34)

It is a strange thing, and could hardly have happened in any
country but England, that there is to this day no complete
collection or edition of the works of Coleridge--one of the
most poetical of our poets, one of the most important of our
critics, and one of the most influential, if one of the
least methodical and conclusive, of our philosophers. Indeed
we never knew what good prose he could write till the
fragments called _Anima Poetae_ were published, two-thirds
of a century after his death. But that no collected edition
of his letters appeared till very shortly before this is
explicable without any difficulty. Coleridge's temperament
was not heroic, and his correspondence as well as his
conduct justified, in regard to much more than his nonage,
the ingenious phrase of an American lady-essayist that he
must have been "a very _beatable_ child." To a certain
extent, however, the correspondence does also justify our
adoption (see _Introduction_) of the charitable theory that
enlargement of understanding brings about extension of
pardon. And putting this aside, the letters sometimes give
us an idea of what his admittedly marvellous conversation
(or rather monologue) must have been like. They are not very
easy to select from, for their author's singular tendency to
_divagation_ affects them. But they sometimes display that
humour which he undoubtedly possessed, though his best-known
published writings seldom admit of it: and the divagation
itself has its advantages. In the following Coleridge
appears in curiously different lights. After joking at his
own Pantheism he becomes amazingly practical, for it _was_,
as Scott points out somewhere, a fault of Southey's to
cling to the system of "half-profits," a fault which often
made his enormous labours altogether unprofitable. "I-rise
to I-set" = "getting-up to bed-time" seems to have been a
favourite quip of his. "Stuart," the Editor of the _Morning
Post_ for which Coleridge was then writing. "The
Anthology"--an _Annual_ one edited by Southey. As for the
_Anti-Jacobin_ libel it was, admirable as was the wit that
accompanied it, utterly indefensible; for it accused
Coleridge of having _at this time_ "left his poor children
fatherless and his wife destitute" (the extraordinary