MR. COLERIDGE'S OBLIGATIONS TO SCHELLING, AND THE UNFAIR VIEW OF THE SUBJECT PRESENTED IN BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE.
SOME years ago, when the late Editor of my Father's works was distantly contemplating a new edition of the Biographia Literaria, but had not yet begun to examine the text carefully with a view to this object, his attention was drawn to an article in Blackwood's Magazine of March, 1840, in which "the very large and unacknowledged appropriations it contains from the great German Philosopher Schelling," are pointed out; and by this paper I have been directed to those passages in the works of Schelling and of Maasz, to which references are given in the following pages,-to most of them immediately, and to a few more through the strict investigation which it occasioned. Whether ' or no my Father's obligations to the great German Philosopher are virtually unacknowledged to the extent and with the unfairness which the writer of that article endeavors to prove, the reader of the present edition will be able to judge for himself; the facts of the case will be all before him, and from these, when the whole of them are fully and fairly considered, I feel assured that by readers in general,—and I have had some experience on this point already,-no such injurious inferences as are contained in that paper will ever be drawn. The author, it must be observed, before commencing his argument, thinks fit to disclaim the belief, that conscious intentional plagiarism is imputable to the object of his censure; nevertheless, throughout great part of it Mr. Coleridge is treated as an artful purloiner and selfish plunderer, who knowingly robs others to enrich himself, both the tone and the language of the article expressing this and no other meaning. Such aspersions will not rest, I think they never have