or too humorous, or too ingenious, or too profound. Yet the English
reader likes, or thinks he likes, eloquence; he has a keen sense of
humour, and a fair appreciation of wit; and he would be much hurt if he
were told that ingenuity and profundity were in themselves distasteful
to him. How, then, to give him enough of these qualities to please and
not enough to offend him--as much eloquence as will stir his emotions,
but not enough to arouse his distrust; as much wit as will carry home
the argument, but not enough to make him doubt its sincerity; as much
humour as will escape the charge of levity, as much ingenuity as can be
displayed without incurring suspicion, and as much profundity as may
impress without bewildering? This is a problem which is fortunately
simplified for most journalists by the fact of their possessing these
qualities in no more than, if in so much as, the minimum required. But
Coleridge, it must be remembered, possessed most of them in
embarrassing superfluity. Not all of them indeed, for, though he could
be witty and at times humorous, his temptations to excess in these
respects were doubtless not considerable. But as for his eloquence, he
was from his youth upwards _Isoo torrentior_, his dialectical
ingenuity was unequalled, and in disquisition of the speculative order
no man was so apt as he to penetrate more deeply into his subject than
most of his readers would care to follow him. _A priori_,
therefore, one would have expected that Coleridge's instincts would
have led him to rhetorise too much in his diction, to refine too much
in his arguments, and to philosophise too much in his reflections, to
have hit the popular taste as a journalist, and that at the age of
eight-and-twenty he would have been unable to subject these tendencies
either to the artistic repression of the maturer writer or to the
tactical restraints of the trained advocate. This eminently natural
assumption, however, is entirely rebutted by the facts. Nothing is more
remarkable in Coleridge's contributions to the _Morning Post_ than