revelation. But the poet in his own mind was nothing if not a philosopher—a kind of seer amongst men, speculating, somewhat vaguely it might be, on matters of transcendental import—and in Schelling he thought he had discovered a kindred spirit; in his writings he believed he had found the Idealism for which he had so long been seeking in Böhme, Fox, and the other mystics—a creed which, though pantheistic in its essence, yet fulfilled the condition of being both orthodox and Trinitarian in its form. This, for many reasons, was a creed presenting many attractions to the younger men of the day, especially when set forth with a certain literary flavour. We have Carlyle's immortal picture of how it influenced John Sterling and his friends.
Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, in which the principal so-called Schelling plagiarisms are contained, was published in 1817, but it was not for a considerable time after that that the plagiarisms were discovered, or at least taken notice of. The first serious indictment came from no less an authority than De Quincey, whose interest in philosophical matters was as great as Coleridge's, and who published his views in an appreciative but gossipy article in Tait's Magazine of September 1834. To commence with, he took up the question of the 'Hymn to Chamouni'; but since, in this matter, Coleridge afterwards admitted his indebtedness to a German poetess, Frederica Brun, it does not seem an important one. Nor, indeed, does De Quincey pretend to take exception to certain expressions in Coleridge's 'France' which are evidently borrowed from Milton, or to regard them as indicating more than a peculiar omission of quotation marks. But the really serious matter, one for which De Quincey cannot
