Note 38 — LECTURES ON THE DRAMATIC LITERATURE OF THE AGE OF ELIZABETH (continued 5)

Sir Thomas Brown has it, ‘The huntsmen are up in America,’ but Mr. Coleridge prefers reading Arabia. I do not think his account of the Urn-Burial very happy. Sir Thomas can be said to be ‘wholly in his subject,’ only because he is wholly out of it. There is not a word in the Hydriotaphia about ‘a thigh-bone, or a skull, or a bit of mouldered coffin, or a tomb-stone, or a ghost, or a winding-sheet, or an echo,’ nor is ‘a silver nail or a gilt anno domini the gayest thing you shall meet with.’ You do not meet with them at all in the text; nor is it possible, either from the nature of the subject, or of Sir T. Brown’s mind, that you should! He chose the subject of Urn-Burial, because it was ‘one of no mark or likelihood,’ totally free from the romantic prettinesses and pleasing poetical common-places with which Mr. Coleridge has adorned it, and because, being ‘without form and void,’ it gave unlimited scope to his high-raised and shadowy imagination. The motto of this author’s compositions might be—‘De apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio.’ He created his own materials: or to speak of him in his own language, ‘he saw nature in the elements of its chaos, and discerned his favourite notions in the great obscurity of nothing!‘