insulated fragments of truth, and therewith to frame a perfect mirror. I show to each system that I fully understand and rightfully appreciate what that system means; but then I lift up that system to a higher point of view, from which I enable it to see its former position, where it was, indeed, but under another light and with different relations; so that the fragment of truth is not only acknowledged, but explained. Thus the old astronomers discovered and maintained much that was true; but, because they were placed on a false ground, and looked from a wrong point of view, they never did, they never could, discover the truth-that is, the whole truth. As soon as they left the earth, their false centre, and took their stand in the sun, immediately they saw the whole system in its true light, and their former station remaining, but remaining as a part of the prospect. I wish, in short, to connect by a moral copula natural history with political history; or, in other words, to make history scientific, and science historical-to take from history its accidentality, and from science its fatalism.

I never from a boy could, under any circumstances, feel the slightest dread of death as such. In all my illnesses I have ever had the most intense desire to be released from this life, unchecked by any but one wish, namely, to be able to finish my work on Philosophy. Not that I have their labours have prepared the way for him, is not likely to produce any thing himself that will be held in remembrance by posterity."— The Doctor, &c., c. 36, P. I.

I heartily trust that the author or authors, as the case may be, of this singularly thoughtful and diverting book will in due time continue it. Let some people say what they please, there has not been the fellow of it published for many a long day.-H. N. C.

The first volume of the "Doctor" was published anonymously in 1833. Keeping the secret of its authorship, and discussing the claims of various writers to whom it was assigned, afforded Southey much amusement. But our editor was behind the age, to be so in the dark in 1836.

1 The same remark occurs under April 19, 1830, and in the margin of a copy of Charles Tennyson-Turner's earliest volume of Sonnets (which Coleridge discussed, as we have seen, on the previous day,-April 18), we find written,-"It is constitutional to me that I cannot, I never could, sympathise with the fear of death, as death."

2 There is usually something one would like to finish. See July 10, 1834.

any author's vanity on the subject: God knows that I should be absolutely glad, if I could hear that the thing had already been done before me.

Illness never in the smallest degree affects my intellectual powers. I can think with all my ordinary vigour in the midst of pain: but I am beset with the most wretched and unmanning reluctance and shrinking from action.1 I could not upon such occasions take the pen in hand to write down my thoughts for all the wide world.

FEW

OCTOBER 26, 1831.

Keenness and Subtlety.

EW men of genius are keen; but almost every man of genius is subtle. If you ask me the difference between keenness and subtlety, I answer that it is the difference between a point and an edge. To split a hair is no proof of subtlety; for subtlety acts in distinguishing differences -in showing that two things apparently one are in fact two; whereas, to split a hair is to cause division, and not to ascertain difference.

THE

OCTOBER 27, 1831.

Duties and Needs of an Advocate.

HERE is undoubtedly a limit to the exertions of an advocate for his client. He has a right, it is his bounden duty, to do everything which his client might honestly do, and to do it with all the effect which any exercise of skill, talent, or knowledge of his own may be able to produce. But the advocate has no right, nor is it his duty, to do that for his client which his client in foro conscientiæ

1 Coleridge lectured badly when ill. We may appropriately quote here Wordsworth's statement,-"Of all men I have ever known, Coleridge had the most of passive courage in bodily trial, but no one was so easily cowed when moral firmness was required in miscellaneous conversation or in the daily intercourse of social life."-Wordsworth's Prose Works, v. iii. 87. Wordsworth himself was not so easily cowed. He would calmly produce from his pocket, at a public dinner, a contrivance to protect his eyes from the light, and set it up on the table, in front of him.

has no right to do for himself; as, for a gross example, to put in evidence a forged deed or will, knowing it to be so forged. As to mere confounding of witnesses by skilful cross-examination, I own I am not disposed to be very strict. The whole thing is perfectly well understood on all hands, and it is little more in general than a sort of cudgelplaying between the counsel and the witness, in which, I speak with submission to you, I think I have seen the witness have the best of it as often as his assailant. It is of the utmost importance in the administration of justice that knowledge and intellectual power should be as far as possible equalised between the Crown and the prisoner, or plaintiff and defendant. Hence especially arises the necessity for an order of advocates,-men whose duty it ought to be to know what the law allows and disallows; but whose interests should be wholly indifferent as to the persons or characters of their clients. If a certain latitude in examining witnesses is, as experience seems to have shown, a necessary mean towards the evisceration of the truth of matters of fact, I have no doubt, as a moralist, in saying, that such latitude within the bounds now existing is justifiable. We must be content with a certain quantum in this life, especially in matters of public cognisance; the necessities of society demand it; we must not be righteous overmuch, or wise overmuch; and, as an old father says, in what vein may there not be a plethora, when the Scripture tells us that there may under circumstances be too much of virtue and of wisdom?

Still I think that, upon the whole, the advocate is placed in a position unfavourable to his moral being, and, indeed, to his intellect also, in its higher powers. Therefore I would recommend an advocate to devote a part of his leisure time to some study of the metaphysics of the mind, or metaphysics of theology; something, I mean, which shall call forth all his powers, and centre his wishes in the investigation of truth alone, without reference to a side to be supported. No studies give such a power of distinguishing as metaphysical, and in their natural and unperverted tendency they are ennobling and exalting. Some such studies are wanted to counteract the operation of legal

studies and practice, which sharpen, indeed, but, like a grinding-stone, narrow whilst they sharpen.

I

NOVEMBER 19, 1831.

Abolition of the French Hereditary Peerage.

CANNOT

66

say what the French peers will do; but I can tell you what they ought to do. "So far," they might say, as our feelings and interests, as individuals, are concerned in this matter if it really be the prevailing wish of our fellow-countrymen to destroy the hereditary peerage —we shall, without regret, retire into the ranks of private citizens: but we are bound by the provisions of the existing constitution to consider ourselves collectively as essential to the well-being of France: we have been placed here to defend what France, a short time ago at least, thought a vital part of its government; and, if we did not defend it, what answer could we make hereafter to France itself, if she should come to see, what we think to be an error, in the light in which we view it? We should be justly branded as traitors and cowards, who had deserted the posts which we were specially appointed to maintain. House of Peers, therefore, as one substantive branch of the legislature, we can never, in honour or in conscience, consent to a measure of the impolicy and dangerous consequences of which we are convinced.

As a

"If, therefore, this measure is demanded by the country, let the king and the deputies form themselves into a constituent assembly; and then, assuming to act in the name of the total nation, let them decree the abolition. In that case we yield to a just, perhaps, but revolutionary, act, in which we do not participate, and against which we are, upon the supposition, quite powerless. If the deputies, however, consider themselves so completely in the character of delegates as to be at present absolutely pledged to vote without freedom of deliberation, let a concise, but perspicuous, summary of the ablest arguments that can be adduced on either side be drawn up, and printed, and circulated throughout the country; and then, after two months, let the deputies demand fresh instructions upon

this point. One thing, as men of honour, we declare beforehand that, come what will, none of us who are now peers will ever accept a peerage created de novo for life.”

TH

NOVEMBER 20, 1831.

Conduct of Ministers on the Reform Bill.-The Multitude.

HE present ministers have, in my judgment, been guilty of two things pre-eminently wicked, sensu politico, in their conduct upon this Reform Bill. First, they have endeavoured to carry a fundamental change in the material and mode of action of the government of the country by so exciting the passions, and playing upon the necessary ignorance of the numerical majority of the nation, that all freedom and utility of discussion, by competent heads, in the proper place, should be precluded. In doing this they have used, or sanctioned the use of, arguments which may be applied with equal or even greater force to the carrying of any measure whatever, no matter how atrocious in its character or destructive in its consequences. They have appealed directly to the argument of the greater number of voices, no matter whether the utterers were drunk or sober, competent or not competent; and they have done the utmost in their power to rase out the sacred principle in politics of a representation of interests, and to introduce the mad and barbarising scheme of a delegation of individuals. And they have done all this without one word of thankfulness to God for the manifold blessings of which the constitution, as settled at the Revolution, imperfect as it may be, has been the source or vehicle or condition to this great nation, without one honest statement of the manner in which the anomalies in the practice grew up, or any manly declaration of the inevitable necessities of government which those anomalies have met. With no humility, nor fear, nor reverence, like Ham the accursed, they have beckoned, with grinning faces, to a vulgar mob, to come and insult over the nakedness of a parent; when it had become them, if one spark of filial patriotism had burnt within their breasts, to have marched with silent steps and averted faces to lay their robes upon his destitution!