Coleridge the Talker

IT is a little hard to see quite where this book comes in. Its purpose is to bolster the tradition that Coleridge was a great talker. After a brief biographical sketch the authors cite testimony lifted from a great number of contemporary writings. This is all very good, but in the first place the tradition is already well enough established to permit one to take it as read. Second, the contemporaries tell us very little of what Coleridge said when he talked, so their information is rather sterile. If there had been an Eckermann among them, the case would be different. The notes help somewhat, and in one way and another one gets a fairly clear idea of what sort of being Coleridge was, but no clearer than the idea one gets from sources already long available.