Here[28] I may best introduce the remarks which have been made, and details which have been given, respecting Mr. Coleridge’s services to The Morning Post and The Courier, spoken of by him in Chapter X of the Biographia Literaria. That representation has been excepted against by Mr. Stuart, who was Editor of the former Paper when my Father wrote for it, and half proprietor of the other. The view which he takes of the case he has already made public;[29] he seems to be of opinion, that the language used by Mr. Coleridge in this work is calculated to give an impression of the amount of his actual performances on behalf of those papers beyond what the facts warrant; I have not thought it necessary or proper to withdraw that portion of Chapter X of which he complains, nor do I see that it must necessarily bear a construction at variance with his own statements: but neither would I republish it, without giving Mr. Stuart’s account of matters to which it refers, extracted from letters written by him to Mr. Coleridge’s late Editor. He writes as follows from Wykham Park, on the 7th of October, 1835.

“In August, 1795, I began to conduct The Morning Post, the sale of which was so low, only 350 per day, that a gentleman at that time made a bet with me that the Paper was actually extinct.

“At Christmas, 1797, on the recommendation of Mr. Mackintosh, Coleridge sent me several pieces of poetry; up to the time of his going to Germany, about 12 pieces.[30] Prose writing I never expected from him at that time. He went to Germany in the summer of 1798.

“He returned, I believe, about the end of 1799,[31] and proposed to me to come to London to reside near me, and write daily for the paper. I took lodgings for him in King Street, Covent Garden. The Morning Post then selling 2,000 daily. Coleridge wrote some things, particularly, I remember, Comments on Lord Grenville’s reply to Buonaparte’s Overtures of Peace, in January, 1800. But he totally failed in the plan he proposed of writing daily on the daily occurrences.”

Mr. Stuart then gives three short letters of Mr. C.’s, showing how often he was ill and incapable of writing for the paper, and the beginning of a long one dated Greta Hall, Keswick, 19th July, 1800,[32] in which he promises a second part of Pitt and Buonaparte, but speaks of it as uncertain whether or no he should be able to continue any regular species of employment for Mr. S.’s paper.

After noting that Mr. C. left London at the end of his first half year’s engagement, Mr. S. brings forward more letters, containing excuses on account of illness, but promising a number of essays: two on the war, as respecting agriculture; one on the raising of rents; one on the riots (corn riots in 1800); and one on the countenance by Government of calumnies on the King;—promising also a second part of Pitt and Buonaparte, which Mr. S. supposes he was constantly dunning for, the Character of Pitt, published in The M. P. early in 1800, having made a great sensation; proposing a letter to Sir F. Burdett on solitary imprisonment, and that all these should be published in pamphlets, after they had been divided into pieces, and published in The M. P., he doubting whether they were of value for a newspaper. Some of these essays appear to have been sent; it is not specified which or how many.

“Early in 1807,” Mr. S. says, “I was confined by a violent fever. Several weeks I was delirious, and to my astonishment, when I recovered, Pitt was out of place, and Horne Tooke in Parliament. I did not resume the conduct of the Paper till the spring. The Paper suffered loss.”

The next letter, dated May, 1801, Keswick, speaks of ill health, and “the habits of irresolution which are its worst consequences,” forbidding him to rely on himself. Mr. S. had solicited him to write, and offered terms, and it appears that he did form a new engagement for the Paper about that time. In a letter of Sept. 1801, he says, “I am not so blinded by authorship as to believe that what I have done is at all adequate to the money I have received.” Mr. Stuart then produces a letter with the postmark Bridgewater, of Jan. 19, 1802.[33] These letters show, he says, that in July and October 1800, in May 1801, on the 30th of September 1801, Coleridge was at Keswick, that in January 1802, he was at Stowey, that he could not therefore have materially contributed to the success of The Morning Post. “In this last year,” says Mr. Stuart, “his Letters to Judge Fletcher, and on Mr. Fox, at Paris, were published.” The former were not published till 1814. The six letters appeared in The Courier on Sept. 20th, 29th, Oct. 21st, Nov. 2nd, Dec. 3rd, 6th, 9th and 10th. The latter appeared on the 4th and 9th of Nov. 1802. Mr. Stuart speaks of it as a mistake in those who have supposed that the coolness of Fox to Sir James Mackintosh was occasioned by his ascribing this “violent philippic,” as Lamb called it, to him (Sir James). “On those to Judge Fletcher,” he says, “and many other such essays, as being rather fit for pamphlets than newspapers, I did not set much value.” On this subject hear Coleridge himself in a letter[34] dated June 4th, 1811, when he was engaged with Mr. Street.

Letter 150. To Daniel Stuart

“Freshness of effect belongs to a newspaper and distinguishes it from a literary book: the former being the Zenith and the latter the Nadir, with a number of intermediate degrees, occupied by pamphlets, magazines, reviews, etc. Besides, in a daily paper, with advertisements proportioned to its large sale, what is deferred must four times in five be extinguished. A newspaper is a market for flowers and vegetables, rather than a granary or conservatory; and the drawer of its Editor a common burial ground, not a catacomb for embalmed mummies, in which the defunct are preserved to serve in after times as medicines for the living.”

This freshness of effect Coleridge scarcely ever gave to either The Morning Post or The Courier. He was occasionally in London during my time, in The Morning Post it is true, but he never gave the daily bread. He was mostly at Keswick. * * * A few months in 1800, and a few weeks in 1802, that was all the time he ever wasted on The Morning Post, and as for The Courier, it accepted his proffered services as a favour done to him,” etc.After speaking again of the former paper, he says, “I could give many more reasons for its rise than those I gave in my former letter, and among others I would include Coleridge’s occasional writings, though to them I would not set down more than one hundredth part of the cause of success, much as I esteemed his writings and much as I would have given for a regular daily assistance by him. But he never wrote a thing I requested, and, I think I may add, he never wrote a thing I expected. In proof of this he promised me at my earnest and endless request, the character of Buonaparte, which he himself, at first of his own mere motion, had promised; he promised it letter after letter, year after year, for ten years (last for The Courier), yet never wrote it. Could Coleridge and I place ourselves thirty-eight years back, and he be so far a man of business as to write three or four hours a day, there is nothing I would not pay for his assistance. I would take him into partnership,” (which, I think, my Father would have declined,) “and I would enable him to make a large fortune. To write the leading paragraph of a newspaper I would prefer him to Mackintosh, Burke, or any man I ever heard of. His observations not only were confirmed by good sense, but displayed extensive knowledge, deep thought and well-grounded foresight; they were so brilliantly ornamented, so classically delightful. They were the writings of a Scholar, a Gentleman and a Statesman, without personal sarcasm or illiberality of any kind. But when Coleridge wrote in his study without being pressed, he wandered and lost himself. He should always have had the printer’s devil at his elbow with ‘Sir, the printers want copy.’

“So far then with regard to The Morning Post, which I finally left in August, 1803. Throughout the last year, during my most rapid success, Coleridge did not, I believe, write a line for me. Seven months afterwards I find Coleridge at Portsmouth, on his way to Malta.” Mr. Stuart proceeds to state that Mr. C. returned to England in the summer of 1806, that in 1807 he was engaged with his Play at Drury Lane Theatre, early in 1808 gave his lectures at the Royal Institution, at the end of that year began his plan of The Friend, which took him up till towards the end of 1809—in 1811 proposed to write for The Courier on a salary. Mr. Stuart mentions that the Essays on the Spaniards were sent in the end of 1809 by Mr. Coleridge, as some return for sums he had expended on his account, not on his (Mr. Stuart’s) solicitation. He says that Mr. C. wrote in The Courier for his own convenience, his other literary projects having failed, and that he wrote for it against the will of Mr. Street, the Editor, who, in accepting his services, only yielded to his (Mr. S.’s) suggestion. “The Courier,” he says, “required no assistance. It was, and had long been, the evening paper of the highest circulation.” In another letter, dated 7th September 1835, he speaks thus: “The Courier indeed sold 8000 daily for some years, but when Street and I purchased it at a good price in June, 1799, it sold nearly 2000, and had the reputation of selling more. It was the apostasy of The Sun in 1803, Street’s good management, its early intelligence, and the importance of public events, that raised The Courier.” In the same letter he says, “Could Coleridge have written the leading paragraph daily his services would have been invaluable, but an occasional essay or two could produce little effect. It was early and ample accounts of domestic occurrences, as Trials, Executions, etc. etc., exclusively early Irish news; the earliest French news; full Parliamentary Debates; Corn Riots in 1800; Procession proclaiming Peace; the attack on the King by Hatfield at the Theatre; the arrest of Arthur O’Connor, respecting which I was examined at the Privy Council: it was the earliest and fullest accounts of such things as these, while the other papers were negligent, that raised The Morning Post from 350, when I took it in August, 1795, to 4500, when I sold it in August, 1803, and then no other daily morning paper sold above 3000. It was unremitting attention and success in giving the best and earliest accounts of occurrences that made The Morning Post, and not the writings of any one, though good writing is always an important feature. I have known the Paper served more by a minute, picturesque, lively account of the ascension of a balloon than ever it was by any piece of writing. There is a great difference among newspapers in this respect. Most of the Sunday Papers, calling themselves Newspapers, have no news, only political essays, which are read by the working-classes, and which in those papers produce astonishing success.” In other letters he says: “The reputation of the writings of any man, the mere reputation of them, would not serve, or in the very slightest degree serve, any daily newspaper.” “Mackintosh’s reputation as a political writer was then much higher than that of Coleridge, and he was my brother-in-law, known to have written for the Paper, especially during one year (1795–6), and to be on good terms with me, yet I must confess that even to the reputation of his writing for the Paper I never ascribed any part of its success.”

It does not appear from Mr. Stuart how many essays in all Mr. Coleridge contributed to The Morning Post and The Courier. Mr. C. himself mentions several in the tenth chapter of the Biographia Literaria. All these have been copied, and will be republished hereafter.[35] I happen to possess also his contributions to The Courier in 1811. They are numerous, though not daily; which I have now no means of ascertaining. The Critique on Bertram first appeared in that Paper, I believe in 1816. Mr. Stuart admits that some of the poems published by Mr. C. in The Morning Post before his going to Germany made a “great impression:” that on Mr. C.’s proposing “personally on the spot and by daily exertion to assist him in the conduct of the Paper,” he “grasped at the engagement,” and “no doubt solicited” him “in the most earnest manner to enter upon it;” that his “writings produced a greater effect in The Morning Post than any others.” In his letter of September 19, 1835, Mr. S. says “The most remarkable things Coleridge published in The Morning Post were The Devil’s Thoughts and the Character of Pitt. Each of these made a sensation, which any writings unconnected with the news of the day rarely did.” Elsewhere he says, “Several hundred sheets extra were sold by them, and the paper was in demand for days and weeks afterwards. Coleridge promised a pair of portraits, Pitt and Buonaparte. I could not walk a hundred yards in the streets but I was stopped by inquiries, ‘When shall we have Buonaparte?’ One of the most eager of these inquirers was Dr. Moore, author of Zeluco.” In the letter mentioned just above he says “At one time Coleridge engaged to write daily for The Courier on the news of the day, and he did attend very regularly and wrote; but as it was in the spring, when the Paper was overwhelmed with debates and advertisements (and Street always preferring news, and a short notice of it in a leading paragraph to any writing however brilliant,) little or nothing that he wrote was inserted from want of room. Of this he repeatedly complained to me, saying that he would not continue to receive a salary without rendering services. I answered, ‘Wait till Parliament is up; we shall then have ample room, and shall be obliged to you for all you can give us.’ When Parliament rose Coleridge disappeared, or at least discontinued his services.”

The time here spoken of was in June, 1811. In April he had proposed to Mr. Stuart a particular plan of writing for The Courier, and on May 5, he writes to that gentleman, that he had stated and particularized this proposal to Mr. Street, and “found a full and in all appearance a warm assent.” Mr. Street, he says, “expressed himself highly pleased both at the thought of my assistance in general, and with the specific plan of assistance. There was no doubt, he said, that it would be of great service to the Paper.”

Mr. Stuart has been offended by Mr. Coleridge’s saying that he “employed the prime and manhood of his intellect in these labours,” namely for the Papers; that they “added nothing to his fortune or reputation;” that the “industry of the week supplied the necessities of the week.” This he has considered as a reproach to himself, and an unjust one. It was not—Mr. Stuart himself saw that it was not—so intended; Mr. Coleridge’s only object was to show that he had not altogether suffered his talents to “rust away without any efficient exertion for his own good or that of his fellow-creatures;” that he had laboured more than would appear from the number and size of the books he had produced, and in whatever he wrote had aimed not merely to supply his own temporal wants, but to benefit his readers by bringing high principles in view. “For, while cabbage-stalks rot on dunghills,” says he, in a letter[36] to the late Editor of The Morning Post, “I will never write what, or for what, I do not think right. All that prudence can justify is not to write what at certain times one may yet think.” But Mr. Stuart thought that the Public would draw inferences from Mr. C.’s language injurious to himself, though it was not meant of him; and hence he gave the details which I have thought it right to bring forward. I have no doubt that Mr. Coleridge had an exaggerated impression of the amount of his labours for The Morning Post and The Courier, and that when he said that he had raised the sale of the former from a low number to 7000 daily, he mistook the sale of the latter, which, Mr. Stuart admits, may have been 7000 per day in 1811, when he wrote for it constantly, with that of The Morning Post, which never sold above 4500. Mr. Stuart says truly “Coleridge had a defective memory, from want of interest in common things;” and of this he brings forward a strong instance. I think my Father’s example and experience go to prove that Newspaper reading must ever be more or less injurious to the public mind; high and careful writing for the daily journal will never answer: who could furnish noble views and a refined moral commentary on public events and occurrences every day of the week, or even every other day, and obtain a proportionate recompense? On the other hand, a coarse or low sort of writing on the important subjects, with which the journal deals, must do mischief. No one will deny that the character of Mr. C.’s articles was such as he has described; he would naturally be more alive to marks of the impression made by what he wrote in particular than any one else, even the Editor; and men are apt to judge of their labours by intensity as much as by quantity. He perhaps expended more thought on some of those essays, of which Mr. Street and even Mr. Stuart thought lightly, than would have served to furnish a large amount of ordinary serviceable matter. Mr. Stuart observes, “He never had a prime and manhood of intellect in the sense in which he speaks of it in the Lit. Biography. He had indeed the great mind, the great powers, but he could not use them for the press with regularity and vigour.[37] He was always ill.” This may have been true; yet it was during what ought to have been the best years of his life that he wrote for the Papers, and doubtless what he did produce helped to exhaust his scanty stock of bodily power, and to prevent him from writing as many books as he might have done, had circumstances permitted him to use his pen, not for procuring “the necessities of the week,” but in the manner most congenial to his own mind, and ultimately most useful to the public. “Such things as The Morning Post and money,” says Mr. S., in The Gentleman’s Magazine, “never settled upon his mind.” I believe that such things unsettled his mind, and made him, as the lampooner said, with a somewhat different allusion, “Like to a man on double business bound, who both neglects.” This was a trouble to himself and all connected with him. Le ciel nous vend toujours les biens qu’il nous prodigue, may be applied to my poor Father emphatically.

In regard to the remuneration he received, I do not bring forward the particulars given by Mr. Stuart of his liberal dealing with Mr. Coleridge, simply because the rehearsal of them would be tedious, and could answer no end. Such details may be superseded by the general declaration, that I believe my Father to have received from Mr. Stuart far more than the market value of his contributions to the Papers which that gentleman was concerned in. Mr. Stuart says that he “paid at the time as highly as such writings were paid for,” and to Mr. Coleridge’s satisfaction, which my Father’s own letters certainly testify; and concludes the account of sums advanced by him to Mr. C., when he was not writing for the paper, by saying that he had “at least £700 of him beside many acts of kindness.” A considerable part of this was spent on stamps and paper for The Friend; two hundred of it was given after the publication of the Biographia Literaria.

Mr. Coleridge expressed his esteem for Mr. Stuart and sense of his kindness very strongly in letters to himself, but not more strongly than to others. He speaks of him in a letter written about the beginning of 1809, addressed to a gentleman of the Quaker persuasion at Leeds, as “a man of the most consummate knowledge of the world, managed by a thorough strong and sound judgment, and rendered innocuous by a good heart”—as a “most wise, disinterested, kind, and constant friend.” In a letter to my Mother, written on his return from Malta, he says, “Stuart is a friend, and a friend indeed.”

I have thought it right to bring forward these particulars,—(I and those equally concerned with myself)—not only out of a regard to truth and openness, that the language of this work respecting The Morning Post and The Courier may not be interpreted in any way contrary to fact, which, I think, it need not be; but also in gratitude to a man who was serviceable and friendly to my Father during many years of his life; who appreciated his merits as a prose writer when they were not generally known and acknowledged; and by whose aid his principal prose work, The Friend, was brought before the public. I do not complain in the least of his stating the facts of my Father’s newspaper writings; in the manner in which this was done—as was pointed out at the time—there was something to complain of. Let me add that I consider his representation of my Father’s feelings on certain occasions altogether incredible, and deeply regret these pieces of bad construing, dictated by resentment, in one who was once so truly his friend.

My Father certainly does not assert, as Mr. Stuart represents him as having asserted in the Literary Biography, that he “made the fortunes of The Morning Post and The Courier, and was inadequately paid.” He speaks of his writings as having been in furtherance of Government. I have no doubt he thought that they were serviceable to Government and to his country, and that while they brought upon him the enmity of the anti-ministerial and Buonapartean party, and every possible hindrance to his literary career which the most hostile and contemptuous criticism of a leading journal could effect, they were unrewarded in any other quarter. There was truth in one half of Hazlitt’s sarcasm, “his politics turned—but not to account.” “From Government, or the friends of Government!” says Mr. Stuart, “Why, Coleridge was attacking Pitt and Lord Grenville in 1800, who were at the head of the Government. In 1801, when the Addingtons came into power, he wrote little or nothing in The Morning Post; in the autumn of 1802 he wrote one or two able essays against Buonaparte in relation to the Peace of Amiens, and he published in that paper, at that time, a letter or two to Judge Fletcher.” This last sentence is a double mistake, as I have already shown. “At that time the newspaper press generally condemned the conduct of Buonaparte in the severest manner: and no part of it more severely than The Morning Post by my own writings. Cobbett attacked Fox, etc., but The Morning Post was the most distinguished on this subject, and the increase of its circulation was great. The qualified opposition to Government was not given to Pitt’s ministry, but to Addington’s. To Pitt The Morning Post was always, in my time, decidedly opposed. I supported Addington against Buonaparte, during the Peace of Amiens, with all my power, and in the summer of 1803 Mr. Estcourt came to me with a message of thanks from the prime minister, Mr. A. offering anything I wished. I declined the offer. It was not till the summer of 1804, a year after I had finally left The Morning Post that, in The Courier, I supported Pitt against Buonaparte, on the same grounds I had supported Mr. Addington, Pitt having become again prime minister, to protect Lord Melville against the fifth clause. Coleridge confuses things. The qualified support of the ministry, he alludes to, applies wholly to The Courier.” I do not see the material discrepancy between this statement and my Father’s, when he says that The Morning Post was “anti-ministerial, indeed, but with far greater earnestness and zeal, both anti-jacobin and anti-gallican,” and that it proved a far more useful ally to the Government in its most important objects, in consequence of its being generally considered moderately anti-ministerial, than if it had been the avowed eulogist of Mr. Pitt; “that the rapid increase in the sale of The Morning Post is a pledge that genuine impartiality with a respectable portion of literary talent will secure the success of a newspaper without ministerial patronage,” and that from “the commencement of the Addington administration” whatever he himself had written “in The Morning Post or Courier was in defence of Government.” In the preceding paragraph he argues that neither Mr. Percival nor “the present administration” pursued the plans of Mr. Pitt.

In what degree my Father’s writings contributed to the reputation and success of The Morning Post cannot at this distance of time be precisely settled. It must indeed be difficult to say what occasions success in such enterprises, if Mr. Stuart’s own brother could attribute that of The Morning Post to Sir James Mackintosh, “though with less reason even than if he had ascribed it to Coleridge.” The long story told to show that booksellers were not aware of Mr. C.’s having produced any effect on the paper, and when they set up a rival journal, never cared to obtain his services, but eagerly secured those of Mr. Stuart’s assistant, George Lane, does not quite decide the question; for booksellers, though, as Mr. Stuart says, “knowing men” in such matters, are not omniscient even in what concerns their own business. If the anti-gallican policy of The Morning Post “increased its circulation,” I cannot but think that the influence of my Father’s writings,[38] though not numerous, and indirectly of his intercourse with the Editor,—who rates his conversational powers as highly as it is usual to rate them—in directing the tone and determining the principles of the paper, must have served it materially. I believe him to have been the anti-gallican spirit that governed The Morning Post, though he may not have performed as much of the letter as he fancied.

I shall conclude this subject with quoting part of a letter of my Father’s on the subject of The Courier, to which Mr. Stuart, to whom it was addressed, declares himself to have replied, that “as long as he actively interfered, the Paper was conducted on the independent principles alluded to by Coleridge,” but that, for reasons which he states, he found it best, from the year 1811, to “leave Street entirely to his own course;” and “so it gradually slid into a mere ministerial journal—an instrument of the Treasury:” “acquired a high character for being the organ of Government, and obtained a great circulation; but became odious to the mob—excited by the falsehoods of the weekly journals.”

Letter 151. To Stuart[39]

My dear Stuart,

Since you left me, I have been reflecting a great deal on the subject of the Catholic question, and somewhat on The Courier in general. With all my weight of faults, (and no one is less likely to underrate them than myself), a tendency to be influenced by selfish motives in my friendships, or even in the cultivation of my acquaintance, will not, I am sure, be by you placed among them. When we first knew each other, it was perhaps the most interesting period of both our lives, at the very turn of the flood; and I can never cease to reflect with affectionate delight on the steadiness and independence of your conduct and principles, and how, for so many years, with little assistance from others, and with one main guide, a sympathizing tact for the real sense, feeling, and impulses of the respectable part of the English nation, you went on so auspiciously, and likewise so effectively. It is far, very far, from being an hyperbole to affirm, that you did more against the French scheme of Continental domination than the Duke of Wellington has done; or rather, Wellington could neither have been supplied by the Ministers, nor the Ministers supported by the nation, but for the tone first given, and then constantly kept up by the plain, un-ministerial, anti-opposition, anti-Jacobin, anti-Gallican, anti-Napoleon spirit of your writings, aided by a colloquial style and evident good sense, in which, as acting on an immense mass of knowledge of existing men and existing circumstances, you are superior to any man I ever met with in my life-time. Indeed you are the only human being, of whom I can say with severe truth, that I never conversed with you for an hour without rememberable instruction; and with the same simplicity I dare affirm my belief, that my greater knowledge of man has been useful to you, though, from the nature of things, not so useful as your knowledge of men has been to me.

Now, with such convictions, my dear Stuart, how is it possible that I can look back on the conduct of The Courier, from the period of the Duke of York’s restoration, without some pain? You cannot be seriously offended or affronted with me, if, in this deep confidence and in a letter, which, or its contents, can meet no eye but your own, I venture to declare, that though since then much has been done, very much of high utility to the country, by and under Mr. Street, yet The Courier itself has gradually lost that sanctifying spirit which was the life of its life, and without which, even the best and soundest principles lose half their effect on the human mind; I mean, the faith in the faith of the person and paper which brings them forward. They are attributed to the accident of their happening to be for such a side, or for such a party. In short, there is no longer any root in the paper, out of which all the various branches and fruits, and even fluttering leaves, are seen or believed to grow. But it is the old tree, barked round above the root, though the circular decortication is so small and so neatly filled up and coloured as to be scarcely visible but in its effects, excellent fruit still hanging on the boughs, but they are tied on by threads and hairs.

In all this I am well aware, that you are no otherwise to be blamed than in permitting that which without disturbance to your heart and tranquillity, you could not, perhaps, have prevented or effectively modified. But the whole plan of Street seems to me to have been motiveless from the beginning, or at least affected by the grossest miscalculations, in respect even of pecuniary interests. For, had the paper maintained and asserted not only its independence, but its appearance of it;—it is true that Mr. Street might not have had Mr. A. to dine with him, or received as many nods and shakes of the hand from Lord this or that; but at least equally true, that the ministry would have been far more effectively served, and that (I speak from facts), both the paper and its conductor would have been held by the adherents of ministers in far higher respect; and after all, ministers do not love newspapers in their hearts, not even those that support them; indeed it seems epidemic among Parliament men in general to affect to look down upon and despise newspapers, to which they owe ⁹⁹⁹/₁₀₀₀ of their influence and character, and at least ³/₅ths of their knowledge and phraseology. Enough! burn the letter, and forgive the writer, for the purity and affectionateness of his motive.”—Quoted from the Gentleman’s Magazine of June, 1838.[40]

One other point connected with Mr. C.’s writings for public journals I must advert to before concluding this chapter. Mr. Cottle finds want of memory in some part of the narrative, contained in this work, respecting the publication of The Watchman; it is as well to let him tell the story in his own way, which he does as follows. “The plain fact is, I purchased the whole of the paper for The Watchman, allowing Mr. C. to have it at prime cost, and receiving small sums from Mr. C. occasionally, in liquidation. I became responsible, also, with Mr. B. for printing the work, by which means, I reduced the price per sheet, as a bookseller (1000), from fifty shillings to thirty-five shillings. Mr. C. paid me for the paper in fractions, as he found it convenient, but from the imperfection of Mr. Coleridge’s own receipts I never received the whole. It was a losing concern altogether, and I was willing, and did bear, uncomplaining, my portion of the loss. There is some difference between this statement, and that of Mr. Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria. A defect of memory must have existed, arising out of the lapse of twenty-two years; but my notices, made at the time, did not admit of mistake. There were but twenty sheets in the whole ten numbers of The Watchman, which, at thirty-five shillings per sheet, came to only thirty-five pounds. The paper amounted to much more than the printing.

“I cannot refrain from observing further, that my loss was augmented from another cause. Mr. C. states in the above work, that his London publisher never paid him ‘one farthing,’ but ‘set him at defiance.’ I also was more than his equal companion in this misfortune. The thirty copies of Mr. C.’s poems, and the six ‘Joans of Arc’ (referred to in the preceding letter)[41] found a ready sale, by this said ‘indefatigable London publisher,’ and large and fresh orders were received, so that Mr. Coleridge and myself successively participated in two very opposite sets of feeling; the one of exultation that our publications had found so good a sale; and the other of depression, that the time of payment never arrived!”

I take this opportunity of expressing my sense of many kind acts and much friendly conduct of Mr. Cottle towards my Father, often spoken of to me by my dear departed Mother, into whose heart all benefits sank deep, and by whom he was ever remembered with respect and affection. If I still regard with any disapproval his publication of letters exposing his friend’s unhappy bondage to opium and consequent embarrassments and deep distress of mind, it is not that I would have wished a broad influencive fact in the history of one whose peculiar gifts had made him in some degree an object of public interest, to be finally concealed, supposing it to be attested, as this has been, by clear unambiguous documents. I agree with Mr. Cottle in thinking that he would himself have desired, even to the last, that whatever benefit the world might obtain by the knowledge of his sufferings from opium,—the calamity which the unregulated use of this drug had been to him—into which he first fell ignorantly and innocently, (not as Mr. De Quincey has said, to restore the “riot of his animal spirits,” when “youthful blood no longer sustained it,” but as a relief from bodily pain and nervous irritation)—that others might avoid the rock, on which so great a part of his happiness for so long a time was wrecked; and this from the same benevolent feeling, which prompted him earnestly to desire that his body should be opened after his death, in the hope that some cause of his life-long pains in the region of the bowels might be discovered, and that the knowledge thus obtained might lead to the invention of a remedy for like afflictions. Such a wish indeed, on the former point, as well as afterwards on the latter, he once strongly expressed; but I believe myself to be speaking equally in his spirit when I say, that all such considerations of advantage to the public should be subordinated to the prior claims of private and natural interests. My own opinion is, that it is the wiser and better plan for persons connected with those, whose feats of extraordinary strength have drawn the public gaze upon them, to endure patiently that their frailties should be gazed and wondered at too; and even if they think, that any reflection to them of such celebrity, on such conditions, is far more to be deprecated than desired, still to consider that they are not permitted to determine their lot, in this respect, but are to take it as it has been determined for them, independently of their will, with its peculiar pains and privileges annexed to it. I believe that most of them would be like the sickly queen in the fairy tale of Peronella, who repented when she had obtained the country maiden’s youth and health at the loss of rank and riches. Be this as it may, they have not a choice of evils, nor can exchange the aches and pains of their portion, or its wrinkles and blemishes,—for a fair and painless obscurity. These remarks, however, refer only to the feeling and conduct of parties privately affected by such exposures. Others are bound to care for them as they are not bound to care for themselves. If a finished portrait of one, in whom they are nearly concerned, is due to the world, they alone can be the debtors, for the property by inheritance is in them. Other persons, without their leave, should not undertake to give any such portrait; their duties move on a different plane; nor can they rightly feel themselves “entitled” (to borrow the language of Mr. De Quincey, while I venture to dissent from his judgment), “to notice the most striking aspects of his character, of his disposition and his manners, as so many reflex indications of his intellectual constitution,” if this involves the publication of letters on private subjects, the relation of domestic circumstances and other such personalities affecting the living. I am sure at least that conscience would prohibit me from any such course. I should never think the public good a sufficient apology for publishing the secret history of any man or woman whatever, who had connections remaining upon earth; but if I were possessed of private notices respecting one in whom the world takes an interest, should think it right to place them in the hands of his nearest relations, leaving it to them to deal with such documents, as a sense of what is due to the public, and what belongs to openness and honesty, may demand.

Of all the censors of Mr. Coleridge, Mr. De Quincey is the one whose remarks are the most worthy of attention; those of the rest in general are but views taken from a distance, and filled up by conjecture, views taken through a medium so thick with opinion, even if not clouded with vanity and self-love, that it resembles a horn more than glass or the transpicuous air;—The Opium eater, as he has called himself, had sufficient inward sympathy with the subject of his criticism to be capable in some degree of beholding his mind, as it actually existed, in all the intermingling shades of individual reality; and in few minds have these shades been more subtly intermingled than in my Father’s. But Mr. De Quincey’s portrait of Coleridge is not the man himself; for besides that his knowledge of what concerned him outwardly was imperfect, the inward sympathy of which I have spoken was far from entire, and he has written as if it were greater than it really was. I cannot but conjecture, from what he has disclosed concerning himself, that on some points he has seen Mr. Coleridge’s mind too much in the mirror of his own. His sketches of my Father’s life and character are, like all that he writes, so finely written, that the blots on the narrative are the more to be deplored. One of these blots is the passage to which I referred at the beginning of the last paragraph: “I believe it to be notorious that he first began the use of opium, not as a relief from any bodily pains or nervous irritations—for his constitution was strong and excellent—but as a source of luxurious sensations. It is a great misfortune, at least it is a great pain, to have tasted the enchanted cup of youthful rapture incident to the poetic temperament. Coleridge, to speak in the words of Cervantes, wanted better bread than was made with wheat.” Mr. De Quincey mistook a constitution that had vigour in it for a vigorous constitution. His body was originally full of life, but it was full of death also from the first; there was in him a slow poison, which gradually leavened the whole lump, and by which his muscular frame was prematurely slackened and stupified. Mr. Stuart says that his letters are “one continued flow of complaint of ill health and incapacity from ill health.” This is true of all his letters—(all the sets of them)—which have come under my eye, even those written before he went to Malta, where his opium habits were confirmed. Indeed it was in search of health that he visited the Mediterranean,—for one in his condition of nerves a most ill-advised measure,—I believe that the climate of South Italy is poison to most persons who suffer from relaxation and tendency to low fever. If my Father sought more from opium than the mere absence of pain, I feel assured that it was not luxurious sensations or the glowing phantasmagoria of passive dreams; but that the power of the medicine might keep down the agitations of his nervous system, like a strong hand grasping the jangled strings of some shattered lyre,—that he might once more lightly flash along

released, for a time at least, from the tyranny of ailments, which, by a spell of wretchedness, fix the thoughts upon themselves, perpetually drawing them inwards, as into a stifling gulf. A letter[42] of his has been given in this Supplement, which records his first experience of opium: he had recourse to it in that instance for violent pain in the face, afterwards he sought relief in the same way from the suffering of rheumatism.

I shall conclude this chapter with a poetical sketch drawn from my Father by a friend, who knew him during the latter years of his life, after spending a few days with him at Bath, in the year 1815.[43]