a tragedy, on the subject indicated in the above title, by the
following evening. Coleridge was to write the first, Southey the
second, and Lovell the third. Southey and Lovell appeared the next day
with their acts complete, Coleridge, characteristically, with only a
part of his. Lovell's, however, was found not to be in keeping with the
other two, so Southey supplied the third as well as the second, by
which time Coleridge had completed the first. The tragedy was
afterwards published entire, and is usually included in complete
editions of Coleridge's poetical works. It is an extremely immature
production, abounding in such coquettings (if nothing more serious)
with bathos as

"Now,
Aloof thou standest from the tottering pillar,
And like a frighted child behind its mother,
Hidest thy pale face in the skirts of Mercy."

and

"Liberty, condensed awhile, is bursting
To scatter the arch-chemist in the explosion."

Coleridge also contributed to Southey's _Joan of Arc_ certain
lines of which, many years afterwards, he wrote in this humorously
exaggerated but by no means wholly unjust tone of censure:--"I was
really astonished (1) at the schoolboy, wretched, allegoric machinery;
(2) at the transmogrification of the fanatic Virago into a modern
novel-pawing proselyte of the Age of Reason--a Tom Paine in
petticoats; (3) at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the
monotony and dead plumb-down of the pauses, and at the absence of all