er on the one side from
certain defects of reading; for his access to books was latterly small,
and even when it had been ample, as at Oxford, in London, or at
Southey's house, he confesses that he had availed himself of it but
little. Hence he is often wrong, and more often incomplete, from sheer
lack of information. Secondly, much of his work is mere jotting, never
in the very least degree intended for publication, and sometimes
explicitly corrected or retracted by later jottings of the same kind. In
such a case we can rather augur of the might-have-been than pronounce on
the actual. But the two volumes are full of delicate critical views on
literature; and the longest series, "Ignoramus on the Fine Arts," shows
how widely, with better luck and more opportunity, he might have
extended his critical performances. In short, Hartley Coleridge, if a
"sair sicht" to the moralist, is an interesting and far from a wholly
painful one to the lover of literature, which he himself loved so much,
and practised, with all his disadvantages, so successfully.

All the persons hitherto mentioned in this chapter appear by undoubted
right in any history of English Literature: it may cause a little
surprise to see that of Maginn figuring with them. Yet his abilities
were scarcely inferior to those of any; and he was kept back from
sharing their fame only by infirmities of character and by his
succumbing to that fatal Bohemianism which, constantly recurring among
men of letters, exercised its attractions with special force in the
early days of journalism in this century. William Maginn (1793), who was
the son of a schoolmaster at Cork, took a brilliant degree at Trinity
College, Dublin, and for some years followed his father's profession.
The establishment, however, and the style of _Blackwood_ were an
irresistible attraction to him, and he drifted to Edinburgh, wrote a
great deal in the earlier and more boisterous days of _Maga_ under the
pseudonym of Ensign O'Doherty, and has, as has been said, some claims to
be considered the originator of the _Noctes_. Then, as he had gone from
Ireland to Edinburgh, he went from Edinburgh to London, and took part in
divers Tory periodicals, acting as Paris correspondent for some of them
till, about 1830, he started, or helped in starting, a London
_Blackwood_ in _Fraser_. He had now every opportunity, and he gathered
round him a staff almost more brilliant than that of the _Edinburgh_, of
the _London_,