ABSTRACT

Mr. Coleridge’s Sybilline Leaves prove that, though in days of error, he was a man of sterling genius, yet that the light of truth, which now blazes upon him, has blighted his fancy. This is as it should be, fable and poetry; fact and dullness. ‘Fire, famine, and slaughter’, the poet’s master-piece, written in 1794, fills six pages of the volume; but in 1817 he judges it necessary to preface it by twenty-four pages of apology, in which PITT, his fiend, is, by the same pen, in 1817, converted into ‘a good man and great statesman’. Alas, poor Yorick!