Equally unthinking and uncharitable ;-I approve of them ;but yet remember Roman Catholic idolatry, and that it originated in such high-flown metaphors as these. Make it sense and lose the rhyme; or make it rhyme and lose the sense. P. 258. The Nativity, or Christmas Day. Unfold thy face, unmask thy ray, Shine forth, bright sun, double the day, Let no malignant misty fume, &c. The only poem in The Synagogue which possesses poetic merit; with a few changes and additions this would be a striking poem. Substitute the following for the fifth to the eighth line. To sheath or blunt one happy ray, P. 267. Whit-Sunday. Nay, startle not to hear that rushing wind, To hear at once so great variety Of language from them come, &c. The spiritual miracle was the descent of the Holy Ghost: the outward the wind and the tongues and so St. Peter himself explains it. That each individual obtained the power of speaking all languages, is neither contained in, nor fairly deducible from, St. Luke's account. R* P. 269. Trinity-Sunday. The Trinity In Unity, And Unity In Trinity, All reason doth transcend. Most true, but not contradict. Reason is to faith, as the eye to the telescope. EXTRACT FROM A LETTER OF S. T. COLERIDGE TO W. COLLINS, R. A. PRINTED IN THE LIFE OF COLLINS BY HIS SON. VOL. I. December, 1818. To feel the full force of the Christian religion it is perhaps necessary, for many tempers, that they should first be made to feel, experimentally, the hollowness of human friendship, the presumptuous emptiness of human hopes. I find more substantial comfort now in pious George Herbert's Temple, which I used to read to amuse myself with his quaintness, in short, only to laugh at, than in all the poetry since the poems of Milton. If you have not read Herbert I can recommend the book to you confidently. The poem entitled "The Flower" is especially affecting, and to me such a phrase as "and relish versing" expresses a sincerity and reality, which I would unwillingly exchange for the more dignified" and once more love the Muse," &c. and so with many other of Herbert's homely phrases. NOTES ON MATHIAS' EDITION OF GRAY. ON A DISTANT PROSPECT OF ETON COLLEGE. Vol. i. p. 9. Wanders the hoary Thames along WE want, methinks, a little treatise from some man of flexible good sense, and well versed in the Greek poets, especially Homer, the choral, and other lyrics, containing first a history of compound epithets, and then the laws and licenses. I am not so much disposed as I used to be to quarrel with such an epithet as silver-winding;" ungrammatical as the hyphen is, it is not wholly illogical, for the phrase conveys more than silvery and winding. It gives, namely, the unity of the impression, the coinherence of the brightness, the motion, and the line of motion. P. 10. Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen To chase the rolling circle's speed, Or urge the flying ball?-GRAY. This is the only stanza that appears to me very objectionable in point of diction. This, I must confess, is not only falsetto throughout, but is at once harsh and feeble, and very far the worst ten lines in all the works of Mr. Gray, English or Latin, prose or verse. P. 12. And envy wan, and faded care,' 'Bad in the first, in the second, in the last degree. The proud are taught to taste of pain.—Gray. There is a want of dignity-a sort of irony in this phrase to my feeling that would be more proper in dramatic than in lyric composition. Whatever might be expected from a scholar, a gentleman, a man of exquisite taste, as the quintessence of sane and sound good sense, Mr. Gray appears to me to have performed. The poet Plato, the orator Plato, Plato the exquisite dramatist of conversation, the seer and the painter of character, Plato the highbred, highly-educated, aristocratic republican, the man and the gentleman of quality stands full before us from behind the curtain as Gray has drawn it back. Even so does Socrates, the social wise old man, the practical moralist. But Plato the philosopher, but the divine Plato, was not to be comprehended within the field of vision, or be commanded by the fixed immovable telescope of Mr. Locke's human understanding. The whole sweep of the best philosophic reflections of French or English fabric in the age of our scholarly bard, was not commensurate with the mighty orb. The little, according to my convictions at least, the very little of proper Platonism contained in the written books of Plato, who himself, in an epistle, the authenticity of which there is no tenable ground for doubting, as I was rejoiced to find Mr. Gray acknowledge, has declared all he had written to be substantially Socratic, and not a fair exponent of his own tenets,* even this little, Mr. Gray has either misconceived or honestly confessed that, as he was not one of the initiated, it was utterly beyond his comprehension. Finally, to repeat the explanation with which I closed the last page of these notes and extracts, We learn from this dialogue in how poor a condition the art of reasoning on moral and abstracted subjects was before the time of Socrates: for it is impossible that Plato should introduce a sophist of the first reputation for eloquence and knowledge in several kinds, talking in a manner below the absurdity and weakness of a child; unless he had really drawn after the life. No less than twenty-four pages are here spent in vain, only to force it into the head of Hippias that there is such a thing as a general idea; and that, before we can dispute on any subject, we should give a definition of it. Is not this, its improbability out of the question, contradicted by the Protagoras of Plato's own drawing? Are there no authors, no physicians in London at the present moment, of "the first reputation," ¿. e. whom a certain class cry up for in no other sense is the phrase historically applicable to Hippias, whom a Sydenham redivivus or a new Stahl might not exhibit as pompous ignoramuses? no one Hippias amongst them? But we need not flee to conjectures. The ratiocination assigned by Aristotle and Plato himself to Gorgias and then to the Eleatic school, are posi *See Plato's second epistle opaσréov dý σoɩ di alvıyμāv к. T. 2. and towards the end τὰ δε νῦν λεγόμενα Σωκράτους ἐστὶ, κ. τ. λ. See also the 7th Epistle, p. 341. Petrarch's Trionfo della Fama, cap. terz. v. 4-6. tive proofs that Mr. Gray has mistaken the satire of an individual for a characteristic of an age or class. May I dare whisper to the reeds without proclaiming that I am in the state of Midas,—may I dare to hint that Mr. Gray himself had not, and through the spectacles of Mr. Locke and his followers, could not have seen the difficulties which Hippias found in a general idea, secundum Platonem ?-S. T. C. P. 386. Notes 289. Passages of Heraclitus. Πιθηκῶν ὁ κάλλιστος αἰσχρὸς ἄλλῳ γένει συμβαλεῖν.—Ανθρώπων ὁ σοφώ τατος πρὸς Θεὸν πιθηκὸς φανεῖται. This latter passage is undoubtedly the original of that famous thought in Pope's Essay on Man, b. ii. :— "And showed a Newton as we show an ape." I remember to have met nearly the same words in one of our elder Poets. Pp. 390-391. That a sophist was a kind of merchant, or rather a retailer of food for the soul, and, like other shopkeepers, would exert his eloquence to recommend his own goods. The misfortune was, we could not carry them off, like corporeal viands, set them by a while, and consider them at leisure, whether they were wholesome or not, before we tasted them: that in this case we have no vessel but the soul to receive them in, which will necessarily retain a tincture, and perhaps, much to its prejudice, of all which is instilled into it. Query, if Socrates, himself a scholar of the sophists, is accurate, did not the change of ὁ σοφός into ὁ Σοφιστής, in the single case of Solon, refer to the wisdom-causing influences of his legislation? Mem. -to examine whether Poovtorns was, or was not, more generally used at first in malum sensum, or rather the proper force originally of the termination ιστής, ἀστής—whether (as it is evidently verbal) it imply a reflex or a transitive act. Ρ. 399. Οτι 'Αμαθία. This is the true key and great moral of the dialogue, that knowledge alone is the source of virtue, and ignorance the source of vice; it was Plato's own principle, see Plat. Epist. vii. p. 336. 'Aμalía, ¿§ ñs távтa κακὰ πᾶσιν ἐῤῥίζωται καὶ βλαστάνει καὶ εἰς ὕστερον ἀποτελεῖ καρπὸν τοῖς yεvvýσασι πIKρóтатоv. See also Sophist. pp. 228 and 229, and Euthydemus from pp. 278 to 281, and De Legib. L. iii. p. 688, and probably it was also |