he has undertaken.

It has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in conversation
and in print, more frequently than I find it easy to explain; _whether
I consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited circulation of my
writings, or the retirement and distance in which I have lived, both
from the literary and political world_.

Now, it is obvious, that if his writings be few, and unimportant, and
unknown, Mr. Coleridge can have no reason for composing his Literary
Biography. Yet in singular contradiction to himself--

"If," says he, at p. 217, vol. i, "_the compositions which I have made
public_, and that too in a form the most certain of an extensive
circulation, though the least flattering to an author's self-love, had
been published in books, they _would have filled a respectable number of
volumes."_

He then adds,

Seldom have I written that in a day, the acquisition or investigation
of which had not cost me _the precious labour of a month!_

He then bursts out into this magnificent exclamation,

Would that the criterion of a scholar's ability were the number and
moral value of the truths which he has been the means of throwing
into general circulation!

And he sums up all by declaring,

By what I _have_ effected am I to be judged by my fellow men.

The truth is, that Mr. Coleridge has lived, as much as any man of his
time, in literary and political society, and that he has sought every
opportunity of keeping himself in the eye of the public, as restlessly
as any charlatan who ever exhibited on the stage. To use his own words,
"In 1794, when I had barely passed the verge of manhood, I published a
small volume of juvenile poems." These poems, by dint of puffing,
reached a third edition; and though Mr. Coleridge pretends now to think
but little of them, it is amusing to see how vehemently he defends them
against criticism, and how pompously he speaks of such paltry trifles.
"They were marked _by an ease and simplicity_ which I have studied,
_perhaps with inferior success,_ to bestow on my latter compositions."
But he afterwards repents of this sneer at his later compositions, and
tells us, that they have nearly reached his standard of perfection!
Indeed, his vanity extends farther back than his juvenile poems; and he
says, "For a school boy, I was _above par in English versification_, and
had already produced two or three compositions, which I may venture to
say, _without re