" After all, too, it must be remembered that, though Mrs.
Coleridge did not permanently retain her hold upon her husband's
affections, she got considerably the better of those who shared them
with her. Coleridge found out the objections to Pantisocracy in a very
short space of time, and a decided coolness had sprung up between him
and Madame la Revolution before another two years had passed.
The whole history indeed of this latter _liaison_ is most
remarkable, and no one, it seems to me, can hope to form an adequate
conception of Coleridge's essential instability of character without
bestowing somewhat closer attention upon this passage in his
intellectual development than it usually receives. It is not uncommon
to see the cases of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge lumped together
indiscriminately, as interequivalent illustrations of the way in which
the young and generous minds of that era were first fascinated and then
repelled by the French Revolution. As a matter of fact, however, the
last of the three cases differed in certain very important respects
from the two former. Coleridge not only took the "frenzy-fever" in a
more violent form than either Wordsworth or Southey, and uttered wilder
things in his delirium than they, but the paroxysm was much shorter,
the _immediate_ reaction more violent in its effects and brought
about by slighter causes in his case than in theirs.
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