A very experienced short-hand writer was employed to take down Mr. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare, but the manuscript was almost entirely unintelligible.  Yet the lecturer was, as he always is, slow and measured.  The writer—­we have some notion it was no worse an artist than Mr. Gurney himself—­gave this account of the difficulty:  that with regard to every other speaker whom he had ever heard, however rapid or involved, he could almost always, by long experience in his art, guess the form of the latter part, or apodosis, of the sentence by the form of the beginning; but that the conclusion of every one of Coleridge’s sentences was a surprise upon him.  He was obliged to listen to the last word.  Yet this unexpectedness, as we termed it before, is not the effect of quaintness or confusion of construction; so far from it, that we believe foreigners of different nations, especially Germans and Italians, have often borne very remarkable testimony to the grammatical purity and simplicity of his language, and have declared that they generally understood what he said much better than the sustained conversation of any other Englishman whom they had met.  It is the uncommonness of the thoughts or the image which prevents your anticipating the end.

We owe, perhaps, an apology to our readers for the length of the preceding remarks; but the fact is, so very much of the intellectual life and influence of Mr. Coleridge has consisted in the oral communication of his opinions, that no sketch could be reasonably complete without a distinct notice of the peculiar character of his powers in this particular.  We believe it has not been the lot of any other literary man in England, since Dr. Johnson, to command the devoted admiration and steady zeal of so many and such widely differing disciples—­some of them having become, and others being likely to become, fresh and independent sources of light and moral action in themselves upon the principles of their common master.  One half of these affectionate disciples have learned their lessons of philosophy from the teacher’s mouth.  He has been to them as an old oracle of the Academy or Lyceum.  The fulness, the inwardness, the ultimate scope of his doctrines has never yet been published in print, and if disclosed, it has been from time to time in the higher moments of conversation, when occasion, and mood, and person begot an exalted crisis.  More than once has Mr. Coleridge said, that with pen in hand, he felt a thousand checks and difficulties in the expression of his meaning; but that—­authorship aside—­he never found the smallest hitch or impediment in the fullest utterance of his most subtle fancies by word of mouth.  His abstrusest thoughts became rhythmical and clear when chaunted to their own music.  But let us proceed now to the publication before us.