Coleridge's to designate a
kind of Communism, partly based on the speculations of Godwin, and
intended to be carried into practice in America.

[6] Yet this praise can only be assigned to Coleridge with large
allowance. He was always unjust to his own _immediate_ predecessors,
Johnson, Gibbon, etc.; and he was not too sensible of the real merits of
Pope or even of Dryden. In this respect Leigh Hunt, an immeasurably
weaker thinker, had a much more catholic taste. And it is not certain
that, as a mere prose writer, Coleridge was a very good prose writer.

[7] Curiously enough, there was another and slightly older Samuel
Rogers, a clergyman, who published verse in 1782, just before his
namesake, and who dealt with Hope--

Hope springs eternal in the _aspiring_ breast.

His verse, of which specimens are given in Southey's _Modern English
Poets_, is purely eighteenth century. He died in 1790.

[8] Henry Headley, who, like Bowles and Landor, was a member of Trinity
College, Oxford, and who died young, after publishing a few original
poems of no great value, deserves more credit for his _Select Beauties
of Ancient English Poetry_, published in two volumes, with an exquisite
title-page vignette, by Cadell in 1787, than has sometimes been allowed
him by the not numerous critics who have noticed him recently, or by
those who immediately followed him. His knowledge was soon outgrown, and
therefore looked down upon; and his taste was a very little
indiscriminate. But it was something to put before an age which was just
awakening to the appetite for such things two volumes full of selections
from the too little read poets of the seventeenth, with a few of the
sixteenth century. Moreover, Headley's biographical information shows
very praiseworthy industry, and his critical remarks a great deal of
taste at once nice and fairly catholic. A man who in his day could,
while selecting and putting forth Drayton and Carew, Daniel and King,
speak enthusiastically of Dryden and even of Goldsmith, must have had
the root of the matter in him as few critics have had.

[9] Not to be confounded with _Robert_, or "Satan" Montgomery, his
junior by many years, and a much worse poet, the victim of Macaulay's
famous classical example of what is called in English "slating," and in
French _ereintement_. There is really nothing to be said about this
person that Macaulay has not said; though perhaps one or two of the
things he has said are a littl