and Corneille, has been mainly exerted in arraying them in the garb of modern times. Parnassus is still the emblem of poetry; Olympus, of the council-seat of supreme power; Ida and the Cyprian Isle, of the goddess of love. The utmost exertion of all the arts combined on the opera stage is devoted to represent the rival goddesses as they appeared to the son of Priam on the summit of Gargarus. Withdraw from subsequent poetry the images, mythology, and characters of the Iliad, and what will remain? Petrarch spent his best years in restoring his verses. Tasso portrayed the siege of Jerusalem and the shock of Europe and Asia almost exactly as Homer has done the contest of the same forces, on the same shores, 3000 years before. Milton's old age, when blind and poor, was solaced by hearing the verses recited of the poet to whose conceptions his own mighty spirit had been so much indebted; and Pope deemed himself fortunate in devoting his life to the translation of the Iliad; and the unanimous voice of ages has confirmed his celebrated lines:

'Be Homer's works your study and delight,
Read them by day, and meditate by night;

Thence form your judgment, thence your maxims bring,
And trace the muses upward to their spring.""

We must draw our remarks abruptly to a close; our space is already exhausted. We need not say the subject is far from being so. We intended to say a good deal concerning Sir Archibald's style; to show that here, as elsewhere, we have his distinguishing characteristics displayed wide, not intense thought, giving rise to a flowing and diffuse, rather than a terse mode of expression - diffused, not concentrated energy, producing a constant glow rather than a piercing fire; and to point out a few of its defects. Upon

the repetitions, the mistakes in imagery, the sameness, frequently rendered the less pardonable by commonplaceness, of forms of phrase, we could descant, but must cover all up in this inuendo.

Sir Archibald Alison's writings are a continued protest against modern utilitarianism; his whole life has been an effort to break Mammon's threefold chain of gold, silver, and copper; he has exposed the dishonesty and insanity of political or party cries; occasionally he has confounded the good with the bad, occasionally his scythe has cut down the corn with the weeds. On the whole, we think he will give us his sanction in saying that change is not wrong in itself: that the frivolous restlessness of the child, which breaks one toy and cries for another, is to be despised; that the morbid fickleness of the hypochondriac, who thinks that a change of seat or the attainment of some dainty would insure health, is to be pitied; but that the calm, reasonable desire to change an old habitude or dwelling for a new, entertained by the sagacious and healthy man, is to be respected; and that it is so in the case of nations.

Sir Archibald is the son of the Rev. Archibald Alison, the celebrated writer on Taste; he became a member of the Scottish bar; and the government of the Earl of Derby conferred upon him the title which he adorns.

IV.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

AMONG the men who have led the van of British thought during the present century, who have stamped the impress of their genius upon the forehead of the age, and moulded the intellectual destinies of our time, there is one name preeminently fraught with interest to the student of our internal history. That name is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In our schools of poetry, of philosophy, of theologyamong our critics and our ecclesiastics, our moralists and our politicians the influence of Coleridge has worked, silently and viewlessly, but with wide-spread and mighty power. As by a verbal talisman, his name opens to our mental gaze vast and varied fields of reflection, invokes grave, important, and thickly-crowding thoughts, and forms the centre round which countless subjects of discussion and investigation group themselves. For these reasons, superadded to the fact, that we know of no easily accessible account of his life and writings at once concise and comprehensive, we purpose to devote some considerable space to a biographic sketch of this celebrated poet and thinker.

Towards the latter half of the last century, there lived at Ottery St. Mary, in the southern quarter of the balmy and beautiful county of Devon, discharging there the duties

of vicar and schoolmaster, an eccentric, erudite, and remarkably loveable old man. He was the father of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. "The image of my father," says the latter, "my reverend, kind, learned, simple-hearted father, is a religion to me." Richter expressed pity for the man to whom his own mother had not rendered all mothers sacred. Both the remarks shed a beautiful and kindly light over the characters of their authors.

The vicar of Ottery St. Mary was twice married, and had, in all, thirteen children. Samuel Taylor was the youngest; his day of birth was the 21st of October, 1772, when he appeared "about eleven o'clock in the forenoon." He speedily gave indications of superior capacity, being able, at the completion of his third year, to read a chapter in the Bible. We soon begin to discern the operation of causes, bearing, with rather singular importance, upon the formation of his character and the shaping of his destiny. The youngest of the family, he was the object of peculiar affection to both parents, and, in consequence, excited the envious dislike of his brother Francis, and the malevolence of Molly, the nurse of the latter. Hence arose annoyances and small peevish reprisals; for the power of a boisterous and sturdy brother, and a malignant nurse, to embitter the cup of a bard in pinafore is considerable; so little Samuel became "fretful and timorous, and a tell-tale." A tell-tale is an object of united detestation on all forms of all academies; it was so at Ottery St. Mary, where Coleridge went to school; the future metaphysician was driven from play, tormented, and universally hated by the boys; he sought solace at mamma's knee and in papa's books. He became a solitary, moping child, dependent on himself for his amusements, passionately fond of books, of irritable temper, and subject to extreme variations of spirits. At six he

had read "Belisarius," "Robinson Crusoe," and "Philip Quarles," and found boundless enjoyment in the wonders and beauties of that Utopia and Eldorado of all school-boys, the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. The following is a portrait of him, about this time, as he sketched it in after years:"So I became a dreamer, and acquired an indisposition to all bodily action, and I was fretful, and inordinately passionate; and, as I could not play at anything, and was slothful, I was despised and hated by the boys: and because I could read and spell, and had, I may truly say, a memory and understanding forced into almost unnatural ripeness, I was flattered and wondered at by all the old women. And so I became very vain, and despised most of the boys that were at all near my own age, and, before I was eight years old, I was a character. Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth, and feelings of deep and bitter contempt for almost all who traversed the orbit of my understanding, were even then prominent and manifest."

This has to us a deep significance, in the psychological consideration of Coleridge's character. The ideas lodged in the mind at this early period of life, and the habits formed, may, in after years, change their forms, and appear in manifold and diversified developments; but they retain their place with extreme obstinacy. This childhood of Coleridge's we cannot, on the whole, pronounce healthy. Little boys are naturally objects of dread, rather than of flattery, to old women. Little Robert Clive, for instance, utterly astonished and startled the old women by exhibiting himself on the steeple of Market Drayton; and turned out a man of clear and decisive mind and adamantine vigor. The playground and the meadow, with the jocund voices of his playmates round him, and in the constant consciousness that his independence has to be maintained