It can hardly be necessary to inform any reader of discernment or of much practice in composition that the whole of this article upon Mr. Coleridge, though carried through at intervals, and (as it has unexpectedly happened) with time sufficient to have made it a very careful one, has, in fact, been written in a desultory and unpremeditated style. It was originally undertaken on the sudden but profound impulse communicated to the writer's feelings by the unexpected news of this great man's death; partly, therefore, to relieve, by expressing, his own deep sentiments of reverential affection to his memory, and partly, in however imperfect a way, to meet the public feeling of interest or curiosity about a man who had long taken his place amongst the intellectual _potentates_ of the age. Both purposes required that it should be written almost _extempore_: the greater part was really and unaffectedly written in that way, and under circumstances of such extreme haste as would justify the writer in pleading the very amplest privilege of licence and indulgent construction which custom concedes to such cases. Hence it had occurred to the writer, as a judicious principle, to create a sort of merit out of his own necessity, and rather to seek after the graces which belong to the epistolary form, or to other modes of composition professedly careless, than after those which grow out of preconceived biographies, which, having originally settled their plan upon a regular foundation, are able to pursue a course of orderly development, such as _his_ slight sketch had voluntarily renounced from the beginning. That mode of composition having been once adopted, it seemed proper to sustain it, even after delays and interruption had allowed time for throwing the narrative into a more orderly movement, and modulating it, as it were, into a key of the usual solemnity. The _qualis ab incepto processerit_--the _ordo_ prescribed by the first bars of the music predominated over all other considerations, and to such an extent that he had purposed to leave the article without any regular termination or summing up--as, on the one hand, scarcely demanded by the character of a sketch so rapid and indigested, whilst, on the other, he was sensible that anything of so much pretension as a formal peroration challenged a sort of consideration to the paper which it was the author's chief wish to disclaim. That effect, however, is sufficiently parried by the implied protest now offered; and, on other reasons, it is certainly desirable that a general glance, however cursory, should be thrown over the intellectual claims of Mr. Coleridge by one who knew him so well, and especially in a case where those very claims constitute the entire and sole justification of the preceding personal memoir. That which furnishes the whole moving reason for any separate notice at all, and forms its whole latent interest, ought not, in mere logic, to be left