Samuel Taylor Coleridge by James Gillman

Author:James Gillman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: poet, biography, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, kubla khan, romantic movement, wordsworth
ISBN: 9781781667385
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2012
Published: 2012-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

('Burke's speech on the 11th of February, 1780'.)

TO MY READERS.

"Conscious that I am about to deliver my sentiments on a subject of the utmost delicacy, I have selected the general motto to all my political lucubrations, from an authority equally respected by both parties. I have taken it from an orator, whose eloquence enables Englishmen to repeat the name of Demosthenes and Cicero, without humiliation; from a statesman, who has left to our language a bequest of glory unrivalled and all our own, in the keen-eyed, yet far-sighted genius, with which he has made the profoundest general principles of political wisdom, and even the recondite laws of human passions, bear upon particular measures and passing events. While of the harangues of Pitt, Fox, and their compeers on the most important occurrences, we retain a few unsatisfactory fragments alone, the very flies and weeds of Burke shine to us through the purest amber, imperishably enshrined, and valuable from the precious material of their embalment. I have extracted the passage not from that Burke, whose latter exertions have rendered his works venerable as oracular voices from the sepulchre of a patriarch, to the upholders of the government and society in their existing state and order; but from a speech delivered by him while he was the most beloved, the proudest name with the more anxious friends of liberty; while he was the darling of those who, believing mankind to have been improved, are desirous to give to forms of government a similar progression. From the same anxiety, I have been led to introduce my opinions on this most hazardous subject, by a preface of a somewhat personal character. And though the title of my address is general, yet, I own, I direct myself more particularly to those among my readers, who, from various printed and unprinted calumnies, have judged most unfavourably of my political tenets; aid to those whose favour I have chanced to win in consequence of a similar, though not equal mistake. To both, I affirm, that the opinions and arguments, I am about to detail, have been the settled convictions of my mind for the last ten or twelve years, with some brief intervals of fluctuation, and those only in lesser points, and known only to the companions of my fire-side. From both and from all my readers, I solicit a gracious attention to the following explanations: first, on the congruity of the following numbers, with the general plan and object of 'The Friend;' and secondly, on the charge of arrogance or presumption, which may be adduced against the author for the freedom, with which in these numbers, and in others that will follow on other subjects, he presumes to dissent from men of established reputation, or even to doubt of the justice, with which the public laurel-crown, as symbolical of the 'first' class of genius and intellect, has been awarded to sundry writers since the revolution, and permitted to wither around the brows of our elder benefactors, from Hooker to Sir P.

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