John_. How individual and
comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life!'

Assuredly it is not with any intention of diminishing Coleridge's title
as a Shakespearean critic that we bring forward this instance. He is the
greatest critic of Shakespeare; and the quality of his excellence is
displayed in one of the other few notes he left on this particular play.
In Act III, scene ii., Warburton's emendation of 'airy' to 'fiery' had
in Coleridge's day been received into the text of the Bastard's lines:--

'Now by my life, this day grows wondrous hot;
Some airy devil hovers in the sky.'

On which Coleridge writes:--

'I prefer the old text: the word 'devil' implies 'fiery.' You need
only to read the line, laying a full and strong emphasis on 'devil,'
to perceive the uselessness and tastelessness of Warburton's
alteration.'

The test is absolutely convincing--a poet's criticism of poetry. But
that Coleridge went astray not once but many times, under the influence
of his idolatry of Shakespeare, corroborates the general conclusion that
is forced upon any one who will take the trouble to read a whole volume
of the modern _Variorum_. There has been much editing, much comment, but
singularly little criticism of Shakespeare; a half-pennyworth of bread
to an intolerable deal of sack. The pendulum has swung violently from
niggling and insensitive textual quibble to that equally distressing
exercise of human ingenuity, idealistic encomium, of which there is a
typical example in the opening sentence of Mr Masefield's remarks upon
the play: 'Like the best Shakespearean tragedies, _King John_ is an
intellectual form in which a number of people with obsessions illustrate
the idea of treachery.' We remember that Mr Masefield has much better
than this to say of Shakespeare in his little book; but we fasten upon
this sentence because it is set before us in the _Variorum_, and because
it too 'is an intellectual form in which a literary man with obsessions
illustrates his idea of criticism.' Genetically, it is a continuation of
the shoddy element in Coleridge's Shakespeare criticism, a continual
bias towards transcendental interpretation of the obvious. To take the
origin a phase further back, it is the portentous offspring of the
feeble constituent of German philosophy (a refusal to see the object)
after it had been submitted to an idle process of ferment in the softer
part of Coleridge's brain.