tisfactory way of conducting a discussion, or of throwing light upon a doubtful matter; and therefore, so far as the Opium-Eater's side of the controversy is concerned, he will excuse us for saying that he has left the question as much in the dark as ever, or rather involved in greater confusion and obscurity than before.
Neither is Mr Hare's side of the question a bit better managed. He likewise is either ignorant of the amount to which Coleridge was indebted to Schelling, or else he does not choose to speak out. He talks of Coleridge having transferred into his work "half-a-dozen pages," or little more, of Schelling. By our Lady! they are nearer twenty. He brings forward what be conceives to be the triumphantly exculpatory circumstance of the case, as they are to be found in the Biographia Literaria itself; but he evidently sees through them as little as though they had been so many milestones, and the inference he draws from them appear to n to be very shallow and very questionable. The reader shall be aid, to judge of this for himself by-and-by. And, lastly, the great body of his defence consists of recriminations against Mr De Quincy for having been the first to bring the charge of plagiarism against a man who had been his friend, and whom he admired so much—as if the Opium-Eater's delinquency in this respect, admitting it to have been—which we do not—the blackest ever committed under heaven, were any exculpation of Coleridge, or had any thing whatever to do with the merits of the case. We think, therefore, that the whole question requires to be revised, and that some attempt ought to be made to bring out its details with the justice and accuracy befitting literature which does not choose to close its eyes, and have foreign productions palmed of upon it as indigenous growth of its own soil.
In bringing this matter before the public, we have no fear that the readers of this Magazine will suppose us actuated by a desire to detract from the merits, or to affix a stigma upon the memory, of Mr Coleridge. The high terms in which he has been spoken of all along throughout our pages, and the exalted rank assigned therein to his genius, will secure us, we should hope, against any such imputation. We are extremely unwilling to hold him guilty of any direct and intentional literary dishonesty; but it is only when we take into consideration what we believe to line been his very peculiar idiosyncrasy, that we are able to attribute to some strange intellectual hallucination a practice, which, in the case of' any other man, we should have called by the stronger name of a gross moral misdemeanour. But, be that as it may, we are not going to sacrifice what we conceive to be truth and justice out of regard to the genius of any man, however illustrious and unsullied it may be. Fair play is a jewel; and we think it our duty to see fair play upon all sides; and, if our admiration of Coleridge has whispered in our ear to keep this disclosure back, our admiration of Schelling (which we admit to be greater than that which we feel for Coleridge) was ever at hand, appealing to our conscience with a still louder voice to bring it forward, and to do justice to the claims of foreign philosophy and of individual genius, by showing that one of the most distinguished English authors of the nineteenth century, at the mature age of forty-five, succeeded in founding by far the greater part of his metaphysical reputation—which was very considerable—upon verbatim plagiarism from works written and published by a German youth,[1] when little more than twenty years of age!
We start, then, by supposing it admitted (as it must be) that Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, borrowed to a certain extent from Schelling, without making any specific acknow-
- ↑ Schelling was born in 1775. The one of his works which Coleridge unmercifully rifles was written in 1796-97, (Phil. Schrift, p. 201;) the other, the Transcendental Idealism, was published in 1800. Coleridge was born in 1772 and his work, the. Biographia Literaria, was not published until 1817.
admit he tells us he is drawing upon his memory or his belief. But he ought not to have done so; for in a case of this kind nothing can be tolerated short of the most scrupulous accuracy. Besides, the passage he refers to is not contained even in the Phil. Schrift.; it occurs in Schelling's System des Transcendentalen Idealismus.
