'seem to many

fitter matter for verse than for

'It might,' as such, sober argument.' 'I will,' therefore, by way of compromise, and for the amusement of the reader, sum it up in the rhyming prose of an old Puritan poet, George Withers:-a Poet consigned to contempt by Mr. Pope, but whose writings, with all their barren flats and dribbling common-place, contain nobler principles, profounder truths, and more that is properly and peculiarly poetic, than are to be found in his own works.'

But the reader has not yet arrived at the lines in question. In the note above mentioned, Mr. Coleridge guards us against inferring that he holds George Withers as great a writer as 'Alexander Pope.' He moreover calls upon us to mark that, in the stanza about to be cited, the word State is used as synonymous with the entire body politic. On returning to the text, we find him stating whence he copied the passage,--from a flying sheet of four leaves', printed in 1745 (1645?). At last, after an introductory extract, we come to the kernel.

6

"Let not your King and Parliament in One,
Much less apart, mistake themselves for that
Which is most worthy to be thought upon :
Nor think they are, essentially, the STATE.
Let them not fancy, that th' Authority
And Priviledges upon them bestown,
Conferr'd are to set up a Majesty,
A Power, or a Glory of their own!

But let them know, 'twas for a deeper life,
Which they but represent·

That there's on earth a yet auguster Thing,

Veil'd tho' it be, than Parliament and King."'

With the sentiment conveyed in these rude but forceful lines, our readers will not be displeased; but we doubt whether they will serve as a key to the mysterious' principle' which they are cited to illustrate. In justice, therefore, to Mr. Coleridge, we have still to supply an explanatory comment upon the sentence we have dissected, and which appears, of course, to the greater disadvantage as being detached from its connexion with the preceding matter.

Of the conditions requisite to the health and constitutional vigour of a body politic, two are selected by the Author as being, in his judgement, the most important, so as to deserve the name of political principles or maxims. The first is, 'a 'due proportion of the free and permeative life and energy of 'the Nation to the organized powers brought within contain'ing channels.' In plain English, if we understand the meaning wrapped up in this physiological metaphor, a due balance of the legitimate powers of government on the one hand, with the antagonist rights, privileges, and power of resistance in the

people on the other. 'What the exact proportion of the two kinds of force should be,' Mr. Coleridge remarks, it is im'possible to predetermine; but the existence of a dispropor'tion is sure to be detected sooner or later by the effects.' The ancient Greek democracies fell into dissolution, from the 'excess of the permeative energy of the nation,' and the relative feebleness of the political organization. The Republic of Venice fell, because all political power was determined to the Government, and the people were nothing: the State, therefore, 'lost all power of resistance ad extra.' We agree with Mr. Coleridge, that to find the due proportion of the two kinds of force, the controlling and the resisting, is the most delicate and recondite problem in political science,-one that will, perhaps, ever defy precise solution. To preserve the due equilibrium under the existing circumstances of the State, is the true business and highest duty of the Administrative Government. And in order to this, it is of the first importance, that the principle. propounded by our Author should be understood and recognised on all sides; that the opposing forces of the Crown and the People should not be supposed to be hostile, when, in fact, they support each other by the equipoise, or to involve contrary interests because they are opposite powers.

The second condition of political health is that which is described in the passage already cited, and the terms of which. we are now to explain; namely, a due proportion of the po'tential (latent, dormant) to the actual power.' This 'poten'tial power,' we have seen, exists and works as an Idea only.' But we must first explain what Mr. Coleridge understands by an Idea.

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By an idea, I mean that conception of a thing, which is not abstracted from any particular state, form, or mode in which the thing may happen to exist at this or that time, nor yet generalized from any number or succession of such forms or modes, but which is given by the knowledge of its ultimate aim That which, contemplated

*

Mr. Coleridge distinguishes an idea from a conception, defining the latter as a conscious act of the understanding, by which it comprehends the object or impression; whereas an idea may influence a man without his being competent to express it in definite words. Thus, an obscure or indistinct conception would seem to be an idea ! In a subsequent part of the volume, adverting to the expression, ab'stract conceptions', as occurring in the Natural History of Enthu'siasm', Mr. Coleridge says: By abstract conceptions, the Author means what I should call ideas, and, as such, contradistinguish from 'conceptions, whether abstracted or generalized.' This distinction, however, is too arbitrary and technical to be generally adopted; nor can we agree with Mr. Coleridge, that a peculiar nomenclature' is

objectively, (i. e. as existing externally to the mind,) we call a LAW; the same, contemplated subjectively, (i. e. as existing in a subject or mind,) is an Idea. Hence Plato often names ideas laws; and Lord Bacon, the British Plato, describes the laws of the material universe as the Ideas in Nature. 'Quod in naturâ naturatâ Lex, in naturâ naturante IDEA dicitur.' pp. 3, 5.

A remarkable contrast may be discerned, our Author thinks, 'between the acceptation of the word Idea, before the Restor'ation, and the present use of the same word;' indicating nothing less than a revolution in philosophy. We admit that the word is not so frequently used now as formerly in the philosophical acceptation of an archetype or model; as when Milton, speaking of the creation, exclaims,

How good, how fair,
Answering his great Idea!'

But the word was never used exclusively in this acceptation, or in any other technical sense. Shakspeare uses it in the simple sense of a mental image; and so Fairfax has it

Her sweet idea wandered thro' his thoughts.'

On the other hand, it is far from being true, that the word, hackneyed and vulgarised as it has become, is now exclusively used in reference to sensations; or that the ideas of Will, God, Freedom, the Beautiful, are no longer the matter of high discourse, as in the days of Sidney and Spenser, Harrington and Milton, Politian and Mirandula. There can be no propriety, however, in attempting to restrict the use of a familiar word to a technical acceptation; and we should imagine it to be quite easy, by a qualifying epithet, to prevent the possibility of misconception. When we speak, for instance, of the right idea of

indispensable or desirable in ethical writing. Upon this point, he avows himself to be at issue with the philosophical writer above mentioned, who asserts, that whatever is practically important on religion 'or morals, may at all times be advanced and argued in the simplest terms of colloquial expression.' I do not believe this', remarks Mr. Coleridge; and he proceeds to represent the maxim as tending to de'prive Christianity of one of its peculiar attributes, that of enriching and enlarging the mind',-that is, with new terms and phrases, which become new organs of thought'. But when it is considered, that the Bible, the only fountain of religious knowledge, is the most untechnical of books, and that from nothing Christianity has suffered more prejudice than from the metaphysical jargon of the theological schools, most persons will think that the maxim impugned by Mr. Coleridge is a reasonable and useful one. The vices of his own style are attributable, in great measure, to his fondness for verbal refinements and a technical nomenclature.

an abstract quality or principle,-as freedom, or happiness,every one understands that we do not mean the idea of a specific state of freedom, or of any definite circumstances of enjoyment, but of that in which freedom or happiness essentially consists. Some ideas may be justly considered as primary laws of thought, e. g. the idea of life or of time; and without entering into the dispute respecting innate ideas, others, which have never been made definite objects of consideration with the generality, possess and unconsciously govern the minds of all; as the idea of free-agency and accountability, or the idea of personal right, which is a sense, rather than a notion,-a principle of thought, rather than a theory or opinion. Such ideas as these, Mr. Coleridge justly represents as the most real of all realities, and of all operative powers the most actual; for, by their influence, the characters of men are greatly shaped, and their actions determined. Now the Constitution itself, our Author maintains, is an Idea of this description,-not generalised from any existing institutions or laws, not a concrete idea made up of historical elements, not the image of any thing actual, but an antecedent principle, a model of thought, or rather a final idea, to which the actual form or mode of things is only an approximation.

A Constitution is an idea arising out of the idea of a State; and because our whole history, from Alfred onward, demonstrates the continued influence of such an idea, or ultimate aim, on the minds of our forefathers, in their characters and functions as public men, alike in what they resisted and in what they claimed; in the institutions and forms of polity which they established, and with regard to those against which they more or less successfully contended; and because the result has been a progressive, though not always a direct or equable advance in the gradual realization of the idea; and that it is actually represented (although, as an idea, it cannot be adequately represented) in a corresponding scheme of means really existing; we speak, and have a right to speak, of the Idea itself as actually existing, i. e. as a principle, existing in the only way in which a principle can exist-in the minds and consciences of the persons whose duties it prescribes, and whose rights it determines. In the same sense that the sciences of arithmetic and geometry, that Mind, that Life itself, have reality, the Constitution has real existence, and does not the less exist in reality because it both is, and exists as, an Idea. . . . As the fundamental idea, it is at the same time, the final criterion by which all particular frames of government must be tried.' pp. 11-13.

Instead of terming this Idea, the Constitution, most writers would have preferred to designate it as the spirit of the Constitution, its pervading principle, or the characteristic genius of our institutions and laws. It would be absurd to deny that the British Constitution does in fact exist in the palpable form of Institutional law;-that it is not a mere ens rationale, but an