oor hard-working men, not
one in fifty can boil a potato into a condition that is not ruinous to
the digestion. And we have reason to know that the Chartists, on their
great meditated outbreak, having hired a six-pounder from a pawnbroker,
meant to give the signal for insurrection at dinner-time, because (as
they truly observed) cannon-balls, hard and hot, would then be plentiful
on every table. God sends potatoes, we all know; but _who_ it is that
sends the boilers of potatoes, out of civility to the female sex, we
decline to say.

Well, but this (you say) is a digression. Why, true; and a digression is
often the cream of an article. However, as you dislike it, let us
_re_gress as fast as possible, and scuttle back from the occult art of
boiling potatoes to the much more familiar one of painting in oil. Did
Coleridge really understand this art? Was he a sciolist, was he a
pretender, or did he really judge of it from a station of
heaven-inspired knowledge? A hypocrite Coleridge never was upon any
subject; he never affected to know when secretly he felt himself
ignorant. And yet, of the topics on which he was wont eloquently to hold
forth, there was none on which he was less satisfactory--none on which
he was more acute, yet none on which he was more prone to excite
contradiction and irritation, if that had been allowed.

Here, for example, is a passage from one of his lectures on art:

'It is sufficient that philosophically we understand that in all
imitations two elements must coexist, and not only coexist, but must be
perceived as existing. Those two constituent elements are likeness and
unlikeness, or sameness and difference, and in all genuine creations of
art there must be a union of these disparates. The artist may take this
point of view where he pleases, provided that the desired effect be
perceptibly produced, that there be likeness in the difference,
difference in the likeness, and a reconcilement of both in one. If there
be likeness to nature without any check of difference, the result is
disgusting, and the more complete the delusion the more loathsome the
effect. Why are such simulations of nature as wax-work figures of men
and women so disagreeable? Because, not finding the motion and the life
all we expected, we are shocked as by a falsehood, every circumstance of
detail, which before induced you to be interested, making the distance
from truth more palpable. You set out with a supposed reality, and are