to be insincere in soliciting peace, "Ministers would certainly treat
with her, since they would again secure the support of the British
people in the war, and expose the ambition of the enemy;" and that,
therefore, the probability was that the British Government knew
France to be sincere, and shrank from negotiation lest it should
expose their own desire to prosecute the war. [5] Most happy, again,
is his criticism of Lord Grenville's note, with its references
to the unprovoked aggression of France (in the matter of the opening of
the Scheldt, etc.) as the sole cause and origin of the war. "If this
were indeed true, in what ignorance must not Mr. Pitt and Mr. Windham
have kept the poor Duke of Portland, who declared in the House of Lords
that the cause of the war was the maintenance of the Christian
religion?"

To add literary excellence of the higher order to the peculiar
qualities which give force to the newspaper article is for a
journalist, of course, a "counsel of perfection;" but it remains to be
remarked that Coleridge did make this addition in a most conspicuous
manner. Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's three volumes of her father's _Essays
on his own Times_ deserve to live as literature apart altogether
from their merits as journalism. Indeed among the articles in the
_Morning Post_ between 1799 and 1802 may be found some of the
finest specimens of Coleridge's maturer prose style. The character of
Pitt, which appeared on 19th March 1800, is as remarkable for its
literary merits as it is for the almost humorous political perversity
which would not allow the Minister any single merit except that which
he owed to the sedulous rhetorical training received by him from his
father, viz. "a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of
words." [6] The letters to Fox, again, though a little artificialised
perhaps by reminiscences of Junius, are full of weight and dignity. But