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have not only planned, but collected the Materials for, many Works on various and important Subjects: so many indeed, that the Number of my unrealized Schemes, and the Mass of my miscellaneous Fragments, have often furnished my Friends with a Subject of Raillery, and sometimes of Regret and Reproof. Waiving the Mention of all private and accidental Hindrances, I am inclined to believe, that this Want of Perseverance has been produced in the Main by an Over-activity of Thought, modified by a constitutional Indolence, which made it more pleasant to me to continue acquiring, than to reduce what I had acquired to a regular Form. Add too, that almost daily throwing off my Notices or Reflections in desultory Fragments, I was still tempted onward by an increasing Sense of the Imperfection of my Knowledge, and by the Conviction, that, in Order fully to comprehend and develope any one Subject, it was necessary that I should make myself Master of some other, which again as regularly involved a third, and so on, with an ever-widening Horizon. Yet one Habit, formed during long Absences from those, with whom I could converse with full Sympathy, has been of Advantage to me -that of daily noting down, in my Memorandum or Common-place Books, both Incidents and Observations; whatever had occurred to me from without, and all the Flux and Reflux of my Mind within itself. The Number of these Notices, and their Tendency, miscellaneous as they were, to one common End ("quid sumus et quid futuri gignimur," what we are and what we are born to become; and thus from the End of our Being to deduce its proper Objects) first encouraged me to undertake the Weekly Essay, of which you will consider this Letter as the Propectus.

Not only did the plan seem to accord better than any other with the Nature of my own Mind, both in its Strength and in its Weakness; but conscious that, in upholding some Principles both of Taste and Philosophy, adopted by the great Men of Europe from the Middle of the fifteenth till toward the Close of the seventeenth Century, I must run Counter to many Prejudices of many of my readers (for old Faith is often modern Heresy) I perceived too in a periodical Essay the most likely Means of winning, intead of forcing my Way. Supposing Truth on my Side, the Shock of the first Day might be so far lessened by Reflections of the succeeding Days, as to procure for my next Week's Essay a less hostile Reception, than it would have met with, had it been only the next Chapter of a present Volume. I hoped to disarm the Mind of those Feelings, which preclude Conviction by Contempt, and, as it were, fling the Door in the Face of Reasoning by a Presumption of its Absurdity. A Motive too for honourable Ambition was supplied by the Fact, that every periodical Paper of the Kind now attempted, which had been conducted with Zeal and Ability, was not only well received at the Time, but has become permanently, and in the best Sense of the Word, popular. By honorable Ambition I mean the strong Desire to be useful, aided by the Wish to be generally acknowledged to have been so. As I feel myself actuated in no ordinary Degree by this Desire, so the Hope of realizing it appears less and less presumptuous to me, since I

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have received from Men of highest Rank and established Character in the Republic of Letters, not only strong Encouragements as to my own Fitness for the Undertaking, but likewise Promises of Support from their own Stores.

The Object of "THE FRIEND," briefly and generally expressed, is-to uphold those Truths and those Merits, which are founded in the nobler and permanent Parts of our Nature, against the Caprices of Fashion, and such Pleasures, as either depend on transitory and accidental Causes, or are pursued from less worthy Impulses. The chief Subjects of my own Essays will be:

The true and sole Ground of Morality, or Virtue, as distinguished from Prudence.

The Origin and Growth of moral Impulses, as distinguished from external and immediate Motives.

The necessary Dependence of Taste on moral Impulses and Habits: and the Nature of Taste (relatively to Judgement in general and to Genius) defined, illustrated, and applied. Under this Head I comprize the Substance of the Lectures given, and intended to have been given, at the Royal Institution, on the distinguished English Poets, in illustration of the general Principles of Poetry; together with Suggestions concerning the Affinity of the Fine Arts to each other, and the Principles common to them all: Architecture; Gardening; Dress; Music; Painting; Poetry.

The opening out of new Objects of just Admiration in our own Language;
and Information of the present State and past History of Swedish,
Danish, German, and Italian Literature (to which, but as supplied by
a Friend, I may add the Spanish, Portuguese and French) as far as the
same has not been already given to English Readers, or is not to be
found in common French Authors.

Characters met with in real Life :-Anecdotes and Results of my own Life
and Travels, &c. &c. as far as they are illustrative of general moral.
Laws, and have no immediate Bearing on personal or immediate
Politics.

Education in its widest Sense, private and national.

Sources of Consolation to the afflicted in Misfortune, or Disease, or De-
jection of Mind, from the Exertion and right Application of the Reason,
the Imagination, and the moral Sense; and new Sources of Enjoyment
opened out, or an Attempt (as an illustrious Friend once expressed
the Thought to me) to add Sunshine to Daylight, by making the
Dejection of Mind" I refer par-
Happy more happy. In the words "
ticularly to Doubt or Disbelief of the moral Government of the
World, and the grounds and arguments for the religious Hopes of
Human Nature.

Orders for the FRIEND received by the Publisher, J. BROWN, PENRITH; by Messrs. LONGMAN, HURST, REES, and ORME, Pater noster Row; by CLEMENT, Bookseller, opposite ST. Clement's, Strand; LONDON.

Orders likewise, and all Communications, to be addressed to $. T. COLERIDGE, Grasmere, KENdal.

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THE FRIEND.

No. 2. THURSDAY, JUNE 8, 1809.

"Whenever we improve, it is right to leave room for a further improvement. It is right to consider, to look about us, to examine the effect of what we have done. Then we can proceed with confidence, because we can proceed with intelligence. Whereas in hot reformations, in what men more zealous than considerate, call making clear work, the whole is generally so crude, so harsh, so indigested; mixed with so much imprudence and so much injustice; so contrary to the whole course of human nature and human institutions, that the very people who are most eager for it, are among the first to grow disgusted at what they have done. Then some part of the abdicated grievance is recalled from its exile in order to become a corrective of the correction. Then the abuse assumes all the credit and popularity of a Reform. The very Idea of purity and disinterestedness in Politics falls into disrepute, and is considered as a vision of hot and inexperienced men; and thus disorders become incurable, not by the virulence of their own quality, but by the unapt and violent nature of the remedies. "BURKE'S SPEECH" on presenting to the House of Commons (on the 11th of February, 1780.) A PLAN FOR THE

BETTER SECURITY OF the independence OF PARLIAMENT.

TO MY READERS.

CONSCIOUS that I am about to deliver my sentiments on a subject of the utmost delicacy, I have selected the general motto to all my political lucubrations from an Authority equally respected by both parties. I have taken it from an Orator, whose eloquence enables Englishmen to repeat the names of Demosthenes and Cicero without humiliation; from a Statesman, who has left to our Language a bequest of Glory unrivalled and all our own, in the keen-eyed yet far-sighted genius, with which he has made the profoundest general principles of political wisdom, and even the recondite laws of human passions, hear upon particular measures and passing events. While of the Harangues of Pitt, Fox, and their elder compeers on the most important occurrences, we retain a few unsatisfactory fragments alone, the very Flies and Weeds of BURKE shine to us through the purest amber, imperishably enshrined, and valuable from the precious material

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I have extracted the passage from of their embalment. that BURKE whose latter exertions have rendered his works venerable as oracular voices from the sepulchre of a Patriarch, to the Upholders of the Government and Society in their existing state and order; but from a Speech delivered by him while he was the most beloved, the proudest name with the more anxious Friends of Liberty; while he was the Darling of those, who believing mankind to have been improved are desirous to give to forms of government a similar progression.

From the same anxiety I have been led to introduce my opinions on this most hazardous subject by a preface of a somewhat personal character. And though the title of my address is general, yet, I own, I direct myself more particularly to those among my readers, who from various printed and unprinted calumnies have judged most unfavourably of my political tenets; and to those, whose favour I have chanced to win in consequence of a similar, though not equal, mistake. To both I affirm, that the opinions and arguments, I am about to detail, have been the settled convictions of my mind for the last ten or twelve years, with some brief intervals of fluctuation, and those only in lesser points, and known only to the Companions of my Fire-side. From both and from all my readers I solicit a gracious attention to the following explanations: first, on the congruity of the following numbers with the general Plan and Object of "The Friend and secondly, on the charge of arrogance or presumption which may be adduced against the Author for the freedom, with which in these numbers and in others that will follow on other subjects, he presumes to dissent from men of established reputation, or even to doubt of the justice with which the public Laurel-crown, as symbolical of the first Class of Genius and Intellect, has been awarded to sundry writers since the Revolution, and permitted to wither around the brows of our elder Benefactors, from Hooker to Sir P. Sidney, and from Sir P. Sidney to Jeremy Taylor and Stillingfleet.

First then, as to the consistency of the subject of the following Essay with the proposed Plan of my work, let something be allowed to honest personal motives, a justifiable solicitude to stand well with my Contemporaries in those points, in which I have remained unreproached by my own conscience.

Des aliquid famæ. A Reason of

far greater importance is derived from the well-grounded Complaint of sober minds, concerning the mode by which political opinions of greatest hazard have been, of late years, so often propagated. This evil cannot be described in more just and lively language than in the words of Paley (p. 395 of the quarto edition of his Moral and Political Philosophy) which, though by him applied to Infidelity, hold equally of the turbulent errors of political Heresy. They are "served up in every shape, that is likely to allure, surprise, or beguile the imagination; in a fable, a tale, a novel, a poem: in interspersed and broken hints; remote and oblique surmises; in books of Travels, of Philosophy, of Natural History; in a word, in any form, rather than the right one, that of a professed and regular disquisition." Now in claiming for "THE FRIEND" a fair chance of unsuspected admission into the families of Christian Believers and quiet Subjects, I cannot but deem it incumbent on me to accompany my introduction with a full and fair statement of my own political system: not that any considerable portion of my Essays will be devoted to politics in any shape, for rarely shall I recur to them except as far as they may happen to be involved in some point of private morality; but that the Encouragers of this Work may possess grounds of assurance, that no tenets of a different tendency from these, I am preparing to state, will be met in it. I would fain hope, that even those persons whose political opinions I may run counter to, will not be displeased at seeing the possible objections to their creed calmly set forth by one, who equally with themselves considers the love of true Liberty, as a part both of Religion and Morality, as a necessary condition of their general predominance, and ministring to the same blessed Purposes. The developement of my religious persuasions relatively to Religion in its great Essentials, will occupy a following number, in which (and throughout these Essays) my aim will be, seldom indeed to enter the Temple of Revelation (much less of positive Institution) but to lead my Readers to its' Threshhold, and to remove the prejudices with which the august edifice may have been contemplated from ill-chosen and unfriendly points of view.

But independently of this motive, I deem the subject of Politics, so treated as I intend to treat it, strictly congruous' with my general Plan. For it was and is my prime

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