therefore deficient in one of the most distinguishing properties of that
which they are designed to represent; and this is true. Yet the reader will
in most instances have little difficulty in understanding the course which
the conversation took, although my recollections of it are thrown into
separate paragraphs for the sake of superior precision. As I never
attempted to give dialogue--indeed, there was seldom much dialogue to give
--the great point with me was to condense what I could remember on each
particular topic into intelligible _wholes_ with as little injury to the
living manner and diction as was possible. With this explanation, I must
leave it to those who still have the tones of "that old man eloquent"
ringing in their ears, to say how far I have succeeded in this delicate
enterprise of stamping his winged words with perpetuity.

In reviewing the contents of the following pages, I can clearly see that I
have admitted some passages which will be pronounced illiberal by those
who, in the present day, emphatically call themselves liberal--_the_
liberal. I allude of course to Mr. Coleridge's remarks on the Reform Bill
and the Malthusian economists. The omission of such passages would probably
have rendered this publication more generally agreeable, and my disposition
does not lead me to give gratuitous offence to any one. But the opinions of
Mr. Coleridge on these subjects, however imperfectly expressed by me, were
deliberately entertained by him; and to have omitted, in so miscellaneous a
collection as this, what he was well known to have said, would have argued
in me a disapprobation or a fear, which I disclaim. A few words, however,
may be pertinently employed here in explaining the true bearing of
Coleridge's mind on the politics of our modern days. He was neither a Whig
nor a Tory, as those designations are usually understood; well enough
knowing that, for the most part, half-truths only are involved in the
Parliamentary tenets of one party or the other. In the common struggles of
a session, therefore, he took little interest; and as to mere personal