Wordsworth
said that though "he had seen many men do wonderful things, Coleridge
was the only wonderful man he had ever met," and it was not the doer of
wonderful things but the wonderful man that English society in those
days went out for to see. Seeing would have been enough, but for a
certain number there was hearing too, with the report of it for all;
and it is not surprising that fame of the marvellous discourser should,
in mere virtue of his extraordinary power of improvised speech, his
limitless and untiring mastery of articulate words, have risen to a
height to which writers whose only voice is in their pens can never
hope to attain.
A reputation of that kind, however, must necessarily perish with its
possessor; and Coleridge's posthumous renown has grown, his place in
English literature has become more assured, if it has not been even
fixed higher, since his death than during his lifetime. This
is, in part no doubt, one among the consequences of those very defects
of character which so unfortunately limited his actual achievements. He
has been credited by faith, as it were, with those famous "unwritten
books" of which he assured Charles Lamb that the titles alone would
fill a volume, and such "popular reputation," in the strict sense of
the word, as he has left behind him, is measured rather by what he was
thought capable of doing than by what he did.
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