4

the after editions, I pruned the double epithets with no sparing hand, and used my best efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction; though in truth, these parasite plants of youthful poetry had insinuated themselves into my longer poems with such

ble epithets seems to be this: either that they should be already denizens of our language, such as blood-stained, terror-stricken, self-applauding or when a new epithet, or one found in books only, is hazarded, that it, at least, be one word, not two words made one by mere virtue of the printer's hyphen. A language which, like the English, is almost without cases, is indeed in its very genius unfitted for compounds. If a writer, every time a compounded word suggests itself to him, would seek for some other mode of expressing the same sense, the chances are always greatly in favour of his finding a better word. Ut tanquam scopulum sic fugias insolens verbum, is the wise advice of Cæsar to the Roman Orators,* and the precept applies with double force to the writers in our own language. But it must not be forgotten, that the same Cæsar wrote a Treatise† for the purpose of reforming the ordinary language by bringing it to a greater accordance with the principles of logic or universal grammar.

4 [The second edition appeared in May 1797 with the same publishers' names. Upwards of twenty of the pieces contained in the first edition were omitted in this, and ten new poems were added. Amongst these latter were the Dedication to his brother, the Reverend George Coleridge, the Ode on the Departing Year, and the Reflections on having left a place of Retirement. (Poet. Works, I.) The volume comprised poems by Lamb and Lloyd, and on the title page was printed the prophetic aspiration:-Duplex nobis vinculum, et amicitiæ junctarumque Camanarum ;-quod utinam neque mors solvat; neque temporis longinquitas! Ed.]

* [The expression is so given by A. Gellius (Noct. Att. I. 10). Macrobius says, infrequens atque insolens verbum. (Saturn. I. 5.) Ed.]

+ [De Analogia Libri duo, the first of which contained the precept above mentioned. Ed.]

intricacy of union, that I was often obliged to omit disentangling the weed, from the fear of snapping the flower. From that period to the date of the present work I have published nothing, with my name, which could by any possibility have come before the board of anonymous criticism.5 Even the three or four poems, printed with the works of a friend, as far as they were censured at all, were charged with the same or similar defects, (though I am persuaded not with equal justice),—with an excess of ornament, in addition to strained and elaborate diction. I must be permitted to add, that, even at the early period of my juvenile poems, I saw and admitted the superiority of an austerer and more natural style, with an insight not less clear, than I at present possess. My judgment was stronger than were my powers of realizing its dictates; and the faults of my language, though indeed partly owing to a wrong choice of subjects, and the desire of giving a poetic

5 [This is certainly not strictly accurate, if the date of the publication of the Biographia (1817) be taken as the period intended. The Remorse appeared in 1813, and Christabel in 1816. Zapolya, the two Lay Sermons, and the Sibylline Leaves, all came out nearly contemporaneously with this work. I believe the fact to be, that Mr. Coleridge wrote the passage in the text several years before 1817, and never observed the misstatement which lapse of time had caused at the date of publication. The first Essays of The Friend, indeed, came out in 1809; but he probably did not consider them as constituting a published work in the ordinary sense of the term. Ed.]

6 See the criticisms on the Ancient Mariner, in the Monthly and Critical Reviews of the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads *

*[The first volume of the Lyrical Ballads contained The Ancient Mariner, Love, The Nightingale, and The Foster Mother's Tale. Ed.]

colouring to abstract and metaphysical truths, in which a new world then seemed to open upon me, did yet, in part likewise, originate in unfeigned diffidence of my own comparative talent.-During several years of my youth and early manhood, I reverenced those who had re-introduced the manly simplicity of the Greek, and of our own elder poets, with such enthusiasm as made the hope seem presumptuous of writing successfully in the same style. Perhaps a similar process has happened to others; but my earliest poems were marked by an ease and simplicity, which I have studied, perhaps with inferior success, to impress on my later compositions.

At school, (Christ's Hospital,) I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master, the Reverend James Bowyer. He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, (in such extracts as I then read,) Terence, and above all the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and brazen ages; but with even those of the Augustan æra: and on grounds of plain sense and universal logic to see and assert the superiority of the former in the truth and nativeness both of their

thoughts and diction. At the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learned

7 [See the Table Talk, p. 185, 2nd edit. and Lamb's exquisite Essay, Christ's Hospital five and thirty years ago. Prose Works, II. p. 26. Ed.]

from him, that poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word; and I well remember that, availing himself of the synonymes to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt to show, with regard to each, why it would not have answered the same purpose; and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in the original

text.

In our own English compositions, (at least for the last three years of our school education,) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words. Lute, harp, and lyre, Muse, Muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene were all an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming "Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!" Nay certain introductions, similes, and examples, were placed by name on a list of interdiction. Among the similes, there was, I remember, that of the manchineel fruit, as suiting equally well with too many subjects;

8 This is worthy of ranking as a maxim, (regula maxima,) of criticism. Whatever is translatable in other and simpler words of the same language, without loss of sense or dignity, is bad. N. B. By dignity I mean the absence of ludicrous and debasing associations.

in which however it yielded the palm at once to the example of Alexander and Clytus, which was equally good and apt, whatever might be the theme. Was it ambition? Alexander and Clytus !-Flattery? Alexander and Clytus!—Anger-drunkenness—pride— friendship-ingratitude-late repentance? Still, still Alexander and Clytus! At length, the praises of agriculture having been exemplified in the sagacious observation that, had Alexander been holding the plough, he would not have run his friend Clytus through with a spear, this tried, and serviceable old friend was banished by public edict in sæcula sæculorum. I have sometimes ventured to think, that a list of this kind, or an index expurgatorius of certain well known and ever returning phrases, both introductory, and transitional, including a large assortment of modest egoisms, and flattering illeisms, and the like, might be hung up in our Law-courts, and both Houses of Parliament, with great advantage to the public, as an important saving of national time, an incalculable relief to his Majesty's ministers, but above all, as insuring the thanks of country attornies, and their clients, who have private bills to carry through the House.

Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which I cannot pass over in silence, because I think it imitable and worthy of imitation. He would

9 ["This lecture he enriched with many valuable quotations from the ancients, particularly from Seneca; who hath, indeed, so well handled this passion, that none but a very angry man can read him without great pleasure and profit. The Doctor concluded his harangue with the famous story of Alexander and Clytus; but, as I find that entered in my Common-place under title Drunkenness, I shall not insert it here." The History of a Foundling, by Henry Fielding, Book vi. chap. ix. Ed.]