Note 49 — JEUX D'ESPRIT AND MINOR POEMS, 1798-1824.

[In the review of Madame de Staël's De L'Allemagne (Edinburgh Review, October, 1813, vol. 22, pp. 198-238), Sir James Mackintosh enlarged upon and upheld the "opinions of Kant" as creative and seminal in the world of thought. In the same article he passes in review the systems of Hobbes, Paley, Bentham, Reid, etc., and finds words of praise and admiration for each in turn. See, too, a passage (p. 226) in which he alludes to Coleridge as a living writer, whose "singular character and unintelligible style" might, in any other country but England, have won for him attention if not approval. His own "conversion" from the extreme liberalism of the Vindiciæ Gallicæ of 1791 to the philosophic conservatism of the Introductory Discourse (1798) to his lecture on The Law of Nature and Nations, was regarded with suspicion by Wordsworth and Coleridge, who, afterwards, were still more effectually "converted" themselves.]