March 24. A call on Coler. He expatiated largely
on the powerful effect of brotherly & sisterly love
in the formn. of char[acte]r. Certain peculiarities in his
wife, Mrs. Southey, Mrs. Lovell he ascribed to their
having no brother. I recollect too, but it was on some other
occasion, his saying that he envied Wordsworth his having
had a sister & that his own character had suffered from the
want of a sister. To-day he also spoke of incest. The
universal horror he ascribed not to instinct (if I mistake not
Southey y he said, believed in the instinct). He was of opinion
that fatal consequences had been found to follow from the
intercourse. And therefore a religious horror had been
industriously excited by priests — he spoke of novelty as
exciting, & of habitual presence as repressing desire.
March 29. With Coler. at Hazlitt's. Before Lamb
came, Coler. praised his serious conversation & Hazlitt
ascribed his puns to humility.
C. in his abuse of the Scotch, said, £dinb[urgh] is a
talking town & the Edinb. Rev. is a concentration of all
the smartness of all Scotland. When, in an Edinb. Conver-
sazione, a spark is elicited, it is instantly caught, preserved, &
brought to the Rev[iew]. He denied humour to the nation.
Of Rogers he said that he was the slave of public opinion.
38



COLERIDGE, WORDSWORTH, LAMB, &fc

He at first eulogised Bloomfield, but when the world
neglected him, he neglected him too.
Abstraction was spoken of. Hazlitt sd. he had learned
from painting how hard it is to have an idea of an individual
object At first we have only a general idea, that is, vague,
broken, imperfect. On my saying that this is all generally
meant by general idea, Hazlitt said he had no other.
