The very burden of The Courier all last week, and for many weeks last past and to come.
5. Mr. Coleridge sums up his opinion of the ultimate design and secret origin of "the Wat Tyler" in these remarkable words:—"We should have seen that the vivid, yet indistinct images in which he had painted the evils of war and the hardships of the poor, proved that neither the forms nor the feelings were the result of real observation. The product of the poet's own fancy, they"—[viz. the evils of war and the hardships of the poor]—"were impregnated, therefore, with that pleasurable fervour which is experienced in all energetic exertion of intellectual power. But as to any serious wish, akin to reality," [that is, to remove these evils] "as to any real persons or events designed or expected, we should think it just as wise and just as charitable, to believe that Quevedo or Dante would have been glad to realise the horrid phantoms and torments of imaginary oppressors, whom they beheld in the infernal regions—i.e. on the slides of their own magic lanthorn."
Answer. The slides of the guillotine, excited (as we have been told) the same pleasurable fervour in Mr. Southey's mind: and Mr. Coleridge seems to insinuate, that the 5,800,000 lives which have been lost to prove mankind the property of kings, by divine right, have been lost "on the slides of a magic lanthorn;" the evils of war, like all other actual evils, being "the products of a fervid imagination." So much for the sincerity of poetry.
Audrey. Is not poetry a true thing?
Touchstone. No.
Would these gentlemen persuade us that there is nothing evil in the universe but what exists in their imagination, but what is the product of their fervid fancy? That the world is full of nothing but their egotism, their vanity, and their hypocrisy? The world is sick of them, their egotism, their vanity, and their hypocrisy.
