by presenting us with some combs purloined from the hive of a foreign worker, calling them by the alluring title of "genial coincidences."
We perceive that Mr Gilman, in the one only sentence in which he attempts to defend Coleridge, has, like ourselves, though for a very different purpose, brought forward the bee as an illustration of the case. He thus writes, (Life of Coleridge, p. 245—the italics are his own)—" With regard to the charge made by Mr De Quincy of Coleridge's so borrowing the property of other writers as to be guilty of 'petty Larceny;' with equal justice might we accuse the bee, which flies from flower to flower in quest of food, and which, by means of the instinct bestowed upon it by the all-wise Creator, extracts its nourishment from the field and the garden, but digests and elaborates it by its own native powers." Now this is precisely what we are complaining Coleridge does not do. Unlike the bee, he steals his honey ready-made. A friendly naturalist suggests, that bees will steal ready-made honey too, when they can get at it, and that, therefore, the parallel is not exact. But we- reply that even then, they make a point of elaborating it over again within their own internals before they publish it to their neighbours in the hive. But with regard to the transcendental philosophy, Coleridge has done nothing of this sort—he has digested nothing by his own native powers. The pots all stand in his Biographia exactly as Schelling elaborated and made them up.
There only remains one other point to be got over: it is contained in the last sentence of the defence, where Coleridge strongly deprecates the charge of plagiarism, and endeavours to establish a sort of compact, by which he is to be entitled, without acknowledgment, to make what use he pleases of the works of Schelling. To save space, we beg to refer our readers to the sentence already printed. But even here he artfully leads us away from the idea that he has transferred into his work, almost word for word, many, nay any, of the pages of the German philosopher. Why could he not make his reference to Schelling with truth, except on the ground that it was not true that these citations, &c., were actually derived from Schelling? This is certainly the ground upon which the reader is led to believe that he refrains from giving his references. He is not able to bring himself to admit that all the profounder philosophical observations contained in his work are entirely the German's, but wishes to have it understood that they are all his own "genial coincidences" with Schelling. Genial coincidences, forsooth! where every one word of the one author tallies with every one word of the other! Credat Judæus Apella; non ego. We have already said, and are prepared to show, that Coleridge contributes nothing to the expansion or explanation of Schelling's system; therefore the sentence we are writing about must be brought to stand thus: " For readers in general, let nothing that shall be found in this or any other work of mine be attributed to Schelling, provided no fault be found with me should I ever be discovered to have cabbaged from his works ad libitum." The logic of that "provided" baffles us entirely. But even admitting that there are resemblances to Schelling to be found in his works, what right could he have to lay down such an arrangement as this, that he would make all these over to Schelling in the event of their being found to resemble him; provided he, in the mean time, might pay himself secretly what he pleased for them out of the funds of that philosopher, and provided no one would blame him should his doings ever be brought to light? The logical propriety of the "provided" escapes us in this case also. How could he tell how little his resemblances might be worth, and how great might be the value of his purloinings from Schelling? How is any security that this bargain is a fair one to be established? To cut the question short, then, we do not think that any man is entitled to enter such a protestation as this, or that it can be listened to for a moment as a defence, in the event of his being convicted of extensive plagiarism. It appears to us to be much worse than no defence at all; for this is the manner in which it is evidently calculated and designed to cut. So long as these plagiarisms are undetected, this manner of wording the protest will ensure to the author (as it did to Coleridge during the whole of his life) the credit of being original,
