A very experienced short-hand writer was employed to take down Mr.
Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare, but the manuscript was almost
entirely unintelligible. Yet the lecturer was, as he always is, slow and
measured. The writer--we have some notion it was no worse an artist than
Mr. Gurney himself--gave this account of the difficulty: that with
regard to every other speaker whom he had ever heard, however rapid or
involved, he could almost always, by long experience in his art, guess
the form of the latter part, or apodosis, of the sentence by the form of
the beginning; but that the conclusion of every one of Coleridge's
sentences was a _surprise_ upon him. He was obliged to listen to the
last word. Yet this unexpectedness, as we termed it before, is not the
effect of quaintness or confusion of construction; so far from it, that
we believe foreigners of different nations, especially Germans and
Italians, have often borne very remarkable testimony to the grammatical
purity and simplicity of his language, and have declared that they
generally understood what he said much better than the sustained
conversation of any other Englishman whom they had met. It is the
uncommonness of the thoughts or the image which prevents your
anticipating the end.

We owe, perhaps, an apology to our readers for the length of the
preceding remarks; but the fact is, so very much of the intellectual
life and influence of Mr. Coleridge has consisted in the oral
communication of his opinions, that no sketch could be reasonably
complete without a distinct notice of the peculiar character of his
powers in this particular. We believe it has not been the lot of any
other literary man in England, since Dr. Johnson, to command the devoted
admiration and steady zeal of so many and such widely differing
disciples--some of them having become, and others being likely to
become, fresh and independent sources of light and moral action in
themselves upon the principles of their common master. One half of these
affectionate disciples have learned their lessons of philosophy from the
teacher's mouth. He has been to them as an old oracle of the Academy or
Lyceum. The fulness, the inwardness, the ultimate scope of his doctrines
has never yet been published in print, and if disclosed, it has been
from time to time in the higher moments of conversation, when occasion,
and mood, and person begot an exalted crisis. More than once has Mr.
Coleridge said, that with pe