First known occurrence of the word "technique" in English
I’m trying to track down the first printed use of the word technique in English. Can anyone tell me the name, author, and date of the publication in question? It would be especially valuable, on top of that, to have an excerpted passage containing the word, in order to infer its intended meaning from its context.
Etymology Online suggests 1817, and it is not difficult to find Samuel Taylor Coleridge using it in his Biographia Literaria
The occasional obscurities, which had risen from an imperfect control over the resources of his native language, had almost wholly disappeared, together with that worse defect of arbitrary and illogical phrases, at once hackneyed, and fantastic, which hold so distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry, and will, more or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius, unless the attention has been specifically directed to their worthlessness and incongruity.
The OED may have something earlier.