by George Watson
Coleridge's own friends started it in his lifetime. Crabb Robinson called him Vpoor Coleridge' and even Lamb, who objected, said 'He is a fine fellow in spite of all his faults and weaknesses.
Today we think we have a iuster estimate of Coleridge's genius. But how strangely the orthodox critical approach accords with one's general impression of the works themselves'; and from Kathleen Coburn's monumental edition of the Notebooks (of which the first two volumes have recently been published) 7 a new image of the man emerges.'