In reading an extract in the German Encyclopædia from Dobrizhoffer's most interesting account of the Abiponenses, a savage tribe in Paraguay, houseless, yet in person and in morals the noblest of savage tribes; who, when first known by Europeans, amounted to 100,000 warriors, yet have a tradition that they were but the relic of a far more numerous community, and who by wars with other savage tribes, and by intestine feuds among themselves, are now dwindled to a thousand (men, women, and children do not exceed five thousand), it struck me with distinct remembrance-first, that this is the history of all savage tribes; and, second, that all tribes are savage that have not a positive religion defecated from witchcraft, and an established priesthood contra-distinguished from individual conjurers. Nay, the islands of the Pacific (the Polynesia, which sooner or later the swift and silent masonry of the coral worms will compact into a rival continent, into a fifth quarter of the world), blest with all the plenties of nature, and enjoying an immunity from all the ordinary dangers of savage life, were many of them utterly dispeopled since their first discovery, and wholly by their own feuds and vices; nay, that their bread-fruit tree and their delicious and healthful climate had only made the process of mutual destruction and self-destruction more hateful, more basely sensual. This, therefore, I assume as an undoubted fact of history; and from this, as a portion of the history of men, I draw a new (to my knowledge, at least, a new) series of proofs of several, I might say of all, the positions of preeminent importance and interest more than vital; a series which, taken in harmonious counterpart to a prior series drawn from interior history (the history of man), the documents of which are to be found only in the archives of each individual's own consciousness, will form a complete whole-a system of evidence, consisting of two correspondent worlds, as it were, correlative and mutually potentiating, yet each integral and self-subsistent having the same correlation, as the geometry

and the observations, or the metaphysics and the physics, of astronomy. If I can thus demonstrate the truth of the doctrine of existence after the present life, it is not improbable that some rays of light may fall on the question, what state of existence it may be reasonably supposed to be? At all events, we shall, I trust, be enabled to determine negatively, what it can not be for any; and for whom this or that, which does not appear universally precluded, is yet for them precluded. In plainer words, what can not be, universally speaking; second, what may be; third, what the differences may be for different individuals, within the limits prescribed in No. 2; fourth, what scheme of embodied representation of the future state (our reason not forbidding the same) is recommended by the truest analogies; and, fifth, what scheme it is best to combine with our belief of a hereafter, as most conducive to the growth and cultivation of our collective faculties in this life, or of each in the order of its comparative worth, value, and permanence. This I must defer to another letter, for I cannot let another post pass by, without your knowing that we are all thinking of and loving you.

T. Allsop, Esq.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

To the preceding letter, pregnant as it is with materials for thinking, your attention will be attracted, both by the great variety of subjects brought forward and illustrated, and by the expressions of earnest and affectionate attachment which it contains.

Certainly no man that I ever knew united in so great a degree, so entirely, "fondeur" with the most extreme simplicity, and the most artless and confiding affection. The whole craving of his moral being was for love. Who is not affected, what man does not grieve, when he hears him exclaim

"To be BELOVED is ALL I need,

"To be BELOVED is I LOVE indeed."

Why was I made for love, and love denied to me?"

Alas! my dear children, how can I hope to convey to you (except your own minds are consenting) all that this glorious being was to me in the days when his vast intellect was in its most gorgeous manhood, and I was yet in the first singleness, and, I will add, purity, of mind.

"Few, and far between," are the moments when I can recall that other self, which, in days past, sat at the feet of the greatest of moderns-that seemed to unite energy, variety, a mind eminently suggestive, with an affection and a reverence, without any assignable limits, for whatever was beautiful and loveable in man or in external nature,

"Who was retired as noon-tide dew
Or fountain in a noon-day grove;

And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.

"The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth

Have come to him in solitude.

"In common things that round us lie,

Some random truths he can impart,

The harvest of a quiet eye,

That broods and sleeps on his own heart.

"But he is shy, both man and boy

Hath been an idler in the land;

Contented, if he might enjoy

The things that others understand."

The next letter which contained the farther development of the very interesting matters opened in the preceding letter, I have mislaid, or, I much fear, lost.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

LETTER XI.

Highgate, Oct. 11th, 1820.

You will think it childish in me, and more savouring of a jealous boarding-school miss than a friend and a philosopher, when I confess that the "with great respect, your obliged and grateful...," gave me pain. But I did not return from Mr. Cooper's, at whose house we all dined, till near midnight, and did not open the packet till this morning after getting out of bed; and this you know is the hour in which the cat-organ of an irritable viscerage is substituted for the brain as the mind's instrument.

The Cobbett is assuredly a strong and battering production throughout, and in the best bad style of this political rhinoceros, with his coat armour of dry and wet mud, and his one horn of brutal strength on the nose of scorn and hate; not to forget the flaying rasp of his tongue! There is one article of his invective, however, from which I cannot withhold my vote of consent: that I mean which respects Mr. Brougham's hollow complimentary phrases to the ministry and the House of Lords. On expressing my regret that his poor hoaxed and hunted client had been lured or terrified into the nets of the revolutionists, and had taken the topmost perch, as the flaring, screaming maccaw, in the clamorous aviary of faction, Sheriff Williams, who dined with us, premising that his wishes accorded with mine, declared himself, however, fully and deeply convinced, that, without this alliance, the Queen must have been overwhelmed, not wholly or even chiefly from the strength of the party itself, but because, without the activity, enthusiasm, and combination, peculiar to the reformists, her case, in all its detail and with all its appendages, would never have had that notoriety so beyond example universal; which (to translate Sheriff Williams into Poet Coleridge), with kettle-drum reveillée, had echoed through the mine and the coal-pit, which had lifted the latch of every cottage, and

thundered with no run-away knock at Carlton Palace. I could only reply, that I had never yet seen, heard, or read of any advantage in the long run, occurring to a good cause from an unholy alliance with evil passions and incongruous or alien purposes. It was ever heavy on my heart, that the people, alike high and low, do perish for lack of knowledge; that both sheep and shepherd, the Flocks and the Pastors, go astray among swamps and in desolate places, for want of the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth; and that the sacred motto, which I had adopted for my first political publication ("The Watchman "), would be the aspiration of my deathbed-THAT ALL MAY KNOW THE TRUTH; AND THAT THE

TRUTH MAY MAKE US FREE.

or .

...

I observed farther, that in bodies of men, not accidentally collected nor promiscuously, but such as our House of Lords, the usual effect of terror was, first, self-justification as to the worst of their past violent and unconstitutional measures; and, next, a desperate belief that their safety would be still more endangered by giving way than by plunging onward; that, if they must fall, they would fall in that way in which they might take vengeance on the occasion of the mischief. If the proposition be either and the latter blank is to be filled up by a Civil War, what shall we put for the former, to make our duty to submit to it deniable or even doubtful? A Legislature permitted by us to stand in the eye of the whole civilised World as the representative of our country, corruptly and ruthlessly pandering to an Individual's Lust and Hate! Open Hostility to Innocence, and the subversion of justice, a shameless trampling under foot of the Laws of God and the Principles of the Constitution, in the name and against the known will of the Nation! Well! if anything, it must be this! It is a decision, compared with which the sentence of the elder Brutus were a grief for which an onion might supply the tears. A dreadful decision! But be it so !-How much more then are we bound to be careful, that no conduct of our