remarkable, and no one, it seems to me, can hope to form an adequate
conception of Coleridge's essential instability of character without
bestowing somewhat closer attention upon this passage in his
intellectual development than it usually receives. It is not uncommon
to see the cases of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge lumped together
indiscriminately, as interequivalent illustrations of the way in which
the young and generous minds of that era were first fascinated and then
repelled by the French Revolution. As a matter of fact, however, the
last of the three cases differed in certain very important respects
from the two former. Coleridge not only took the "frenzy-fever" in a
more violent form than either Wordsworth or Southey, and uttered wilder
things in his delirium than they, but the paroxysm was much shorter,
the _immediate_ reaction more violent in its effects and brought
about by slighter causes in his case than in theirs. This will appear
more clearly when we come to contrast the poems of 1794 and 1795 with
those of 1797. For the present it must suffice to say that while the
history of Coleridge's relations to the French Revolution is
intellectually more interesting than that of Wordsworth's and
Southey's, it plainly indicates, even in that early period of the three
lives, a mind far more at the mercy of essentially transitory sentiment
than belonged to either of the others, and far less disposed than
theirs to review the aspirations of the moment by the steady light of
the practical judgment.

This, however, is anticipating matters. We are still in the summer of
1794, and we left Coleridge at Bristol with Southey, Lovell, and the
Miss Frickers. To this year belongs that remarkable experiment in
playwriting at high pressure, _The Fall of Robespierre_. It
originated, we learn from Southey, in "a sportive conversation at poor
Lovell's," when each of the three friends agreed to produce one act of