As an intellectual power, C. manifested himself in a great variety of ways. Coin . pared with his contemporaries, he did not produce a very large amount of original poetry; and of what he did produce, a considerable portion is prosaic and artificial„buZ the residue is of the highest order of merit. No poet ever evolved such exquisite fan tasies, or wove our language into such webs of spiritual melody. He is.also to this day the greatest of philosophical critics. He was the first who.gave a definite. reason.for the "faith that is in us" regarding Shakespeare. He was the first representative of German literature and philosophy in England, and, till Carlyle came, the most potent. His own philosophical and theological writings, although, from constitutional indolence and irresolution, in some measure incomplete, arc 11111 of incidental merits, and have given a new impulse to English thought; yet it is right to mention here, that in his philo sophical writings he has been convicted of the most extraordinary plagiarism. Prof. Ferrier, in Blackwood's Magazine, April, 1840, "tracked the footsteps of this literary reaver through the Hercynian brakes" of Schelling's metaphysics (see also Hamilton's Reid, note), and has shown page after page to be pilfered from the German author. It
has been argued, however, by way of explanation and palliation, that C., who certainly did not lack original and penetrating powers as a metaphysician, was, from the sluggish ness and irresolution of his mind, better fitted to conceive in outline, and then adapt from others in detail, than to elaborate for himself a system of thought, or even the fragment of a system; while his notoriously confused and dreamy memory would be apt to mingle and confound what was his own with what might hare been such. As a thinker, C. exerted greater influence through conversation than through books; and to him we are largely indebted for what the young men who listened to him at High gate, Sterling, Hare, Maurice, etc., have since produced. A complete edition of Ms Poetical and Dramatic TVorks, with Memoir, was issued in 1S77.