ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS

COLERIDGE

BY

H. D. TRAILL




PREFATORY NOTE.


In a tolerably well-known passage in one of his essays De Quincey
enumerates the multiform attainments and powers of Coleridge, and the
corresponding varieties of demand made by them on any one who should
aspire to become this many-sided man's biographer. The description is
slightly touched with the humorous hyperbole characteristic of its
author; but it is in substance just, and I cannot but wish that it were
possible, within the limits of a preface, to set out the whole of it in
excuse for the many inevitable shortcomings of this volume. Having thus
made an "exhibit" of it, there would only remain to add that the
difficulties with which De Quincey confronts an intending biographer of
Coleridge must necessarily be multiplied many-fold by the conditions
under which this work is here attempted. No complete biography of
Coleridge, at least on any important scale of dimensions, is in
existence; no critical appreciation of his work _as a whole_, and
as correlated with the circumstances and affected by the changes of his
life, has, so far as I am aware, been attempted. To perform either of