memory or dream only after long absence." Of the work itself he says,
"Except the two or three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical
necessity and Unitarianism, I see little or nothing in these
'outbursts' of my 'youthful' zeal to 'retract', and with the exception
of some flame-coloured epithets applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and
others, or rather to personifications (for such they really were to
'me') as little to regret. Qualis ab initio [Greek: estaesae] S.T.C.
[15] When a rifacimento of the 'Friend' took place, [1818] at vol. ii.
p. 240, he states his reasons for reprinting the lecture referred to,
one of the series delivered at Bristol in the year 1794-95, because,
says he, "This very lecture, vide p. 10, has been referred to in an
infamous libel in proof of the author's Jacobinism."

When the mind of Coleridge was more matured he did not omit this truth,
which has never been refuted, that the aristocratic system "had its
golden side, for the noblest minds; but I

"should," continues he, "act the part of a coward if I disguised my
conviction that the errors of the aristocratic party were as gross,
and far less excusable than those of the Jacobin. Instead of
contenting themselves with opposing the real blessing of English law
to the 'splendid promises of untried theory', too large a part of
those who called themselves 'anti-Jacobins', did all in their power to
suspend those blessings; and they furnished 'new arguments to the
advocates of innovation', when they should have been answering 'the
old ones!'"

But, whatever were his opinions, they were founded on 'principle', and
with the exception of the two above alluded to, he ought never to be
accused of changing. Some years since, the late Charles Matthews, the