APPENDIX

Letters contained in this work drawn from Joseph Cottle’s Early Recollections (1837), and his Reminiscences (1847)

Letters Nos. 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 30, 32, and 38 were included in the Biographical Supplement. The text of these eleven letters is that of the Supplement.

Letters in the Life of William Godwin, not included in this work nor in Letters of S. T. Coleridge(1895)

MEMORIALS OF COLEORTON (1887)

Letters by Coleridge to Sir George and Lady Beaumont, not included in Letters of S. T. Coleridge (1895)

Letters in Thomas Poole and his Friends, by Mrs. Henry Sandford (1888), not contained in the Biographical Supplement, nor in Letters of S. T. C. (1895).

Letters contained in Brandl’s Life of Coleridge (1887)

Letters contained in Professor Knight’s Life Of Wordsworth, not appearing in this work, or Letters of S. T. C. (1895)

Letters contained in William Blackwood and His Sons, by Mrs. Oliphant (1897)

Letters contained in the Life of Alaric Watts, By his son, Alaric Alfred Watts (1884)

Letters contained in John Hookham Frere and his Friends, by Gabrielle Festing, 1899.

ADDITIONAL NOTES

Biographical Supplement.—The original Text of the Supplement of the Biographia Literaria, 2 vols., 1847, by Henry Nelson Coleridge and Sara Coleridge, is as follows:

Cottle’s Text.—Cottle has been severely blamed for tampering with the text of the letters of Coleridge. The most glaring changes occur in Letter 32, in which Cottle inserts the names of Lamb, Wordsworth and Dr. Parr, and in Letter 123, in which he alters his own name for that of Biggs, his partner. His changes consist mostly of omissions. Letters 99, 114, 117, 122, which are given in full in T. Litchfield’s Tom Wedgwood the First Photographer, are the principal sufferers from Cottle’s treatment. It cannot be said that these omissions amount to a serious charge against Cottle. They were made to avoid bringing in the names of people still alive or whose near relations might object to their names figuring in a publication, and also to avoid obtruding Coleridge’s complaints about his ill-health and his own treatment into notice. His tampering with the letters of Southey, in which he makes Southey say what he never wrote, is not, of course, defensible (see Dykes Campbell’s Life of Coleridge, p. 204 note). Cottle’s longest omission is in Letter 99, to Wedgwood, where Coleridge quotes what Lamb had written to him about Cottle’s own poem Alfred (see Ainger’s Letters of Lamb, i, 138). The omission of such a passage was only to be expected; Cottle was not going to act as his own hangman. Henry Nelson Coleridge, Thomas Noon Talfourd, and even Canon Ainger, and indeed nearly all editors of letters published during the first half of the nineteenth century, took the liberty to discriminate what should be communicated to the public in volumes such as Cottle’s.

Vol. I, p. 50.—The Summer of 1795 should be “the Autumn of 1794;” see Thomas Poole and his Friends, I, 95.

Vol. I, p. 62.—Letter 24 is placed by Cottle in the spring of 1796, but being dated from Stowey, it is possible that this letter may belong to 1797. The revision of the Religious Musings mentioned in the letter would suit 1797 as well as 1796, for the text of that poem differed very widely from that of the First Edition.

Vol. I, p. 97.—The numbered poems in Letter 42, are:

Vol. I, p. 292, Letter 117. Books from Wordsworth’s Library.—“Perhaps one of the most interesting books in the whole selection is Sir T. Browne’s Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors, the folio edition of 1658, which contains a long letter to Sara Hutchinson, relative principally to many curious passages in the work, also several MS. marginal notes and corrections, all in the handwriting of S. T. Coleridge, and autographs of Charles Lamb and Mary Wordsworth. The copy of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, 1669, contains copious marginal and other MS. annotations by Coleridge, and has this inscription inside the cover, ‘Sara Hutchinson from S. T. C.’”—AthenÆum, No. 3579, May 30, 1896.

Vol. II, p. 262, Contemplative melancholy.—The phrase is a variation of “speculative gloom,” which Coleridge used in his original prospectus of the Friend, objected to by Francis Jeffrey (see Letters, ii, 536, note), and afterwards changed into “Dejection of Mind” in the printed Prospectus (see Letter 143, vol. ii, p. 51). The phrase “speculative gloom” was derived from Warton’s Ode for the New Year 1786 (which Coleridge took as his model for his own Ode to the Departing Year):

Vol. II, p. 294. The Objective and the Subjective in Art.—Goethe and Schiller always insisted upon the Objective as the highest form of art; many passages occur in their letters regarding the distinction. Schiller says, 28th November 1796: “As regards Wallenstein, it is at present progressing very slowly, as I am chiefly occupied with the raw material, which is not yet quite collected; but I still feel equal to it, and I have obtained many a clear and definite idea in regard to its form. What I wish and ought to do, and what I have to do, has now become pretty clear to me; it now merely depends upon accomplishing what I wish and what I ought to do by using what I have in hand before me. As regards the spirit in which I am working, you will probably be satisfied with what I have done. I shall have no difficulty in keeping my subject outside of myself, and in only giving the object.”—Bohn Library Translation, Correspondence between Goethe and Schiller, i, 263–4.

Vol. II, p. 297.—Poems of Coleridge differing in their Texts in the Editions of 1829 and 1834: