nst the true tone of social intercourse more appalling to a Parisian
taste?

In a case such as this, where Coleridge was the performer, I myself
enter less profoundly into the brilliant woman's horror, for the reason
that, having originally a necessity almost morbid for the intellectual
pleasures that depend on solitude, I am constitutionally more careless
about the luxuries of conversation. I see them; like them in the rare
cases where they flourish, but do not require them. Not sympathizing,
therefore, with the lady's horror in its intensity, I yet find my
judgment in harmony with hers. The evils of Coleridgean talk, even
managed by a Coleridge, were there, and they fixed themselves
continually on my observation:

I. It defeats the very end of social meetings. Without the excitement
from a reasonable number of auditors, and some novelty in the
composition of his audience, Coleridge was hardly able to talk his best.
Now, at the end of some hours, it struck secretly on the good sense of
the company. Was it reasonable to have assembled six, ten, or a dozen
persons for the purpose of hearing a prelection? Would not the time have
been turned to more account, even as regarded the object which they had
substituted for _social_ pleasure, in studying one of Coleridge's
printed works?--since there his words were stationary and not flying, so
that notes might be taken down, and questions proposed by way of letter,
on any impenetrable difficulties; whereas in a stream of oral teaching,
which ran like the stream of destiny, impassive to all attempts at
interruption, difficulties for ever arose to irritate your nervous
system at the moment, and to vex you permanently by the recollection
that they had prompted a dozen questions, every one of which you had
forgotten through the necessity of continuing to run alongside with the
speaker, and through the impossibility of saying, 'Halt, Mr. Coleridge!
Pull up, I beseech you, if it were but for two minutes, that I may try
to fathom that last sentence.' This in all conversation is one great
evil, viz., the substitution of an alien purpose for the natural and
appropriate purpose. Not to be intellectual in a direct shape, but to be
intellectual through sociality, is the legitimate object of a social
meeting. It may be right, medically speaking, that a man should be
shampooed; but it cannot be right that, having asked him to dine, you
should decline dinner and substitute a shampooing. This a