dsworth's feelings are a little morbid in this respect, or that he
resents censure more than he is gratified by praise. Otherwise, the tide
has turned much in his favour of late years--he has a large body of
determined partisans--and is at present sufficiently in request with the
public to save or relieve him from the last necessity to which a man of
genius can be reduced--that of becoming the God of his own idolatry!

XI

MR. COLERIDGE

The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is,
that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and
Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements. The
accumulation of knowledge has been so great, that we are lost in wonder at
the height it has reached, instead of attempting to climb or add to it;
while the variety of objects distracts and dazzles the looker-on. What
_niche_ remains unoccupied? What path untried? What is the use of doing
anything, unless we could do better than all those who have gone before
us? What hope is there of this? We are like those who have been to see
some noble monument of art, who are content to admire without thinking of
rivalling it; or like guests after a feast, who praise the hospitality of
the donor "and thank the bounteous Pan"--perhaps carrying away some
trifling fragments; or like the spectators of a mighty battle, who still
hear its sound afar off, and the clashing of armour and the neighing of
the war-horse and the shout of victory is in their ears, like the rushing
of innumerable waters!

MR. COLERIDGE has "a mind reflecting ages past:" his voice is like the
echo of the congregated roar of the "dark rearward and abyss" of thought.
He who has seen a mouldering tower by the side of a chrystal lake, hid by
the mist, but glittering in the wave below, may conceive the dim,
gleaming, uncertain intelligence of his eye: he who has marked the evening
clouds uprolled (a world of vapours), has seen the picture of his mind,
unearthly, unsubstantial, with gorgeous tints and ever-varying forms--

"That which was now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water."

Our author's mind is (as he himself might express it) _tangential_. There
is no subject on which he has not touched, none on which he has rested.
With an understanding fertile, subtle, expansive, "quick, forgetive,
apprehensive," beyond all living precedent, few traces of