The reader of experience, on sliding over the surface of this opening paragraph, begins to think there's mischief singing in the upper air. No, reader--not at all. We never were cooler in our days. And this we protest, that, were it not for the excellence of the subject, _Coleridge and Opium-Eating_, Mr Gillman would have been dismissed by us unnoticed. Indeed, we not only forgive Mr Gillman, but we have a kindness for him; and on this account, that he was good, he was generous, he was most forbearing, through twenty years, to poor Coleridge, when thrown upon his hospitality. An excellent thing _that_, Mr Gillman, and one sufficient to blot out a world of libels on ourselves! But still, noticing the theme suggested by this unhappy Vol. I., we are forced at times to notice its author. Nor is this to be regretted. We remember a line of Horace never yet properly translated, viz:--
"Nec scuticâ dignum horribili sectêre flagello."
The true translation of which, as we assure the unlearned reader, is--"Nor must you pursue with the horrid knout of Christopher that man who merits only a switching." Very true. We protest against all attempts to invoke the exterminating knout; for _that_ sends a man to the hospital for two months; but you see that the same judicious poet, who dissuades an appeal to the knout, indirectly recommends the switch, which, indeed, is rather pleasant than otherwise, amiably playful in some of its little caprices, and in its worst, suggesting only a pennyworth of diachylon.
We begin by professing, with hearty sincerity, our fervent admiration of the extraordinary man who furnishes the theme for Mr Gillman's _coup-d'essai_ in biography. He was, in a literary sense, our brother--for he also was amongst the contributors to _Blackwood_--and will, we presume, take his station in that Blackwood gallery of portraits, which, in a century hence, will possess more interest for intellectual Europe than any merely martial series of portraits, or any gallery of statesmen assembled in congress, except as regards one or two leaders; for defunct major-generals, and secondary diplomatists, when their date is past, awake no more emotion than last year's advertisements, or obsolete directories; whereas those who, in a stormy age, have swept the harps of passion, of genial wit, or of the wrestling and gladiatorial reason, become more interesting to men when they can no longer be seen as bodily agents, than even in the middle chorus of that intellectual music over which, living, they presided.