Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/189

182 We may take tins opportunity of saying, that Mr. Derwent Coleridge's annotations in general are candid in judgment, as well as tender to the memory of both his distinguished relatives. The care which he, has bestowed on this edition of his brother's writings, does honour to his heart and head. They deserved the pains.

Again, upon Galen's maxim, that "much music marreth men's manners” (an unmusically alliterative sentence, by the way), S. T. C. remarks:

"Throughout my whole life, since the period of reflection, I have found the truth of this observation. Music is the twilight between sense and sensuality. For its demoralising effect, when it is a mastering passion, see 'A Ramble among the Musicians of Germany, by a Musical Professor.'"

We should like to see an examination in extenso of this doctrine, by the lively authoress of "Letters from the Baltic,” impugning as it does the soundness of the opposite view, which she has so eloquently advocated in the pages of the Quarterly In fact, most of S. T. C.'s foot-notes may serve as stumbling-blocks to those polemically disposed; or, to change the figure, as key-notes for the variations and voluntaries of others. This, however, is characteristic of whatever he put on paper, or scattered to the crumb-gatherers of table-talk, and is the of his independence of thought, his energetic reason, and shaping mind. And it is this which assigns a peculiar value to the study of his works—as provoking reflection and stimulating to inquiry. Whatever the absolute worth of his suggestions in se, they thus assume a relative significance of deep practical result in the mental activity of which they are the exciting cause.

One more illustration, and we conclude. Hartley's censure of the parliamentary agents who opened Charles the First's letters to his wife, is thus disposed of by S. T. C.:

"The parliament had acted ab initio on their convictions of the king's bad faith, and of the utter insincerity of his promises and professions. What stronger presumption can we have of the certainty of the evidences which they had previously obtained, and by the year-after-year accumulation of which their suspicions had been converted into convictions? And was Henrietta an ordinary wife? Was Charles to her as Charles of Sweden to his spouse? The Swede's queen was only the man’s wife, but Henrietta was notoriously Charles's queen—or, rather, the he-queen's she-king—a commander in the war, meddling with and influencing all his councils. I hold the parliament fully justified in the publication of the letters—much more the historian."

We take leave of the "Northern Worthies," with a stanch faith in Wordsworth's prediction that they will live, and with confirmed respect and affection for the winning character of the biographer. The memoirs amply attest his originality and subtlety of thought, his radiant bonhomie, his wealth of illustration, his critical acumen, his philosophic reflectiveness, and his poetical instinct. Not that we think any one of them, however, equal to his "Life of Massinger;" but that is a piece of biography which, as a delightful amalgam of gossip and dissertation, condensed information and discursive reasoning, graceful scholarship and sagacious knowledge of life, we hold to be almost unique among our belles lettres.