We lose our patience when we think of the powers that he has wasted, and compare them and their success with those, for instance, of such a fellow as the ———, all whose ideas, notions, apprehensions, comprehensions, feelings, virtues, genius, skill, are comprised in the two words which Peachum describes as necessary qualifications in his gang, "To stand himself and bid others stand!"
When his six Irish friends, the six Irish gentlemen, Mr. Makins, Mr. Dunkley, Mr. Monaghan, Mr. Gollogher, Mr. Gallaspy, and Mr. O'Keeffe, after an absence of several years, discovered their old acquaintance John Buncle, sitting in a mixed company at Harrowgate Wells, they exclaimed with one accord—"There he is—making love to the finest woman in the universe!" So we may say at a venture of Mr. Coleridge—"There he is, at this instant (no matter where) talking away among his gossips, as if he were at the Court of Semiramis, with the Sophi or Prestor John." The place can never reach the height of his argument. He should live in a world of enchantment, that things might answer to his descriptions. His talk would suit the miracle of the Conversion of Constantine, or Raphael's Assembly of the Just. It is not short of that. His face would cut no figure there, but his tongue would wag to some purpose. He is fit to take up the deep pauses of conversation between Cardinals and Angels—his cue would not be wanting in presence of the beatific vision. Let him talk on for ever in this world and the next; and both worlds will be the better for it. But let him not write, or pretend to write, nonsense. Nobody is the better for it. It was a fine thought in Mr. Wordsworth to represent Cervantes at the day of judgment and conflagration of the world carrying off the romance of Don Quixote under his arm. We hope that Mr. Coleridge, on the same occasion, will leave "the Friend" to take its chance, and his "Lay Sermon" to get up into the Limbo of Vanity, how it can.
