a Jacobin. As a scholar and a man of literary taste he might possibly
have admired the rhetorical force of the following outburst, but,
considering that the "HE" here gibbeted in capitals was no less a
personage than the "heaven-born minister" himself, a plain man might
well have wondered what additional force the vocabulary of Jacobinism
could have infused into the language of Pantisocracy. After summing up
the crimes of the Reign of Terror the lecturer asks: "Who, my brethren,
was the cause of this guilt if not HE who supplied the occasion and the
motive? Heaven hath bestowed on _that man_ a portion of its
ubiquity, and given him an actual presence in the sacraments of hell,
wherever administered, in all the bread of bitterness, in all the cups
of blood." And in general, indeed, the _Conciones ad Populum_, as
Coleridge named these lectures on their subsequent publication, were
rather calculated to bewilder any of the youthful lecturer's well-
wishers who might be anxious for some means of discriminating his
attitude from that of the Hardys, the Horne Tookes, and the Thelwalls
of the day. A little warmth of language might no doubt be allowed to a
young friend of liberty in discussing legislation which, in the
retrospect, has staggered even so staunch a Tory as Sir Archibald
Alison; but Coleridge's denunciation of the Pitt and Grenville Acts, in
the lecture entitled _The Plot Discovered_, is occasionally
startling, even for that day of fierce passions, in the fierceness of
its language. It is interesting, however, to note the ever-active play
of thought and reasoning amid the very storm and stress of political
passion. Coleridge is never for long together a mere declaimer on
popular rights and ministerial tyranny, and even this indignant address
contains a passage of extremely just and thoughtful analysis of the
constituent elements of despotism. Throughout the spring and summer of
1795 Coleridge continued his lectures at Bristol, his head still
simmering--though less violently, it may be suspected, every month--