-with an originality of thought, a force of illustration which,' the narrator doubts, if any man then living, except his father, could have surpassed.'1

The singular gift of continuous conversationfor singular it is, if in any degree agreeable—seems to have come to him by nature, and it was through life the one quality which he relied on for attraction in society. Its being agreeable is to be accounted for mainly by its singularity; if one knew any respectable number of declaimers-if any proportion of one's acquaintance should receive the gift of the English language, and improve each shining hour' with liquid eloquence, how we should regret their present dumb and torpid condition! If we are to be dullwhich our readers will admit to be an appointment of providence-surely we will be dull in silence. Do not sermons exist, and are they not a warning to mankind?

In fact, the habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people's minds. S. T. Coleridge, it is well known, talked to everybody, and to everybody alike; like a Christian divine, he did not regard persons. 'That is a fine opera, Mr. Coleridge,' said a young lady, some fifty years back. Yes, ma'am; and I remember Kant somewhere makes a very similar remark, for, as we know, the idea of philosophical infinity Now, this sort of talk will answer with two sorts of people-with comfortable, stolid, solid people, who don't understand it at all-who don't feel that they ought to understand it-who feel that they ought not-that they are to sell treacle and appreciate figs -but that there is this transcendental superlunary sphere, which is known to others-which is now

1 Memoir, p. lxiv.

revealed in the spiritual speaker, the unmitigated oracle, the evidently celestial sound. That the dreamy orator himself has no more notion what is passing in their minds than they have what is running through his, is of no consequence at all. If he did know it, he would be silent; he would be jarred to feel how utterly he was misunderstood; it would break the flow of his everlasting words. Much better that he should run on in a never-pausing stream, and that the wondering rustics should admire for ever. The basis of the entire entertainment is that neither should comprehend the other.—But in a degree yet higher is the society of an omniscient orator agreeable to young men, and particularly -as in Hartley's case-to clever undergraduates.

All young men like what is theatrical, and by a fine dispensation all clever young men like notions. They want to have opinions, to hear about opinions, to know about opinions. The ever-flowing rhetorician gratifies both propensions. He is a notional spectacle. Like the sophist of old, he is something and says something. The vagabond speculator in all ages will take hold on those who wish to reason, and want premises-who wish to argue, and want theses who desire demonstrations, and have but presumptions. And so it was acceptable enough that Hartley should make the low tones of his musical voice glide sweetly and spontaneously through the cloisters of Merton, debating the old questions, the 'fate, free-will, foreknowledge,'-the points that Ockham and Scotus propounded in these same enclosures-the common riddles, the common riddles, the everlasting enigmas of mankind. It attracts the scorn of middle-aged men (who depart pos rà iepa, and fancy they are wise), but it is a pleasant thing, that impact of hot thought upon hot thought, of young

thought upon young thought, of new thought upon new thought. It comes to the fortunate once, but to no one a second time thereafter for ever.

Nor was Hartley undistinguished in the regular studies of the University. A regular, exact, accurate scholar he never was; but even in his early youth he perhaps knew much more and understood much more of ancient literature than seven score of schoolmasters and classmen. He had, probably, in his mind a picture of the ancient world, or of some of it, while the dry literati only know the combinations and permutations of the Greek alphabet.

There is a pleasant picture of him at this epoch, recorded by an eye-witness.1 'My attention,' he narrates, 'was at first aroused by seeing from my window a figure flitting about amongst the trees and shrubs of the garden with quick and agitated motion. This was Hartley, who, in the ardour of preparing for his college examination, did not even take his meals with the family, but snatched a hasty morsel in his own apartment, and only . . . sought the free air when the fading daylight no longer permitted him to see his books. Having found out who he was that so mysteriously flitted about the garden, I was determined to lose no time in making his acquaintance; and through the instrumentality of Mrs. Coleridge I paid Hartley a visit to what he called his den. This was a room afterwards converted by Mr. Southey'—as what chink was not ?— 'into a supplementary library, but then appropriated as a study to Hartley, and presenting a most picturesque and student-like disorder of scattered pamphlets and open folios.' This is not a picture of the business-like reading man-one wonders what fraction of his time he did read—but

1 Chancey Hare Townsend.

2 Memoir, p. lxvii.

it was probably the happiest period of his life. There was no coarse prosaic action there. Much musing, little studying,-fair scholarship, an atmosphere of the classics, curious fancies, much perusing of pamphlets, light thoughts on heavy folios,— these make the meditative poet, but not the technical and patient-headed scholar; yet, after all, he was happy, and obtained a second class.

A more suitable exercise, as it would have seemed at first sight, was supplied by that curious portion of Oxford routine, the Annual Prize Poem. This, he himself tells us, was, in his academic years, the real and single object of his ambition. His reason is, for an autobiographical reason, decidedly simple. A great poet,' he says, 'I should not have imagined myself, for I knew well enough that the verses were no great things.' But he entertained at that period of life he was twenty-one-a favourable opinion of young ladies; and he seems to have ascertained, possibly from actual trial, that verses were not in themselves a very emphatic attraction. Singular as it may sound, the ladies selected were not only insensible to what is, after all, a metaphysical line, the distinction between good poetry and bad, but were almost indifferent to poetry itself. Yet the experiment was not quite conclusive. Verses might fail in common life, and yet succeed in the Sheldonian theatre. It is plain that they would be read out; it occurred to him, as he naïvely relates, that if he should appear as a prizeman,' as an intelligible reciter of poetry,' he would be an object of some curiosity to the fair promenaders in Christchurch Meadow;' that the young ladies' with whom he was on bowing and speaking terms might have felt a satisfaction in being known to know me, which they had never experienced before.' 'I should,' he adds,

' have deemed myself a prodigious lion, and it was a character I was weak enough to covet more than that of poet, scholar, or philosopher.' 1

In fact, he did not get the prize. The worthy East Indian who imagined that, in leaving a bequest for a prize to poetry, he should be as sure of possessing poetry for his money as of eggs, if he had chosen eggs, or butter, if he had chosen butter, did not estimate rightly the nature of poetry, or the nature of the human mind. The mechanical parts of rhythm and metre are all that a writer can be certain of producing, or that a purchaser can be sure of obtaining; and these an industrious person will find in any collection of the Newdegate poems, together with a fine assortment of similes and sentiments, respectively invented and enjoined by Shem and Japhet for and to the use of after generations.

And there is a peculiar reason why a great poet (besides his being, as a man of genius, rather more likely than another, to find a difficulty in the preliminary technicalities of art) should not obtain an academical prize, to be given for excellent verses to people of about twenty-one. It is a bad season. The imagination,' said a great poet of the very age, ' of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy, but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted... And particularly in a real poet, where the disturbing influences of passion and fancy are most likely to be in excess, will this unhealthy tinge be most likely to be excessive and conspicuous. Nothing in the style of Endymion would have a chance of a prize; there are no complete conceptions, no continuance of adequate words. 1 Memoir, lxxxii.

2

• Keats Preface to Endymion.