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Reviews Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century ''We insensibly imitate what we habitually admire," Coleridge wrote in The Friend, balf-heartedly determining to purge his prose style of its entortillage while at the same time defending his preference for "the stately march and difficult evolutions, which characterise the eloquence of Hooker, Bacon, Milton, and Jeremy Taylor." Coleridge abominated "the epigrammatic unconnected periods of the fashionable Anglo-Gallican taste" and found in the seventeenth-century writers a style consonant with his own way of mind. But his devotion to the seventeenth century did not begin and end with stylistic mannerisms. The discoveries. turmoils, and problems of his own day could not satisfy a mind so capacious and restlessly inquiring. He must search for principles, beginnings, seeds, fountain-heads; and set forth, guided by a fine sensibility, a large capacity for astonishment, and a rare talent for emphatic reading. To what country of the mind, being what he was, could Coleridge have turned with more joyous sense of recognition than to the writings of the period from Elizabeth's reign to the Restoration? Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, Richard Baxter, Henry More, Francis Bacon, John Donne, John Milton, and Thomas Fuller-that "dear, fine, silly old angel" as Lamb called him: great wealth of resonant prose, intricate verse, round rhetoric; much inquiry, much moving polemical sermoning, much resolute political thinking. In this ebullient confusion of ingenuity and dogged reflection , the age had its own gullibilities, superstitions, and ignorances-the wrong~headedness often not the least fascinating. Here too the seeds of the Critical Philosophy were laid and the strain of pragmatic assertiveness that was to dominate the next century took root. Coleridge approached with affection and with vigorous abandon, as though in a hame-coming. delighting most in those "masculine intellects, formed under the robust discipline of an age memorable for keenness of research, and iron industry." In the Protectorate alone he saw "a momentous period, during which all the possible forms of truth and error . . . bubbled up on the surface of the public mind.... It would be difficult [he said] to conceive of a notion, or a fancy, in politics, ethics, theology, or even in physics and physiology, which had not been anticipated by the men of that age." He threw himself into the controversies-political and biblical-as though they were still living issues (which in a sense they were); quarrelled with the errors, revelled in the quaintnesses~ gloried in the toughness of mind. 259 REVIEWS indicate the scope cumulus of his and maLnuscI'ipt wrltIIJlgs·-(";oIendge venient. At times the Great other times it to embrace as a accession to the He does not is less interested in historical movements than in movements of to the he "but n He thinks most of individual mc.IIVldual processes of He reads his books one direct communion with the author a realized "'VJU.~""/LLJ '''''''''.......In.n£Y below the verbal surfaces for the writer's intention. from his of the incisive historical a movement or trend. But at his intimate with minds of an earlier age disclose the vivid touch of a fine critical sense: he moves~ among the dead as were and them among the of the we wish to delineate a for his mind-to Seventeenth to him ever UllnKlLng without .....u.UAJu..J.15 Miss .........."".">'

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