as to general impressiveness; a history of styles and manners, their
causes, their birthplace and parentage, their analysis." The fourth
volume would take up "the history of metaphysics, theology, medicine,
alchemy; common, canon, and Roman law from Alfred to Henry VII." The
fifth would "carry on metaphysics and ethics to the present day in the
first half, and comprise in the second half the theology of all the
reformers." In the sixth and seventh volumes were to be included "all
the articles you (Southey) can get on all the separate arts and
sciences that have been treated of in books since the Reformation; and
by this time," concludes the enthusiastic projector, "the book, if it
answered at all, would have gained so high a reputation that you need
not fear having whom you liked to write the different articles--
medicine, surgery, chemistry, etc.; navigation, travellers' voyages,
etc., etc." There is certainly a melancholy humour in the formulation
of so portentous a scheme by a man who was at this moment wandering
aimlessly among the lakes and mountains, unable to settle down to any
definite piece of literary work, or even to throw off a fatal habit,
which could not fail, if persevered in, to destroy all power of steady
application in the future. That neither the comic nor the pathetic
element in the situation was lost upon Southey is evident from his
half-sad, half-satirical, wholly winning reply. "Your plan," he writes,
"is too good, too gigantic, quite beyond my powers. If you had my
tolerable state of health and that love of steady and productive
employment which is now grown into a necessary habit with me, if you
were to execute and would execute it, it would be beyond all doubt the
most valuable work of any age or any country; but I cannot fill up such
an outline. No man can better feel where he fails than I do, and to
rely upon you for whole quartos! Dear Coleridge, the smile that comes
with that thought is a very melancholy one; and if Edith saw me now she
would think my eyes were weak again, when in truth the humour that