onishing genius to which its
possessor gave so unfair a chance. As a thinker, although the evidence
is too imperfect to justify very dogmatic conclusions, the opinion of
the best authorities, from which there is little reason for differing,
is that Coleridge was much more stimulating than intrinsically valuable.
His _Aids to Reflection_, his most systematic work, is disappointing;
and, with _The Friend_ and the rest, is principally valuable as
exhibiting and inculcating an attitude of mind in which the use of logic
is not, as in most eighteenth century philosophers, destructive, but is
made to consist with a wide license for the employment of imagination
and faith. He borrowed a great deal from the Germans, and he at least
sometimes forgot that he had borrowed a great deal from our own older
writers.

So, too, precise examination of his numerous but fragmentary remains as
a literary critic makes it necessary to take a great deal for granted.
Here, also, he Germanised much; and it is not certain, even with the aid
of his fragments, that he was the equal either of Lamb or of Hazlitt in
insight. Perhaps his highest claim is that, in the criticism of
philosophy, of religion, and of literature alike he expressed, and was
even a little ahead of, the nobler bent and sympathy of his
contemporaries. We are still content to assign to Coleridge, perhaps
without any very certain title-deeds, the invention of that more
catholic way of looking at English literature which can relish the
Middle Ages without doing injustice to contemporaries, and can be
enthusiastic for the seventeenth century without contemning the
eighteenth.[6] To him more than to any single man is also assigned (and
perhaps rightly, though some of his remarks on the Church, even after
his rally to orthodoxy, are odd) the great ecclesiastical revival of the
Oxford movement; and it is certain that he had not a little to do with
the abrupt discarding of the whole tradition of Locke, Berkeley and
Hartley only excepted. Difficult as it may be to give distinct chapter
and verse for these assignments from the formless welter of his prose
works, no good judge has ever doubted their validity, with the above and
other exceptions and guards. It may be very difficult to present
Coleridge's assets in prose in a liquid form; but few doubt their value.

It is very different with his poetry. Here, too, the disastrous, the
almost ruinous results of his weaknesses appear. When one b