CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. With a Prefatory Notice, Biographical and Critical, by Joseph Skipsey. (Walter Scott, London and Newcastle-on-Tyne.)—This is the first volume of a "New Edition of the Poets," which is to appear under the care of the editor, whose name appears on the title.page, and with the title of "The Canterbury Poets." The shape is "square Sao" (measuring 51 in. by 4 in.), the paper and type reasonably good, the ink (the publishers must excuse us for saying) distressingly bad. Altogether, the volumes are of a convenient size and agreeable appearance. We cannot say much in praise of Mr. Skipsey's "Prefatory Notice." The style is simply deplorable. Here is its conclusion :—" Besides his wife, he left two sons and a daughter, all then in the stage of middle-life. The whole of these also had literary talent, the eldest especially so ; but it is the fate of the lesser genius in a family to be always thrust out of sight by the memory of the greater, and that of the author of the 'Ancient Mariner' was such that when he died the world may be said to have lost all that could be lost of the greatest poet, if we except Shelley, that England had produced since the days of Milton, and, in the domain of pure poetry, each a one as has not appeared in the world since." We do not remember that Coleridge's wife had literary talent ; and neither Derwent nor Hartley were in the least obscured by their father's fame. Mr. 8kipsey must call largely upon the "various contributors" of whom mention is made in the advertisement, if this series is to succeed.
Nineteen Centuries of Drink in England. By Richard Valpy French, D.C.L. (Longmana.) — Dr. French marshals here an amazingly large array of facts, which, indeed, nineteen centuries of a subject so fertile were certain to produce in abundance. In the earlier centuries he is a little hazy, quoting, for instance, the legend of Vortigern, the childish invention with which British bards sought to disguise a national defeat, without any intimation of its falsity. He might, too, have enriched his account of later times with some characteristic anecdotes, as with the story of the miraculous multi- plication of the mead at Abingdon Abbey, where its second founder was entertaining his Northumbrian guests. But, on the whole, no one can complain that there is any lack of research. Dr. French, too, is impartial, or rather—for to be impartial on such a topic, is scarcely possible—reasonable and moderate. He shows a temperance in language and statement which the advocates of that virtue, in its limited sense of abstinence from intoxicating drink, do not invariably display. He can say, for instance, of an utterance that gave grievous offence at the time in certain quarters, that "it was founded on convic- tion, and not as a flippant apothegm, that Bishop Magee pronounced that he preferred to see England free to England sober." And he is averse to the rough-and-ready method of compulsion which finds favour with some social reformers. They argue, he tells us, "Take away the man from the drink, or the drink from the man, and the excess is at an end." "But," he replies, "Due of these factors, human nature, declines the divorce." Of course, the tendency of his thought is towards restraint ; but he wishes the restraint to come as much as possible from within, though he wonld probably go further than many thinkers in what he would impose from without. Apart from its value as a contribution to social science, Dr. French's volume is fall of literary interest.
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