine tale of Gualberto, his Description of a Pig, and the Holly-tree, which is an affecting, beautiful, and modest retrospect on his own character. May the aspiration with which it concludes be fulfilled![11]—But the little he has done of true and sterling excellence, is overloaded by the quantity of indifferent matter which he turns out every year, ‘prosing or versing,’ with equally mechanical and irresistible facility. His Essays, or political and moral disquisitions, are not so full of original matter as Montaigne’s. They are second or third rate compositions in that class. It remains that I should say a few words of Mr. Coleridge; and there is no one who has a better right to say what he thinks of him than I have. ‘Is there here any dear friend of Cæsar? To him I say, that Brutus’s love to Cæsar was no less than his.’ But no matter.—His Ancient Mariner is his most remarkable performance, and the only one that I could point out to any one as giving an adequate idea of his great natural powers. It is high German, however, and in it he seems to ‘conceive of poetry but as a drunken dream, reckless, careless, and heedless, of past, present, and to come.’ His tragedies (for he has written two) are not answerable to it; they are, except a few poetical passages, drawling sentiment and metaphysical jargon. He has no genuine dramatic talent. There is one fine passage in his Christabel, that which contains the description of the quarrel between Sir Leoline and Sir Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine, who had been friends in youth.