gain, while it exercised the wit of certain anti-Jacobin writers of the
day, and raised them into notice. Canning had the faculty of satire to
an extraordinary degree, and also that common sense tact, which made his
services at times so very useful to his country; his powers seemed in
their full meridian of splendour when an argument or new doctrine
permitted him rapidly to run down into its consequence, and then
brilliantly and wittily to skew its defects. In this he eminently
excelled. The beauties of the anti-Jacobin are replete with his satire.
He never attempted a display of depth, but his dry sarcasm left a sting
which those he intended to wound carried off 'in pain and mortfication'.
This scheme of Pantisocracy excited a smile among the kind-hearted and
thinking part of mankind; but, among the vain and restless ignorant
would-be-political economists, it met with more attention; and they,
with their microscopic eyes, fancied they beheld in it what was not
quite so visible to the common observer. Though the plan was soon
abandoned, it was thought sufficient for the subject of a lecture, and
afforded some mirth when the minds of the parties concerned in it
arrived at manhood. Coleridge saw, soon after it was broached, that no
scheme of colonizing that was not based on religion could be
permanent.--Left to the disturbing forces of the human passions to which
it would be exposed, it would soon perish; for all government to be
permanent should be influenced by reason, and guided by religion.

In the year 1795 Coleridge, residing then at Clevedon, a short distance
from Bristol, published his first prose work, with some additions by Mr.
Southey, the "Conciones ad Populum." In a short preface he observes,

"The two following addresses were delivered in the month of February,
1795, and were followed by six others in defence of natural and
revealed religion. 'There is a time to keep silence,' saith King