Oh name of Coleridge, that hast mixed so much with the trepidations of our own agitated life, mixed with the beatings of our love, our gratitude, our trembling hope; name destined to move so much of reverential sympathy and so much of ennobling strife in the generations yet to come, of our England at home, […]

Using a New Testament, of which (in the narrative parts at least) any one word being given will suggest most of what is immediately consecutive, you evade the most irksome of the penalties annexed to the first breaking ground in a new language: you evade the necessity of hunting up and down a dictionary. Your […]

By way of Counsel to Adults who are hesitating as to the Propriety of Studying the Greek Language with a view to the Literature; and by way of consolation to those whom circumstances have obliged to lay aside that plan. No. I. No question has been coming up at intervals for reconsideration more frequently than […]

(May, 1822.) In revolutionary times, as when a civil war prevails in a country, men are much worse, as moral beings, than in quiet and untroubled states of peace. So much is matter of history. The English, under Charles II., after twenty years’ agitation and civil tumults; the Romans after Sylla and Marius, and the […]

I. The Main Subject Opened. What is Chronology, and how am I to teach it? The what is poorly appreciated, and chiefly through the defects of the how. Because it is so ill-taught, therefore in part it is that Chronology is so unattractive and degraded. Chronology is represented to be the handmaid of history. But […]

Some time back I published in this journal a little paper on the Californian madness–for madness I presumed it to be, and upon two grounds. First, in so far as men were tempted into a lottery under the belief that it was not a lottery; or, if it really were such, that it was a […]

The assassination of Caesar, we find characterized in one of his latter works (Farbenlehre, Theil 2, p. 126) by Goethe, as ‘die abgeschmackteste That die jemals begangen worden‘–the most outrageously absurd act that ever was committed. Goethe is right, and more than right. For not only was it an atrocity so absolutely without a purpose […]

(Supplementary To Published Essay.) Some little official secrets we learn from the correspondence of Cicero as Proconsul of Cilicia.[1] And it surprises us greatly to find a man, so eminently wise in his own case, suddenly turning romantic on behalf of a friend. How came it–that he or any man of the world should fancy […]

One fault in Wordsworth’s ‘Excursion’ suggested by Coleridge, but luckily quite beyond all the resources of tinkering open to William Wordsworth, is–in the choice of a Pedlar as the presiding character who connects the shifting scenes and persons in the ‘Excursion.’ Why should not some man of more authentic station have been complimented with that […]

In attempting to appraise Mr. Finlay’s work comprehensively, there is this difficulty. It comes before us in two characters; first, as a philosophic speculation upon history, to be valued against others speculating on other histories; secondly, as a guide, practical altogether and not speculative, to students who are navigating that great trackless ocean the Eastern […]

The ‘Essay on Criticism’ illustrates the same profound misconception of the principle working at the root of Didactic Poetry as operated originally to disturb the conduct of the ‘Essay on Man’ by its author, and to disturb the judgments upon it by its critics. This ‘Essay on Criticism’ no more aims at unfolding the grounds […]

I take the opportunity of referring to the work of a very eloquent Frenchman, who has brought the names of Wordsworth and Shakspeare into connection, partly for the sake of pointing out an important error in the particular criticism on Wordsworth, but still more as an occasion for expressing the gratitude due to the French […]

Review of Kant’s Essay on the Common Saying, that such and such a thing may be true in theory, but does not hold good in practice. What was the value of Kant’s essay upon this popular saying? Did it do much to clear up the confusion? Did it exterminate the vice in the language by […]

It is by a continued secretion (so to speak) of all which forces itself to the surface of national importance in the way of patriotic services that the English peerage keeps itself alive. Stop the laurelled trophies of the noble sailor or soldier pouring out his heart’s blood for his country, stop the intellectual movement […]

The sincerity of an author sometimes borrows an advantageous illustration from the repulsiveness of his theme. That a subject is dull, however unfortunately it may operate for the impression which he seeks to produce, must at least acquit him of seeking any aid to that impression from alien and meretricious attractions. Is a subject hatefully […]

Look into the Acts of the Apostles, you see the wide dispersion of the Jews which had then been accomplished; a dispersion long antecedent to that penal dispersion which occurred subsequently to the Christian era. But search the pages of the wicked Jew, Josephus,[1] who notices expressly this universal dispersion of the Jews, and gives […]

If you are one that upon meditative grounds have come sincerely to perceive the philosophic value of this faith; if you have become sensible that as yet Christianity is but in its infant stages–after eighteen centuries is but beginning to unfold its adaptations to the long series of human situations, slowly unfolding as time and […]

The Romans, so far from looking with the Jews to the Tigris, looked to the Jews themselves. Or at least they looked to that whole Syria, of which the Jews were a section. Consequently, there is a solution of two points: 1. The wise men of the East were delegates from the trans-Tigridian people. 2. […]

To write his own language with propriety is the ambition of here and there an individual; to speak it with propriety is the ambition of multitudes. Amongst the qualifications for a public writer–the preliminary one of leisure is granted to about one man in three thousand; and, this being indispensable, there at once, for most […]

Now, observe what I am going to prove. First A, and as a stepping-stone to something (B) which is to follow: It is, that the Jewish Scriptures could not have been composed in any modern aera. I am earnest in drawing your attention to the particular point which I have before me, because one of […]