Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

STORIES BETTER THAN POLITICS. 419
know, aud that he is a man of the highest respectability and
purest honour you may believe on my assurance. 2nd. Have you
not overrated the inconvenience of [this piece of] unluck ? Why,
bless me! ten well- written [lines describing] the case would
have converted it into an additional interest. In all that forms
the true comparative merit of a Tale of this kind the contribu-
tions to your Magazine have so unmeasurably the advantage.
Oh that I could persuade you how much more likely to be
ultimately injurious is the recent change of the character of
'Maga' by the increasing disproportion of the party politics
articles, with the feelings and passions of which there is no
sympathy in England, and with the subjects themselves only
a languid exhausted interest. I speak without any reference
to their merits or demerits as compositions. Be assured you
have few more zealous advocates and no more sincere well-
wisher than your aged friend, S. T. Colekidge.
S. T. Coleridge to W. Blackwood.
May 26, 1832.
I have no means of procuring a frank; and I cannot but
fear that the disproportion between the contents of my last,
and the postage of an Edinburgh letter from London, may
argue a somewhat unconscientious self - appreciation on the
part of the Writer, and the more so that it omitted what yet
was a fact foremost and apparent in my mind ; videlicet, the
sense of your kind attentions to me, my cordial thanks for
the ' Odd Book,' and my old friend De Quincey's ' Klosterheim.'
It is now about the second year of my imprisonment to my
Bad (?) Book Attic, and from fever and languor I crawl through
a book as cumbrously as a Ely through a Milk-splash, and the
more the book interests me the slower is my progress. And I
have read nothing since the ' Quentin Durward ' which would
compare in interest with ' Klosterheim ' : and in purity of style
and idiom, in which the Scholar is ever implied, and the scholarly
never obtrudes itself, it reaches an excellence ^ to which Sir W,
Scott, with all the countless unaffected conversational charms
^ Note of Coleridge.—With a few exceptions, as " knock up," *' were
pulled up," the inevitables of that human iscoria from which no writer
in his senses ever hopes to secure an immunity. N.B.—In writing this