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 with a view to qualifying himself as a philosopher; and the fact illustrates the vague simmering of an interest in German speculation, which showed that the labours of Willich and Nitsch were not altogether thrown away. The beacon on Highgate Hill was only lighted in the later years of Wirgman's propaganda. Coleridge must', of course, be regarded as the main channel through which German philosophy began to influence Englishmen. Other names would have to, be mentioned in a history of the subject. Mackintosh took Kant and Fichte with him to India in 1806, and De Quincey had studied German before his introduction to Coleridge. But it was Coleridge, whose singular power of stimulating other men, even by fragmentary and irrelevant disquisitions, first spread the notion that a profound esoteric knowledge lay hid somewhere in the mysterious depths of German philosophy. He helped himself, as we know, a little too freely from that source. The magical poetry which he produced during his brief period of 'flowering' was, happily, his own beyond all dispute. Yet in one way Coleridge, too, illustrates the influence of German poetical literature in the early period.

This, however, takes us back to Scott. Scott's