is admiration; opinions
that seem to tally with his own wild ravings are holy and inspired; and
unless agreeable to his creed, the wisdom of ages is folly; and wits,
whom the world worship, dwarfed when they approach his venerable side.
His admiration of nature or of man, we had almost said his religious
feelings towards his God, are all narrowed, weakened, and corrupted, and
poisoned by inveterate and diseased egotism; and instead of his mind
reflecting the beauty and glory of nature, he seems to consider the
mighty universe itself as nothing better than a mirror in which, with a
grinning and idiot self-complacency, he may contemplate the Physiognomy
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Though he has yet done nothing in any one
department of human knowledge, yet he speaks of his theories, and plans,
and views, and discoveries, as if he had produced some memorable
revolution in Science. He at all times connects his own name in Poetry
with Shakespeare, and Spenser, and Milton; in politics with Burke, and
Fox, and Pitt; in metaphysics with Locke, and Hartley, and Berkely, and
Kant--feeling himself not only to be the worthy compeer of those
illustrious Spirits, but to unite, in his own mighty intellect, all the
glorious powers and faculties by which they were separately
distinguished, as if his soul were endowed with all human power, and was
the depository of the aggregate, or rather the essence of all human
knowledge. So deplorable a delusion as this, has only been equalled by
that of Joanna Southcote, who mistook a complaint in the bowels for the
divine afflatus; and believed herself about to give birth to the
regenerator of the world, when sick unto death of an incurable and
loathsome disease.

The truth is that Mr. Coleridge is but an obscure name in English
literature. In London he is well known in literary society, and justly
admired for his extraordinary loquacity: he has his own little circle of
devoted worshippers, and he mistakes their foolish babbling for the
voice of the world. His name, too, has been often foisted into Reviews,
and accordingly is known to many who never saw any of his works. In
Scotland few know or care any thing about him; and perhaps no man who
has spoken and written so much, and occasionally with so much genius and
ability, ever made so little impression on the public mind. Few people
know how to spell or pronounce his name; and were he to drop from the
clouds among any given number of well informed