saving him from a premature absorption in metaphysics and
theology and with introducing him to the excellences of the new school of
poetry. In his enthusiasm he went about making proselytes for Bowles and
"as my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made,
within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the
best presents I could offer to those, who had in any way won my regard.
And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following
publications of the same author." Coleridge also addressed a "Sonnet to
Bowles," opening

"My heart hath thanked thee, Bowles! for those soft strains,
That on the still air floating tremblingly,
Wak'd in me Fancy, Love, and Sympathy!"

P. 212. _John Bull_. Croker's John Bull was a scurrilous newspaper edited
by Theodore Hook, the first number of which appeared December 17, 1820.

_Mr. Croker_, John Wilson (1780-1857), politician and man of letters, one
of Hazlitt's pet aversions, and the same who comes in for such a severe
chastisement in Macaulay's review of his edition of Boswell's "Johnson."

_Junius_, the mysterious author of a famous series of political letters
which appeared in the London Public Advertiser from January 21, 1769, to
January 21, 1772, collected as the "Letters of Junius" in 1772. The name
of Sir Philip Francis is the one most persistently associated with the
composition of these letters.

_Godwin_, William (1756-1836), leader of the philosophical radicals in
England and a believer in the perfectibility of man, wrote "An Enquiry
concerning Political Justice" (1793), "Caleb Williams" (1794), and other
novels and miscellaneous works. Godwin was the husband of Mary
Wolstonecraft, and the father-in-law of Shelley. Hazlitt wrote a sketch of
him in the "Spirit of the Age" and reviewed his last novel, "Cloudesley,"
in the Edinburgh Review. Coleridge has a Sonnet to William Godwin:

"Nor will I not thy holy guidance bless,
And hymn thee, Godwin! with an ardent lay;
For that thy voice, in Passion's stormy day
When wild I roam'd the bleak Heath of Distress,
Bade the bright form of Justice meet my way--
And told me that her name was Happiness."

_Sorrows of Werter_, a sentimental novel of Goethe's, the work by which he
was most generally known to English readers in Hazlitt's day.

_laugh'd with Rabelais_. Cf. Pope's "Dunciad," I, 22: "Or laugh and shake
in Rab'lais easy chair."

_spoke with rapture