Note 117 — Chapter XLII

Footnote 117: In the Introduction to The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 1830, Sir Walter says: "Were I ever to take the unbecoming freedom of censuring a man of Mr. Coleridge's extraordinary talents, it would be on account of the caprice and indolence with which he has thrown from him, as in mere wantonness, those unfinished scraps of poetry, which, like the Torso of antiquity, defy the skill of his poetical brethren to complete them. The charming fragments which the author abandons to their fate are surely too valuable to be treated like the proofs of careless engravers, the sweepings of whose studios often make the fortune of some painstaking collector." And in a note to The Abbot, alluding to Coleridge's beautiful and tantalizing fragment of Christabel, he adds: "Has not our own imaginative poet cause to fear that future ages will desire to summon him from his place of rest, as Milton longed