nature of the human mind in childhood and the best way of bringing it happily into action, some tincture of sound philosophy. He constantly enforced and drew attention to the principle (not then so generally admitted as now), that Education is to be speeded forward by Encouragement, beckoning on from before, rather than by Fear urging from behind; because he saw that the former gives power, while it inspires desire, to advance; the latter with its envenomed goad, stupefies in attempting to stimulate. He was always insisting on the maxim that dulness, inattention and obstinacy in the taught, generally arises from want of sense, temper and honest diligence on the part of teachers.

Dr. Bell was an enthusiast of philanthropy as truly, I believe, if not as nobly as Clarkson, Howard, or John Wesley, and had within him at least a certain quantity of precious fire to burn up somewhat of the ignorance, and consequent misery, of this world.* It is often observed that such enthusiasm may be neither the result nor the accompaniment of true Christian charity; that a man may bestow strength, time, and money, on the public, whilst, in his private sphere, he is selfish and exacting, or sensual and corrupt; that he may be raising a temple to the honor of his own inventions, while he thinks himself a model of self-devotedness. So far as these remarks are true (and perhaps it is not the truth, that any man who makes it the business of his life to promote the general good, and habitually spends and is spent in that cause, has been from the first wholly uninspired with a pure and genuine zeal), they apply to all the public agents of philanthropy. No faults or failings that can be imputed to Dr. Bell disprove his title to be enrolled in that band; nor ought he to be denied the credit due to those whose aims in life are of the higher sort. Mr. Carlyle insists, that "the professional self-conscious friends of humanity are the fatalest kind of persons to be met with in our day;" but this can be affirmed of those alone whose schemes are conceived unwisely or without any real regard to the good of the classes to be affected by them; surely it is not "benevolence prepense" or the conscious deliberate endeavor to be fellow-workers with God, that causes such failures. Of Dr. Bell it should be remembered that at Swanage he showed the same activity in promoting the welfare of others in obscure and unobserved ways, which he afterwards displayed in more noticeable enterprises;-that he established the straw-plait manufactory and the practice of vaccination in a corner of the land before he undertook to re-model all the schools of the kingdom on the Madras

* "Brother Ringletub, the Missionary, inquired of Ram-Dass, a Hindoo man-god, who had set up for godhead lately, what he meant to do, then, with the sins of mankind? To which Ram-Dass at once answered, he had fire enough in him to burn up all the sins in the world. Surely it is the test of every divino man, that he have fire in him to burn up somewhat of the sins of the world, of the miseries and errors of the world: why else is he there?" Carlyle's Miscellanies, vol. iv. pp. 290-91.

system.* As Master of Sherborne Hospital, he continued the old system in the mode of dealing with ecclesiastical revenues a little after the time when it began to strike against the consciences of many; his conscience was not sensitive on the side of church interests, and his public spirit was all flowing away in another channel. If his marriage was not happy, here too, among men of mark, he has had too many partners in misconduct or misfortune; persons who devote themselves to the public are apt to bestow too little thought or pains on their own private affairs; what wonder if the fruit prove blighted or bitter, when there has been such carelessness in choosing the seed and in attending to its germination? That in youth Dr. Bell must have possessed considerable personal attractions, and shown marks of worth, is evident from the warm and worthy friends he acquired by personal qualities alone. His conduct during the earlier part of his career was distinguished by industry and earnestness; nor was it wanting in private liberality and family affection. During his employment at Madras he gathered golden opinions, and, had he died at the end of it, would have been remembered, while memory of him remained, as a zealous and disinterested, as well as an able and ingenious man. Throughout the latter half of a long life his character seems to have deteriorated; so it will ever be with men who, by a successful course of exertion, acquire power and importance, their intellectual not being on a par with their other personal endowments, men in whom a vigorous body supports a resolute will, and gives effect to the suggestions of a quick and lively though not enlarged mind, while clearness and depth of insight, freedom and foresight of thought are not among the gifts assigned them at their birth. Such a piece of mental mechanism, wherein the practical faculty so predominates over the reflective-energy and perseverance in action so exceed the power of duly determining action-is sure to get wrong in the working, and lose its internal balance more and more. Success, long continued, corrupts the heart; opposition, which often comes in full tide at last when little experienced at first, exacerbates the temper; and meantime the ventilation of abstract or imaginative thought, refreshing and renovating, like a breeze that has swept the plain of ocean, and comes charged with the salubrious particles which it bears within its bosom, is wanting to the engrossed and over-busy mortal, who, in the last stages of his life's journey, while he draws nearer to the other world, is ever receding further and further from it in mental preparedness, and goes on perpetually increasing his burden as he "crawls toward death." All this which I have said would be brought before the reader's mind more effectually, were he to peruse the present Mr. Southey's Life of Dr. Bell,-a faithful and feeling record, which must ever have a place, I think, in the great store-house of * See the Life of Dr. Bell, vol. ii. chap. xix.

British Biography. Two paragraphs of the Statesman's Manual are devoted by my Father to Bell and Lancaster:* in one of them he says: "But take even Dr. Bell's original and unsophisticated plan, which I myself regard as an especial gift of Providence to the human race; and suppose this incomparable machine, this vast moral steam-engine, to have been adopted and in free motion throughout the Empire; it would yet appear to me a most dangerous delusion to rely on it as if this of itself formed an efficient national education."

NOTES TO LECTURE XIII.

ON POESY OR ART.

(1) p. 328. It has been stated elsewhere (Biographia Literaria Introd. p. 33), that for many positions of this Lecture the author was indebted to Schelling's admirable Oration-Ueber das Verhältniss der Bildenden Künste zu der Natur: Philosophische Schriften, pp. 341–96. Here, as well as in his Lecture on the Greek Drama, Mr. Coleridge seems to have borrowed from memory. A few short sentences are taken almost verbatim; but for the most part the thoughts of Schelling are mixed up with those of the borrower, and I think that, on a careful comparison of the Lecture with the oration, any fair reader will admit that, if it be Schelling's-and that the leading thought of the whole is his, I freely own,-it is Coleridge's also. But this question every student will be able to decide for himself even without going beyond the present volume.

N.B. The title of Schelling's Discourse has been commonly translated, On the Relation between the Plastic Arts and Nature; yet the term Plastic refers to Sculpture exclusively, and is never applied either by Schelling or Schlegel to Painting: and Schelling's discourse treats der Bildenden Künste, of the figuring or imaging Arts, in their relationship to Nature.† Bild is a picture, a print, as well as a graven image. The verb háσow is "strictly used of the artist who works in soft substances, such as earth, clay, wax." Liddell and Scott. Still die Plastik is generally applied to carving or sculpture; but never, believe, to the mere expression of shape and visual appearance by painting, drawing, or printing.

* Works. I. p. 460.

† He says of Raphael, p. 379. "The bloom of the most cultivated life, the perfume of fancy, together with the aroma of the spirit breathe forth unitedly from his works ;" and bis criticism on Correggio, pp. 378-9, is remarkably genial and beautiful.

(mm) p. 328. See the next note.

"For the imaging art (die

(nn) p. 330. Phil. Schrift. pp. 344–5. bildenden Künst), in the oldest form of expression, is styled a dumb poetry. The author of this definition doubtless meant to intimate thereby that, like Poetry, it is intended to express intellectual thoughts, conceptions, which the soul originates, not, however, by means of speech, but as silent Nature does, through form, through sensuous works independent of herself. Thus the imaging or figuring art stands evidently as an active bond betwixt the Soul and Nature, and can be conceived only in the vital mean-in der lebendigen Mitte,— between both. Yea, since its relationship with the Soul it has in common with every other art, and with Poetry in particular, that (relation) whereby it is connected with Nature, and becomes, like Nature, a productive power, remains as the only one that is peculiar to it: and to this alone can we refer a theory which shall be satisfactory to the understanding, as well as furthering and beneficial to art." Transl. Compare also with a passage, which will be presently quoted, in p. 352.

(00) p. 230. See the last note.

(pp) p. 230. Ib. pp. 345-6. “But has not Science, then, always recognized this relationship? Has not every theory of later times even set out from the fixed principle, that Art should be the imitatress of Nature? It has so: but what did this broad general principle avail the artist, amid the various significations (Vieldeutigheit) of the conception of Nature, and when there were almost as many representations of this Nature as different modes of existence ?"

(99) p. 331. Compare with the following passage, Phil. Schrift. p. 356. "How comes it that, to every cultivated sense, imitations of the so named real, carried even to illusion, appear in the highest degree untruthful,- -even convey the impression of spectres; whereas a work, in which the idea is dominant, seizes us with the full force of truth,-nay, transports us for the first time into the genuine world of reality? Whence does this arise, save from the more or less obscure perception, which proclaims, that the idea is that alone which lives (das allein Lebendige) in Things:-that all else is beingless and empty shadow?"-Tr.

(rr) p. 331. Ib. p. 347. "Should then the disciple of Nature imitate every thing in her without distinction, and in every thing all that belongs to it, und von jedem jedes? Only beautiful objects, and even of these only the beautiful and perfect should he repeat.”—Tr.

(88) p. 331. Compare with the following. Ib. p. 351. "We must depart from the form in order to win it back again, to win back itself, perceived as true, livingly and in the light of understanding. Consider the most beautiful forms, what remains, when in thought you have abstracted from them the operative principle? Nothing but bare unessential properties, such as extension and space-relationship. ***** Nicht das Nebeneinanderseyn macht die Form,—it is not the contiguity or mutual nearness of parts that constitutes form, but the manner thereof (the mode in which it takes place). But this can only be determined through a positive power, dem Aussereinander vielmehr entgegenwirkende ―opposed even to that condition of space whereby things are perceived as without one another, which subjects the variety (or manifoldness) of parts to the unity of an idea (Begriff): from the power which works in the crystal even to that which, like a soft magnetic stream, gives to the parts of matter in human frames a disposition and situation relative to one another, whereby the conception, the essential unity and beauty-can become visible.”—Tr. Compare with this passage the last sentence of the first paragraph of Mr. C.'s Lecture.

(tt) p. 332. Ib. p. 353. "This effective science is the bond in Nature and Art between the conception and form; between body and soul."-Tr.

(uu) p. 332. Ib. p. 352. "The science, through which Nature works, is indeed like to no human science, which is united with self-reflection: mit der Reflexion ihrer selbst. In it conception is not distinct from art, nor design separate from execution."-Tr.

(vv) p. 332. Compare with this passage: Ph. Schrift. p. 353. “If that artist is to be accounted fortunate and praiseworthy beyond all others, on whom the Gods have bestowed this creative spirit, so will the work of art appear excellent in that proportion wherein it shows us, as in outline, this uncounterfeited power of creation and effectivity."-Tr.

(ww) p. 332. Ib. pp. 353-4. "It has long been perceived that, in Art, not every thing is performed with consciousness: that with the conscious activity an unconscious power must be united, and that the perfect union and interpenetration of these two accomplishes that which is highest in Art. Works that want this seal of conscious science are recognized through the sensible deficiency of a self-subsistent life independent of the life which produces them: while, on the other hand, where this operates, Art imparts to its work, together with the highest clearness of the understanding, that inscrutable reality, through which it appears like to a work of Nature."