Coleridge, Christabel [etc.]

Coleridge, Christabel [etc.] (1816); review by Francis Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review, XXVII (Sept. 1816), 58–67. The authorship of this review has generated much controversy, students of Hazlitt and Moore tumbling over one another to dissociate their man from it. Jeffrey himself certainly had a hand in it, the opening paragraphs and the whole method of review by plot-summary quotation being much more his than Hazlitt’s. (Moore can be exonerated on external evidence.) Hazlitt, in his known review of Christabel in the Examiner (q.v.) writes much differently, and I personally think that if Hazlitt wrote any part of this review, his contribution was buried by Jeffrey’s revisions until the review deserves to be attributed solely to the editor. For Hazlitt’s own manner, see the next two reviews; for Jeffrey’s disclaimer, see his long footnote to Hazlitt’s review of Biographia Literaria.