e kind, and with the presumption of
youth withheld from its masters the legitimate name of poets. I saw that
the excellence of this kind consisted in just and acute observations on
men and manners in an artificial state of society, as its matter and
substance, and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong
epigrammatic couplets, as its form; that even when the subject was
addressed to the fancy, or the intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock, or
the Essay on Man; nay, when it was a consecutive narration, as in that
astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity, Pope's Translation
of the Iliad; still a point was looked for at the end of each second line,
and the whole was, as it were, a _sorites_, or, if I may exchange a
logical for a grammatical metaphor, a conjunction disjunctive, of
epigrams. Meantime, the matter and diction seemed to me characterized not
so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts translated into the language of
poetry."

_he thought little of Junius as a writer_. Cf. Coleridge's "Table Talk,"
July 3, 1833: "The style of Junius is a sort of metre, the law of which is
a balance of thesis and antithesis. When he gets out of his aphorismic
metre into a sentence of five or six lines long, nothing can exceed the
slovenliness of the English."

_dislike for Dr. Johnson_. Cf. "Table Talk," July 4, 1833: "Dr. Johnson's
fame now rests principally upon Boswell. It is impossible not to be amused
with such a book. But his _bow-wow_ manner must have had a good deal to do
with the effect produced.... As to Burke's testimony to Johnson's powers,
you must remember that Burke was a great courtier; and after all, Burke
said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in talking
than in writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life."

_opinion of Burke_. Cf. "Table Talk," April 8, 1833: "Burke was indeed a
great man. No one ever read history so philosophically as he seems to have
done.... He would have been more influential if he had less surpassed his
contemporaries, as Fox and Pitt, men of much inferior minds, in all
respects."

_He liked Richardson, but not Fielding._ On this subject Coleridge
evidently changed his mind. Cf. "Table Talk," July 5, 1834: "What a master
of composition Fielding was! Upon my word, I think the OEdipus Tyrannus,
the Alchemist, and Tom Jones the three most perfect plots ever planned.
And how charming, how wholesome, Fielding always is! To take him up after
R