Coleridge; but without attributing strange error to Coleridge's own
estimate (in the _Biographia Literaria_) of the amount of his
journalistic work, it is impossible to believe that this collection,
forming as it does but two small volumes, and a portion of a third, is
anything like complete.

5. Alas, that the facts should be so merciless to the most excellent
arguments! Coleridge could not foresee that Napoleon would, years
afterwards, admit in his own Memoirs the insincerity of his
overtures. "I had need of war; a treaty of peace...would have
withered every imagination." And when Mr. Pitt's answer arrived,
"it filled me with a secret satisfaction."

6. The following passage, too, is curious as showing how polemics, like
history, repeat themselves. "As his reasonings were, so is his
eloquence. One character pervades his whole being. Words on words,
finely arranged, and so dexterously consequent that the whole bears the
semblance of argument and still keeps awake a sense of surprise; but,
when all is done, nothing rememberable has been said; no one
philosophical remark, no one image, not even a pointed aphorism. Not a
sentence of Mr. Pitt's has ever been quoted, or formed the favourite
phrase of the day--a thing unexampled in any man of equal reputation."
With the alteration of one word--the proper name--this passage might
have been taken straight from some political diatribe of to-day.




CHAPTER V.