  Abergavenny, 410. 521; seriously ill, 520, 521; C. proposes to write a book on Locke, Hobbes, and Hume, 349, 350; Footnotes: [1] Richard Sharp, 1759-1835, known as “Conversation Sharp,” a banker, Member of Parliament, and distinguished critic. He was a friend of Wordsworth’s, and on intimate terms with Coleridge and Southey. Life of W. Wordsworth, i. 377; Letters of R. Southey, i. 279, et passim. [2] Jean Victor Moreau, 1763-1813. The “retreat” took place in October, 1796, after his defeat of the Archduke Charles at Neresheim, in the preceding August. Biographical Dictionary. [3] This phrase reappears in the first issue (1808) of the Prospectus of The Friend. Jeffrey, to whom the Prospectus was submitted, objected to the wording, and it was changed, in the first instance, to “mental gloom” and finally to “dejection of mind.” See letter to F. Jeffrey, December 14, 1808, published in the Illustrated London News, June 10, 1893. Letter CLXXI. [4] See concluding paragraph of Introductory Address of Conciones ad Populum (February, 1795); The Friend, Section I., Essay xvi.; Coleridge’s Works, 1853, ii. 307. For recantation of Necessitarianism, see footnote (1797) to lines “To a Friend, together with an Unfinished Poem.” Poetical Works, p. 38. [5] Stuart is responsible for a story that Coleridge’s dislike and distrust of the “fellow from Aberdeen,” the hero of The Two Round Spaces on a Tombstone, dated from a visit to the Wedgwoods at Cote House, when Mackintosh outtalked and outshone his fellow protÉgÉ, and drove him in dudgeon from the party. But in 1838, when he contributed his articles to the Gentleman’s Magazine, Stuart had forgotten much and looked at all things from a different point of view. For instance, he says that the verses attacking Mackintosh were never published, whereas they appeared in the Morning Post of December 4, 1800. A more probable explanation is that Stuart, who was not on good terms with his brother-in-law, was in the habit of confiding his grievances, and that Coleridge, more suo, espoused his friend’s cause with unnecessary vehemence. Gentleman’s Magazine, May, 1838, p. 485. [6] The Pantheon. By Andrew Tooke. Revised, etc., for the use of schools. London: 1791. “Tooke was a prodigious favourite with us (at Christ’s Hospital). I see before me, as vividly now as ever, his Mars and Apollo, his Venus and Aurora—the Mars coming on furiously in his car; Apollo, with his radiant head, in the midst of shades and fountains; Aurora with hers, a golden dawn; and Venus, very handsome, we thought, and not looking too modest in ‘a slight cymar.’” Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, p. 75. [7] See note infra. [8] George Rose, 1744-1818, statesman and political writer. He had recently brought in a bill which “authorised the sending to all the Parish Overseers in the country a paper of questions on the condition of the poor.” Poole, at the instance of John Rickman, secretary to Speaker Abbot, was at this time engaged at Westminster in drawing up an abstract of the various returns which had been made in accordance with Sir George Rose’s bill. See Letter from T. Poole to T. Wedgwood, dated September 14, 1803. Cottle’s Reminiscences, pp. 477, 478; Thomas Poole and his Friends, ii. 107-114. [9] See Letter to Southey of February 20, 1804. Letter CXLIX. [10] John Dalton, 1766-1844, chemist and meteorologist. He published his researches on the atomic theory, which he had begun in 1803, in his New System of Chemical Philosophy, in 1808. Biographical Dictionary. [11] His old fellow-student at GÖttingen. “O for a single hour of that Dundee, “In the Pass of Killicranky.” Wordsworth’s Poetical Works, 1889, p. 201. [13] John Tobin the dramatist (or possibly his brother James), with whom Coleridge spent the last weeks of his stay in London, before he left for Portsmouth on the 27th of March, on his way to Malta. [14] The misspelling, which was intentional, was an intimation to Lamb that the letter was not to be opened. [15] A retired carrier, the owner of Greta Hall, who occupied “the smaller of the two houses inter-connected under one roof.” He was godfather to Hartley Coleridge, and left him a legacy of fifty pounds. Mrs. Wilson, the “Wilsy” of Hartley’s childhood, was Jackson’s housekeeper. Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, 1873, i. 13. [16] Coleridge had already attended Davy’s Lectures at the Royal Institution in 1802, and, possibly, in 1803. It is probable that allusions in his correspondence to Davy’s Lectures gave rise to the mistaken supposition that he delivered public lectures in London before 1808. “He said, and, gliding like a snake, “Madoc in Aztlan,” Book XI. Southey’s Poetical Works, 1838, v. 274, 275. [18] Mrs. E. Fenwick, author of Secrecy, a novel (1799); a friend of Godwin’s first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft. William Godwin, by C. Kegan Paul, i. 282, 283. See, also, Lamb’s Letters (ed. Ainger), i. 331; and Lamb’s essays, “Two Races of Men,” and “Newspapers Thirty-five Years ago.” [19] Lamb’s “bad baby”—“a disgusting woman who wears green spectacles.” Letters, passim. [20] Afterwards Sir John Stoddart, Chief Justice of Malta, 1826-39. [21] A note dated “Treasury, July 20th, 1805,” gives vent to his feelings on this point. “Saturday morning ½ past nine o’clock, and soon I shall have to brace up my hearing in toto, (for I hear in my brain—I hear, that is, I have an immediate and peculiar feeling instantly co-adunated with the sense of external sound = (exactly) to that which is experienced when one makes a wry face, and putting one’s right hand palm-wise to the right ear, and the left palm pressing hard on the forehead, one says to a bawler, ‘For mercy’s sake, man! don’t split the drum of one’s ear’—sensations analogous to this of various degrees of pain, even to a strange sort of uneasy pleasure. I am obnoxious to pure sound and therefore was saying—[N. B. Tho’ I ramble, I always come back to sense—the sense alive, tho’ sometimes a limb of syntax broken]—was saying that I hear in my brain, and still more hear in my stomach). For this ubiquity, almost (for I might safely add my toes—one or two, at least—and my knees) for this ubiquity of the Tympanum auditorium I am now to wind up my courage, for in a few seconds that accursed Reveille, the horrible crash and persevering malignant torture of the Pare-de-Drum, will attack me, like a party of yelling, drunken North American Indians attacking a crazy fort with a tired garrison, out of an ambush. The noisiness of the Maltese everybody must notice; but I have observed uniformly among them such utter impassiveness to the action of sounds as that I am fearful that the verum will be scarcely verisimile. I have heard screams of the most frightful kind, as of children run over by a cart, and running to the window I have seen two children in a parlour opposite to me (naked, except a kerchief tied round the waist) screaming in their horrid fiendiness—for fun! three adults in the room perfectly unannoyed, and this suffered to continue for twenty minutes, or as long as their lungs enabled them. But it goes thro’ everything, their street-cries, their priests, their advocates, their very pigs yell rather than squeak, or both together, rather, as if they were the true descendants of some half-dozen of the swine into which the Devils went, recovered by the Royal Humane Society. The dogs all night long would draw curses on them, but that the Maltese cats—it surpasses description, for he who has only heard caterwauling on English roofs can have no idea of a cat-serenade in Malta. In England it has often a close and painful resemblance to the distressful cries of young children, but in Malta it is identical with the wide range of screams uttered by imps while they are dragging each other into hotter and still hotter pools of brimstone and fire. It is the discord of Torment and of Rage and of Hate, of paroxysms of Revenge, and every note grumbles away into Despair.” [22] The first Sicilian tour extended from the middle of August to the 7th of November, 1804. Two or three days, August 19-21, were spent in the neighbourhood of Etna. He slept at Nicolosi and visited the Hospice of St. Nicola dell’ Arena. It is unlikely that he reached the actual summit, but two ascents were made, probably to the limit of the wooded region. A few days later, August 24, he reached Syracuse, where he was hospitably entertained by H. M. Consul G. F. Lecky. The notes which he took of his visit to Etna are fragmentary and imperfect, but the description of Syracuse and its surroundings occupies many pages of his note-book. Under the heading, “Timoleon’s, Oct. 18, 1804, Wednesday, noon,” he writes: “The Gaza and Tree at Tremiglia. Rocks with cactus, pendulous branches, seed-pods black at the same time with the orange-yellow flower, and little daisy-like tufts of silky hair.... Timoleon’s villa, supposed to be in the field above the present house, from which you ascend to fifty stairs. Grand view of the harbour and sea, over that tongue of land which forms the anti-Ortygian embracing arm of the harbour, the point of Plemmyrium where Alcibiades and Nicias landed. I left the aqueduct and walked ascendingly to some ruined cottages, beside a delve, with straight limestone walls of rock, on which there played the shadows of the fig-tree and the olive. I was on part of EpipolÆ, and a glorious view indeed! Before me a neck of stony common and fields—Ortygia, the open sea and the ships, and the circular harbour which it embraces, and the sea over that again. To my right that large extent of plain, green, rich, finely wooded; the fields so divided and enclosed that you, as it were, knew at the first view that they are all hedged and enclosed, and yet no hedges nor enclosings obtrude themselves—an effect of the vast number of trees of the same sort. On my left, stony fields, two harbours, Magnisi and its sand isle, and Augusta, and Etna, whose smoke mingles with the clouds even as they rise from the crater.... Still as I walk the lizard gliding darts along the road, and immerges himself under a stone, and the grasshopper leaps and tumbles awkwardly before me.” It must have been in anticipation of this visit to Sicily, or after some communication with Coleridge, that Wordsworth, after alluding to his friend’s abode,— “Where Etna over hill and valley casts gives utterance to that unusual outburst of feeling:— “Oh! wrap him in your shades, ye giant woods, Wordsworth’s Poetical Works, 1889, “The Prelude,” Book XI. p. 319. [23] A short treatise entitled Observations on Egypt, which is extant in MS., may have been among the papers sent to Stuart with a view to publication. [24] Shakespeare, Richard III., Act I. Scene 4. [25] He had, perhaps, something more than a suspicion that Southey disliked these protestations. In the letter of friendly remonstrance (February, 1804), which Southey wrote to him after the affair with Godwin, he admits that he may be “too intolerant of these phrases,” but, indeed, he adds, “when they are true, they may be excused, and when they are not, there is no excuse for them.” Life and Correspondence, ii. 266. [26] Cynocephalus, Dog-visaged. Compare Milton’s “Hymn on the Nativity:”— “The brutish gods of Nile as fast, [27] A printed slip, cut off from some public document, has been preserved in one of Coleridge’s note-books. It runs thus: “Segreteria del Governo li 29 Gennajo 1805. Samuel T. Coleridge Seg. Pub. del. Commis. Regio. G. N. Zammit Pro segretario.” His actual period of office extended from January 18 to September 6, 1805. [28] John Wordsworth, the poet’s younger brother, the original of Leonard in “The Brothers,” and of “The Happy Warrior,” was drowned off the Bill of Portland, February 5, 1805. In a letter to Sir G. Beaumont, dated February 11, 1805, Wordsworth writes: “I can say nothing higher of my ever-dear brother than that he was worthy of his sister, who is now weeping beside me, and of the friendship of Coleridge; meek, affectionate, silently enthusiastic, loving all quiet things, and a poet in everything but words.” “We have had no tidings of Coleridge. I tremble for the moment when he is to hear of my brother’s death; it will distress him to the heart, and his poor body cannot bear sorrow. He loved my brother, and he knows how we at Grasmere loved him.” The report of the wreck of the Earl of Abergavenny and of the loss of her captain did not reach Malta till the 31st of March. It was a Sunday, and Coleridge, who had been sent for to the Palace, first heard the news from Lady Ball. His emotion at the time, and, perhaps, a petition to be excused from his duties brought from her the next day “a kindly letter of apology.” “Your strong feelings,” she writes, “are too great for your health. I hope that you will soon recover your spirits.” But Coleridge took the trouble to heart. It was the first death in the inner circle of his friends; it meant a heavy sorrow to those whom he best loved, and it seemed to confirm the haunting presentiment that death would once more visit his family during his absence from home. Ten days later he writes (in a note-book): “O dear John Wordsworth! What joy at Grasmere that you were made Captain of the Abergavenny! now it was next to certain that you would in a few years settle in your native hills, and be verily one of the concern. Then came your share in the brilliant action at Linois. I was at Grasmere in spirit only! but in spirit I was one of the rejoicers ... and all these were but decoys of death! Well, but a nobler feeling than these vain regrets would become the friend of the man whose last words were, ‘I have done my duty! let her go!’ Let us do our duty; all else is a dream—life and death alike a dream! This short sentence would comprise, I believe, the sum of all profound philosophy, of ethics and metaphysics, and conjointly from Plato to Fichte. S. T. C.” [29] An island midway between Malta and Tunis, ceded by Naples to Don Fernandez in 1802. [30] A description of the cottage at Stowey and its inmates, contained in a letter written by Mr. Richard Reynell (in August, 1797) to his sister at Thorveston, was published in the Illustrated London News, April 22, 1893. [31] Coleridge left Rome with his friend Mr. Russell on Sunday, May 18, 1806. He had received, so he tells us in the Biographia Literaria, a secret warning from the Pope that Napoleon, whose animosity had been roused by articles in the Morning Post, had ordered his arrest. A similar statement is made in a footnote to a title-page of a proposed reprint of newspaper articles (an anticipation of Essays on His Own Times), which was drawn up in 1817. “My essays,” he writes, “in the Morning Post, during the peace of Amiens, brought my life into jeopardy when I was at Rome. An order for my arrest came from Paris to Rome at twelve at night—by the Pope’s goodness I was off by one—and the arrest of all the English took place at six.” In a letter to his brother George, which he wrote about six months after he returned to England, he says that he was warned to leave Rome, but does not enter into particulars. It is a well-known fact that Napoleon read the leading articles in the Morning Post, and deeply resented their tone and spirit, but whether Coleridge was rightly informed that an order for his arrest had come from Paris, or whether he was warned that, if with other Englishmen he should be arrested, his connection with the Morning Post would come to light, must remain doubtful. Coleridge’s Works, 1853, iii. 309. [32] An entry in a note-book, dated June 7, 1806, expresses this at greater length: “O my children! whether, and which of you are dead, whether any and which among you are alive I know not, and were a letter to arrive this moment from Keswick I fear that I should be unable to open it, so deep and black is my despair. O my children! My children! I gave you life once, unconscious of the life I was giving, and you as unconsciously have given life to me.” A fortnight later, he ends a similar outburst of despair with a cry for deliverance:— Come, come thou bleak December wind, [33] It is difficult to trace his movements during his last week in Italy. He reached Leghorn on Saturday, June 7. Thence he made his way to Florence and returned to Pisa on a Thursday, probably Thursday, June 19, the date of this letter. On Sunday, June 22, he was still at Pisa, but, I take it, on the eve of setting sail for England. Fifty-five days later, August 17, he leaped on shore at Stangate Creek. His account of Pisa is highly characteristic. “Of the hanging Tower,” he writes, “the Duomo, the Cemetery, the Baptistery, I shall say nothing, except that being all together they form a wild mass, especially by moonlight, when the hanging Tower has something of a supernatural look; but what interested me with a deeper interest were the two hospitals, one for men, one for women,” etc., and these he proceeds to describe. Nevertheless he must have paid more attention to the treasures of Pisan art than his note implies, for many years after in a Lecture on the History of Philosophy, delivered January 19, 1819, he describes minutely and vividly the “Triumph of Death,” the great fresco in the Campo Santo at Pisa, which was formerly assigned to Oreagna, but is now, I believe, attributed to Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti. MS. Journal; MS. Report of Lecture. [34] Mr. Russell was an artist, an Exeter man, whom Coleridge met in Rome. They were fellow-travellers in Italy, and returned together to England. [35] William Smith, M. P. for Norwich, who lived at Parndon House, near Harlow, in Essex. It was in a great measure through his advice and interest that Coleridge obtained his Lectureship at the Royal Institution. Ten years later (1817), on the occasion of the surreptitious publication of Wat Tyler, Mr. Smith, who was a staunch liberal, denounced the Laureate as a “renegade,” and Coleridge with something of his old vigour gave battle on behalf of his brother-in-law in the pages of The Courier. Essays on His Own Times, iii. 939-950. [36] Charles James Fox died on September 13, 1806. [37] An unpublished letter from Sir Alexander Ball to His Excellency H. Elliot, Esq. (Minister at the Court of Naples), strongly recommends Coleridge to his favourable notice and consideration. Nothing that Coleridge ever said in favour of “Ball” exceeds what Sir Alexander says of Coleridge, but the Minister, whose hands must have been pretty full at the time, failed to be impressed, and withheld his patronage. [38] “The Foster-Mother’s Tale,” Poetical Works, 1893, p. 83. [39] Hartley Coleridge, now in his eleventh year, was under his father’s sole care from the end of December, 1806, to May, 1807. The first three months were spent in the farmhouse near Coleorton, which Sir G. Beaumont had lent to the Wordsworths, and it must have been when that visit was drawing to a close that this letter was written for Hartley’s benefit. The remaining five or six weeks were passed in the company of the Wordsworths at Basil Montagu’s house in London. Then it was that Hartley saw his first play, and was taken by Wordsworth and Walter Scott to the Tower. “The bard’s economy,” says Hartley, “would not allow us to visit the Jewel Office, but Mr. Scott, then no anactolater, took an evident pride in showing me the claymores and bucklers taken from the Loyalists at Culloden.” Whilst he was at Coleorton, Hartley was painted by Sir David Wilkie. It is the portrait of a child “whose fancies from afar are brought,” but the Hartley of this letter is better represented by the grimacing boy in Wilkie’s “Blind Fiddler,” for which, I have been told, he sat as a model. Poems of Hartley Coleridge, 1851, i. ccxxii. [40] Scott had proposed to Southey that he should use his influence with Jeffrey to get him placed on the staff of the Edinburgh Review. Southey declined the offer alike on the score of political divergence from the editor, and disapproval of “that sort of bitterness [in criticism] which tends directly to wound a man in his feelings, and injure him in his fame and fortune.” Life and Correspondence, iii. 124-128. See, too, Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott, 1837, ii. 130. [41] Sir John Acland. The property is now in the possession of a descendant in the female line, Sir Alexander Hood, of Fairfield, Dodington. [42] To receive him and his family at Ottery as had been originally proposed. George Coleridge disapproved of his brother’s intended separation from his wife, and declined to countenance it in any way whatever. [43] Faulkner: a Tragedy, 1807-1808, 8vo. [44] I presume that the reference is to the Conciones ad Populum, published at Bristol, November 16, 1795. [45] Coleridge’s article on Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade was published in the Edinburgh Review, July, 1808. It has never been reprinted. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by J. Dykes Campbell, London, 1894, p. 168; Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 180; Allsop’s Letters, 1836, ii. 112. [46] Of this pamphlet or the translation of Palm’s Deutschland in seiner tiefsten Erniedrigung, I know nothing. The author, John Philip Palm, a Nuremberg bookseller, was shot August 26, 1806, in consequence of the publication of the work, which reflected unfavorably on the conduct and career of Napoleon. [47] Compare his letter to Poole, dated December 4, 1808. “Begin to count my life, as a friend of yours, from 1st January, 1809;” and a letter to Davy, of December, 1808, in which he speaks of a change for the better in health and habits. Thomas Poole and his Friends, ii. 227; Fragmentary Remains of Sir H. Davy, p. 101. [48] The Convention of Cintra was signed August 30, 1808. Wordsworth’s Essays were begun in the following November. “For the sake of immediate and general circulation I determined (when I had made a considerable progress in the manuscript) to print it in different portions in one of the daily newspapers. Accordingly two portions of it were printed, in the months of December and January, in the Courier. An accidental loss of several sheets of the manuscript delayed the continuance of the publication in that manner till the close of the Christmas holidays; and this plan of publication was given up.” Advertisement to Wordsworth’s pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra, May 20, 1809: Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 385. [49] “In the place of some just eulogiums due to Mr. Pitt was substituted some abuse and detraction.” Allsop’s Letters, 1836, ii. 112. [50] A preliminary prospectus of The Friend was printed at Kendal and submitted to Jeffrey and a few others. A copy of this “first edition” is in my possession, and it is interesting to notice that Coleridge has directed his amanuensis, Miss Hutchinson, to amend certain offending phrases in accordance with Jeffrey’s suggestions. “Speculative gloom” and “year-long absences” he gives up, but, as the postscript intimates, “moral impulses” he has the hardihood to retain. See The Friend’s Quarterly Examiner for July, 1893, art. “S. T. Coleridge on Quaker Principles;” and AthenÆum for September 16, 1893, art. “Coleridge on Quaker Principles.” [51] Thomas Wilkinson, of Yanwath, near Penrith, was a member of the Society of Friends. He owned and tilled a small estate on the banks of the Emont, which he laid out and ornamented “after the manner of Shenstone at his Leasowes.” As a friend and neighbour of the Clarksons and of Lord Lonsdale he was well known to Wordsworth, who, greatly daring, wrote in his honour his lines “To the Spade of a Friend (an Agriculturist).” Alas! for the poor Prospectus! “Speculative gloom” and “year-long absence” had been sacrificed to Jeffrey, and now “Architecture, Dress, Dancing, Gardening, Music, Poetry, and Painting” were erased in obedience to Wilkinson. Most of these articles, however, “Architecture, Dress,” etc., reappeared in a second edition of the Prospectus, attached to the second number of The Friend, but Dancing, “Greek statuesque dancing,” on which Coleridge might have discoursed at some length, was gone forever. Wordsworth’s Works, p. 211 (Fenwick Note); The Friend’s Quarterly Examiner, July, 1893; Records of a Quaker Family, by Anne Ogden Boyce, London, 1889, pp. 30, 31, 55. [52] The original draft of the prospectus of The Friend, which was issued in the late autumn of 1808, was printed at Kendal by W. Pennington. Certain alterations were suggested by Jeffrey and others (Southey in a letter to Rickman dated January 18, 1809, complains that Coleridge had “carried a prospectus wet from the pen to the publisher, without consulting anybody”), and a fresh batch of prospectuses was printed in London. A third variant attached to the first number of the weekly issue, June 1, 1809, was printed by Brown, a bookseller and stationer at Penrith, who, on Mr. Pennington’s refusal, undertook to print and publish The Friend. Some curious letters which passed between Coleridge and his printer, together with the MS. of The Friend, in the handwriting of Miss Sarah Hutchinson, are preserved in the Forster Library at the South Kensington Museum. Letters from the Lake Poets, pp. 85-188; Selections from the Letters of R. Southey, ii. 120. [53] Compare letters to Stuart (December), 1808. “You will long ere this have received Wordsworth’s second Essay, etc., rewritten by me, and in some parts recomposed.” Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 101. [54] Colonel Wardle, who led the attack in the House of Commons against the Duke of York, with regard to the undue influence in military appointments of the notorious Mrs. Clarke. [55] Coleridge’s friendship with Dr. Beddoes dated from 1795-96, and was associated with his happier days. It is possible that the recent amendment in health and spirits was due to advice and sympathy which he had met with in response to a confession made in writing to his old Bristol friend. His death, which took place on the 24th of December, 1808, would rob Coleridge of a newly-found support, and would “take out of his life” the hope of self-conquest. The letter implies that he had recently heard from or conversed with Beddoes. [56] Compare letter from Southey to J. N. White dated April 21, 1809. “A ridiculous disorder called the Mumps has nearly gone through the house, and visited me on its way—a thing which puts one more out of humour than out of health; but my neck has now regained its elasticity, and I have left off the extra swathings which yesterday buried my chin, after the fashion of fops a few years ago.” Selections from the Letters of R. Southey, ii, 135, 136. [57] The Parliamentary investigation of the charges and allegations with regard to the military patronage of the Duke of York. [58] Bertha Southey, afterwards Mrs. Herbert Hill, was born March 27, 1809. [59] “The Appendix (to the pamphlet On the Convention of Cintra), a portion of the work which Mr. Wordsworth regarded as executed in a masterly manner, was drawn up by Mr. De Quincey, who revised the proofs of the whole.” Memoirs of Wordsworth, i. 384. [60] In Southey’s copy of the reprint of the stamped sheets of The Friend the passage runs thus: “However this may be, the Understanding or regulative faculty is manifestly distinct from Life and Sensation, its function being to take up the passive affections of the sense into distinct Thoughts and Judgements, according to its own essential forms. These forms, however,” etc. The Friend, No. 5, Thursday, September 14, 1809, p. 79, n. [61] For extracts from Poole’s narrative of John Walford, see Thomas Poole and his Friends, ii. 235-237. Wordsworth endeavoured to put the narrative into verse, but was dissatisfied with the result. His lines have never been published. [62] H. N. Coleridge included these lines, as they appear in a note-book, among the Omniana of 1809-1816. They are headed incorrectly, “Inscription on a Clock in Cheapside.” The MS. is not very legible, but there can be no doubt that Coleridge wrote, “On a clock in a market place (proposed).” Table Talk, etc., 1884, p. 401; Poetical Works, p. 181. [63] The story of Maria Eleanora SchÖning appeared in No. 13 of The Friend, Thursday, November 16, 1809, pp. 194-208. It was reprinted as the “Second Landing Place” in the revised edition of The Friend, published in 1818. The somewhat laboured description of the heroine’s voice, which displeased Southey, and the beautiful illustration of the “withered leaf” were allowed to remain unaltered, and appear in every edition. Coleridge’s Works, 1853, ii. 312-326. [64] Jonas Lewis von Hess, 1766-1823. He was a friend and pupil of Kant, and author of A History of Hamburg. [65] John of Milan, who flourished 1100 A. D., was the author of Medicina Salernitana. He also composed “versibus Leoninis,” a poem entitled Flos MedicinÆ. Hoffmann’s Lexicon Universale, art. “Salernum.” [66] Three letters on the Catholic Question appeared in the Courier, September 3, 21, and 26, 1811. Essays on His Own Times, iii. 891-896, 920-932. [67] The Battle of Albuera. Articles on the battle appeared in the Courier on June 5 and 8, 1811. Essays on His Own Times, iii. 802-805. [68] “That a Judge should have regarded as an aggravation of a libel on the British Army, the writer’s having written against Buonaparte, is an act so monstrous,” etc. “Buonaparte,” Courier, June 29, 1811; Essays on His Own Times, iii. 818. [69] John Drakard, the printer of the Stamford News, was convicted at Lincoln, May 25, 1811, of the publication of an article against flogging in the army, and sentenced to a fine and imprisonment. [70] Lord Milton, one of the members for Yorkshire, brought forward a motion on June 6, 1811, against the reappointment of the Duke of York as Commander-in-Chief. [71] Clerk of the Courier. Letter to Gentleman’s Magazine, June, 1838, p. 586. [72] Many years after the date of this letter, Dr. Spurzheim took a life-mask of Coleridge’s face, and used it as a model for a bust which originally belonged to H. N. Coleridge, and is now in the Library at Heath’s Court, Ottery St. Mary. Another bust of Coleridge, very similar to Spurzheim’s, belonged to my father, and is still in the possession of the family. I have been told that it was taken from a death-mask, but as Mr. Hamo Thornycroft, who designed the bust for Westminster Abbey, pointed out to me, it abounds in anatomical defects. In a letter which Henry Coleridge wrote to his father, Colonel Coleridge, on the day of his uncle’s death, he says that a death-mask had been taken of the poet’s features. Whether this served as a model for a posthumous bust, or not, I am unable to say. In the curious and valuable article on death-masks which Mr. Laurence Hutton contributed to the October number of Harper’s Magazine, for 1892, he gives a fac-simile of a death-mask which was said to be that of S, T. Coleridge. At the time that I wrote to him on the subject, I had not seen Henry Coleridge’s letter, but I came to the conclusion that this sad memorial of death was genuine. The “glorious forehead” is there, but the look has passed away, and the “rest is silence.” With regard to Allston’s bust of Coleridge, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1812, I possess no information. See Harper’s Magazine, October, 1892, pp. 782, 783. [73] A favourite quip. Apropos of the bed on which he slept at Trinity College, Cambridge, in June, 1833, he remarks, “Truly I lay down at night a man, and awoke in the morning a bruise.” Table Talk, etc., Bell & Co., 1884, p. 231, note. [74] “Crimen ingrati animi nil aliud est quam perspicacia quÆdam in causam collati beneficii.” De Augmentis Scientiarum, cap. iii. 15. If this is the passage which Coleridge is quoting, he has inserted some words of his own. The Works of Bacon, 1711, i. 183. [75] A crayon sketch of Coleridge, drawn by George Dawe, R. A., is now in existence at Heath Court. The figure, which is turned sideways, the face looking up, the legs crossed, is that of a man in early middle life, somewhat too portly for his years. An engraving of the sketch forms the frontispiece to Lloyd’s History of Highgate. It was, in the late Lord Coleridge’s opinion, a most characteristic likeness of his great-uncle. A time came when, for some reason, Coleridge held Dawe in but light esteem. I possess a card of invitation to his funeral, which took place at St. Paul’s Cathedral, on October 27, 1829. It is endorsed thus:— “I really would have attended the Grub’s Canonization in St. Paul’s, under the impression that it would gratify his sister, Mrs. Wright; but Mr. G. interposed a conditional but sufficiently decorous negative. ‘No! Unless you wish to follow his Grubship still further down.’ So I pleaded ill health. But the very Thursday morning I went to Town to see my daughter, for the first time, as Mrs. Henry Coleridge, in Gower Street, and, odd enough, the stage was stopped by the Pompous Funeral of the unchangeable and predestinated Grub, and I extemporised:— As Grub Dawe pass’d beneath the Hearse’s Lid, S. T. Coleridge.” Dawe, it may be remembered, is immortalised by Lamb in his amusing Recollections of a Late Royal Academician. [76] This portrait, begun at Rome, was not finished when Coleridge left. It is now in the possession of Allston’s niece, Miss Charlotte Dana, of Boston, Mass., U. S. A. The portrait by Allston, now in the National Portrait Gallery, was taken at Bristol in 1814. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, 1894, p. 150, footnote 5. [77] The lectures were delivered at the rooms of “The London Philosophical Society, Scotch Corporation Hall, Crane Court, Fleet Street (entrance from Fetter Lane).” Of the lecture on “Love and the Female Character,” which was delivered on December 9, 1811, H. C. Robinson writes: “Accompanied Mrs. Rough to Coleridge’s seventh and incomparably best Lecture. He declaimed with great eloquence about love, without wandering from his subject, Romeo and Juliet.” Among the friends who took notes were John Payne Collier, and a Mr. Tomalin. Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakespeare, London, 1856, p. viii.; H. C. Robinson’s Diary, ii. 348, MS. notes by J. Tomalin. [78] The visit to Greta Hall, the last he ever paid to the Lake Country, lasted about a month, from February 23 to March 26. On his journey southward he remained in Penrith for a little over a fortnight, rejoining the Morgans towards the middle of April. [79] The Reverend John Dawes, who kept a day-school at Ambleside. Hartley and Derwent Coleridge, Robert Jameson, Owen Lloyd and his three brothers (sons of Charles Lloyd), and the late Edward Jefferies, afterwards Curate and Rector of Grasmere, were among his pupils. In the Memoir of Hartley Coleridge, his brother Derwent describes at some length the character of his “worthy master,” and adds: “We were among his earliest scholars, and deeming it, as he said, an honour to be entrusted with the education of Mr. Coleridge’s sons, he refused, first for the elder, and afterwards for the younger brother, any pecuniary remuneration.” Poems of Hartley Coleridge, 1851, i. liii. [80] In an unpublished letter from Mrs. Coleridge to Poole, dated October 30, 1812, she tells her old friend that when “the boys” perceived that their father did not intend to turn aside to visit the Wordsworths at the Rectory opposite Grasmere Church, they turned pale and were visibly affected. No doubt they knew all about the quarrel and were mightily concerned, but their agitation was a reflex of the grief and passion “writ large” in their father’s face. One can imagine with what ecstasy of self-torture he would pass through Grasmere and leave Wordsworth unvisited. [81] Sir Thomas Bernard, 1750-1818, the well-known philanthropist and promoter of national education, was one of the founders of the Royal Institution. [82] It is probable that during his stay at Penrith he recovered a number of unbound sheets of the reprint of The Friend. His proposal to Gale and Curtis must have been to conclude the unfinished narrative of the life of Sir Alexander Ball, and to publish the whole as a complete work. A printed slip cut out of a page of publishers’ advertisements and forwarded to “H. N. Coleridge, Esq., from W. Pickering,” contains the following announcement:— “Mr. Coleridge’s Friend, of which twenty-eight Numbers are published, may now be had, in one Volume, royal 8vo. boards, of Mess. Gale and Curtis, Paternoster Row. And Mr. C. intends to complete the Work, in from eight to ten similar sheets to the foregoing, which will be published together in one part, sewed. The Subscribers to the former part can obtain them through their regular Booksellers. Only 300 copies remain of the 28 numbers, and their being printed on unstamped paper will account to the Subscribers for the difference of price. 23, Paternoster Row, London, 1st February, 1812.” [83] The full title of this work was The Origin, Nature and Object of the New System of Education. Southey’s Life of Dr. Bell, ii. 409. [84] The Honourable and Right Reverend John Shute Barrington, 1734-1826, sixth son of the first Lord Barrington, was successively Bishop of Llandaff, Salisbury, and Durham. He was a warm supporter of the Madras system of education. It was no doubt Dr. Bell who helped to interest the Bishop in Coleridge’s Lectures. [85] Herbert Southey, known in the family as “Dog-Lunus,” and “Lunus,” and “The Moon.” Letters of R. Southey, ii. 399. [86] Readers of The Doctor will not be at a loss to understand the significance of the references to Dr. Daniel Dove and his horse Nobs. According to Cuthbert Southey, the actual composition of the book began in 1813, but the date of this letter (April, 1812) shows that the myth or legend of the “Doctor,” and his iron-grey, which had taken shape certainly as early as 1805, was fully developed in the spring of 1812, when Coleridge paid his last visit to Greta Hall. It was not till the winter of 1833-1834, that the first two volumes of The Doctor appeared in print, and, as they were published anonymously, they were, probably, by persons familiar with his contribution to Blackwood and the London Magazine, attributed to Hartley Coleridge. “No clue to the author has reached me,” wrote Southey to his friend Wynne. “As for Hartley Coleridge, I wish it were his, but am certain that it is not. He is quite clever enough to have written it—quite odd enough, but his opinions are desperately radical, and he is the last person in the world to disguise them. One report was that his father had assisted him; there is not a page in the book, wise or foolish, which the latter could have written, neither his wisdom nor his folly are of that kind.” There had been a time when Southey would have expressed himself differently, but in 1834 dissociation from Coleridge had become a matter alike of habit and of principle. Southey’s Life and Correspondence, ii. 355, vi. 225-229; Letters of R. Southey, iv. 373. [87] The first of the series of “Essays upon Epitaphs” was published in No. 25 of the original issue of The Friend (Feb. 22, 1810), and republished by Wordsworth in the notes to The Excursion, 1814. “Two other portions of the ‘Series,’ of which the Bishop of Lincoln gives an outline and some extracts in the Memoirs (i. 434-445), were published in full in Prose Works of Wordsworth, 1876, ii. 41-75.” Life of W. Wordsworth, ii. 152; Poetical Works of Wordsworth, Bibliography, p. 907. [88] To Miss Sarah Hutchinson, then living in Wales. [89] That Wordsworth ever used these words, or commissioned Montagu to repeat them to Coleridge, is in itself improbable and was solemnly denied by Wordsworth himself. But Wordsworth did not deny that with the best motives and in a kindly spirit he took Montagu into his confidence and put him on his guard, that he professed “to have no hope” of his old friend, and that with regard to Coleridge’s “habits” he might have described them as a “nuisance” in his family. It was all meant for the best, but much evil and misery might have been avoided if Wordsworth had warned Coleridge that if he should make his home under Montagu’s roof he could not keep silence, or, better still, if he had kept silence and left Montagu to fight his own battles. The cruel words which Montagu put into Wordsworth’s mouth or Coleridge in his agitation and resentment put into Montagu’s, were but the salt which the sufferer rubbed into his own wound. The time, the manner, and the person combined to aggravate his misery and dismay. Judgment had been delivered against him in absentiÂ, and the judge was none other than his own “familiar friend.” Henry Crabb Robinson’s Diary, May 3-10, 1812, first published in Life of W. Wordsworth, ii. 168, 187. [90] The tickets were numbered and signed by the lecturer. Printed cards which were issued by way of advertisement contained the following announcement:— “Lectures on the Drama. “Mr. Coleridge proposes to give a series of Lectures on the Drama of the Greek, French, English and Spanish stage, chiefly with Reference to the Works of Shakespeare, at Willis’s Rooms, King Street, St. James’s, on the Tuesdays and Fridays in May and June at Three o’clock precisely. The Course will contain Six Lectures, at One Guinea. The Tickets Transferable. An Account is opened at Mess. Ransom Morland & Co., Bankers, Pall Mall, in the names of Sir G. Beaumont, Bart., Sir T. Bernard, Bart., W. Sotheby, Esq., where Subscriptions will be received, and Tickets issued. The First Lecture on Tuesday, the 12th of May.—S. T. C., 71, Berners St.” For an account of the first four lectures, see H. C. Robinson’s Diary, i. 385-388. [91] From Bombay. [92] I have followed Professor Knight in omitting a passage in which “he gives a lengthened list of circumstances which seemed to justify misunderstanding.” The alleged facts throw no light on the relations between Coleridge and Wordsworth. [93] The cryptogram which Coleridge invented for his own use was based on the arbitrary selection of letters of the Greek as equivalents to letters of the English alphabet. The vowels were represented by English letters, by the various points, and by algebraic symbols. An expert would probably decipher nine tenths of these memoranda at a glance, but here and there the words symbolised are themselves anagrams of Greek, Latin, and German words, and, in a few instances, the clue is hard to seek. [94] The Right Honourable Spencer Perceval was shot by a man named Bellingham, in the lobby of the House of Commons, May 11, 1812. [95] The occasion of this letter was the death of Wordsworth’s son, Thomas, which took place December 1, 1812. It would seem, as Professor Knight intimates, that the letter was not altogether acceptable to the Wordsworths, and that “no immediate reply was sent to Coleridge.” We have it, on the authority of Mr. Clarkson, that when Wordsworth and Dorothy did write, in the spring of the following year, inviting him to Grasmere, their letters remained unanswered, and that when the news came that Coleridge was about to leave London for the seaside, a fresh wound was inflicted, and fresh offence taken. As Mr. Dykes Campbell has pointed out, the consequences of this second rupture were fatal to Coleridge’s peace of mind and to his well-being generally. The brief spell of success and prosperity which attended the representation of “Remorse” inspired him for a few weeks with unnatural courage, but as the “pale unwarming light of Hope” died away, he was left to face the world and himself as best or as worst he could. Of the months which intervened between March and September, 1813, there is no record, and we can only guess that he remained with his kind and patient hosts, the Morgans, sick in body and broken-hearted. Life of W. Wordsworth, ii. 182; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, 1894, pp. 193-197. [96] See Letter CXCV., p. 611, note 2. [97] The notice of “Remorse” in The Times, though it condemned the play as a whole, was not altogether uncomplimentary, and would be accepted at the present day by the majority of critics as just and fair. It was, no doubt, the didactic and patronising tone adopted towards the author which excited Coleridge’s indignation. “We speak,” writes the reviewer, “with restraint and unwillingly of the defects of a work which must have cost its author so much labour. We are peculiarly reluctant to touch the anxieties of a man,” etc. The notice in the Morning Post was friendly and flattering in the highest degree. The preface to Osorio, London, 1873, contains selections of press notices of “Remorse,” and other interesting matter. See, too, Poetical Works, Editor’s Note on “Remorse,” pp. 649-651. [98] John Williams, described by Macaulay as “a filthy and malignant baboon,” who wrote under the pseudonym of “Anthony Pasquin,” emigrated to America early in this century. In 1804 he published a work in Boston, and there is, apparently, no reason to suppose that he subsequently returned to England. Either Coleridge was in error or he uses the term generally for a scurrilous critic. [99] This note-book must have passed out of Coleridge’s possession in his lifetime, for it is not among those which were bequeathed to Joseph Henry Green, and subsequently passed into the hands of my father. The two folio volumes of the Greek Poets were in my father’s library, and are now in my possession. [100] “Mr. Colridge (sic) will not, we fear, be as much entertained as we were with his ‘Playhouse Musings,’ which begin with characteristic pathos and simplicity, and put us much in mind of the affecting story of old Poulter’s mare.” [101] The motto “Sermoni propriora,” translated by Lamb “properer for a sermon,” was prefixed to “Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement.” The lines “To a Young Ass” were originally published in the Morning Chronicle, December 30, 1794, under the heading, “Address to a Young Jack Ass, and its tethered Mother. In Familiar Verse.” Poetical Works, pp. 35, 36, Appendix C, p. 477. See, too, Biographia Literaria, Coleridge’s Works, 1853, iii. 161. [102] The words, “Obscurest Haunt of all our mountains,” are to be found in the first act of “Remorse,” lines 115, 116. Their counterpart in Wordsworth’s poems occurs in “The Brothers,” l. 140. (“It is the loneliest place of all these hills.”) “De minimis non curat lex,” especially when there is a plea to be advanced, or a charge to be defended. Poetical Works, p. 362; Works of Wordsworth, p. 127. [103] Many theories have been hazarded with regard to the broken friendship commemorated in these lines. My own impression is that Coleridge, if he had anything personal in his mind, and we may be sure that he had, was looking back on his early friendship with Southey and the bitter quarrel which began over the collapse of pantisocracy, and was never healed till the summer of 1799. In the late autumn of 1800, when the second part of “Christabel” was written, Southey was absent in Portugal, and the thought of all that had come and gone between him and his “heart’s best brother” inspired this outburst of affection and regret. [104] The annuity of £150 for life, which Josiah Wedgwood, on his own and his brother Thomas’ behalf, offered to Coleridge in January, 1798. The letter expressly states that it is “an annuity for life of £150 to be regularly paid by us, no condition whatsoever being annexed to it.” “We mean,” he adds, “the annuity to be independent of everything but the wreck of our fortune.” It is extraordinary that a man of probity should have taken advantage of the fact that the annuity, as had been proposed, was not secured by law, and should have struck this blow, not so much at Coleridge, as at his wife and children, for whom the annuity was reserved. It is hardly likely that a man of business forgot the terms of his own offer, or that he could have imagined that Coleridge was no longer in need of support. Either in some fit of penitence or of passion Coleridge offered to release him, or once again “whispering tongues had poisoned truth,” and some one had represented to Wedgwood that the money was doing more harm than good. But a bond is a bond, and it is hard to see, unless the act and deed were Coleridge’s, how Wedgwood can escape blame. Thomas Poole and his Friends, i. 257-259. [105] Dr. Southey, the poet’s younger brother Henry, and Daniel Stuart were afterwards neighbours in Harley Street. A close intimacy and lifelong friendship arose between the two families. [106] Treaty of Vienna, October 9, 1809. [107] This could only have been carried out in part. A large portion of the books which Coleridge possessed at his death consisted of those which he had purchased during his travels in Germany in 1799, and in Italy in 1805-1806. [108] The publication by Cottle, in 1837, of this and the following letter, and still more of that to Josiah Wade of June 26, 1814 (Letter CC.), was deeply resented by Coleridge’s three children and by all his friends. In the preface to his Early Recollections Cottle defends himself on the plea that in the interests of truth these confessions should be revealed, and urges that Coleridge’s own demand that after his death “a full and unqualified narrative of my wretchedness and its guilty cause may be made public,” not only justified but called for his action in the matter. The law of copyright in the letters of parents and remoter ancestors was less clearly defined at that time than it is at present, and Coleridge’s literary executors contented themselves with recording their protest in the strongest possible terms. In 1848, when Cottle reprinted his Early Recollections, together with some additional matter, under the title of Reminiscences of S. T. Coleridge, etc., he was able to quote Southey as an advocate, though, possibly, a reluctant advocate, for publication. There can be no question that neither Coleridge’s request nor Southey’s sanction gave Cottle any right to wound the feelings of the living or to expose the frailties and remorse of the dead. The letters, which have been public property for nearly sixty years, are included in these volumes because they have a natural and proper place in any collection of Coleridge’s Letters which claims to be, in any sense, representative of his correspondence at large. [109] At whatever time these lines may have been written, they were not printed till 1829, when they were prefixed to the “Monody on the Death of Chatterton.” Poetical Works, p. 61; Editor’s Note, pp. 562, 563. [110] “The Picture; or The Lover’s Resolution,” lines 17-25. Poetical Works, p. 162. [111] Solomon Grundy is a character, played by Fawcett, in George Colman the younger’s piece, Who wants a Guinea? produced at Covent Garden, 1804-1805. [112] A character in Macklin’s play, Love À la Mode. [113] A character in Macklin’s play, A Man of the World. [114] It is needless to say that Coleridge never even attempted a translation of Faust. Whether there were initial difficulties with regard to procuring the “whole of Goethe’s works,” and other books of reference, or whether his heart failed him when he began to study the work with a view to translation, the arrangement with Murray fell through. A statement in the Table Talk for February 16, 1833, that the task was abandoned on moral grounds, that he could not bring himself to familiarise the English public with “language, much of which was,” he thought, “vulgar, licentious, and blasphemous,” is not borne out by the tone of his letters to Murray, of July 29, August 31, 1814. No doubt the spirit of Faust, alike with regard to theology and morality, would at all times have been distasteful to him, but with regard to what actually took place, he deceived himself in supposing that the feelings and scruples of old age would have prevailed in middle life. Memoirs of John Murray, i. 297 et seq. [115] “The thoughts of Coleridge, even during the whirl of passing events, discovered their hidden springs, and poured forth, in an obscure style, and to an unheeding age, the great moral truths which were then being proclaimed in characters of fire to mankind.” Alison’s History of Europe, ix. 3 (ninth edition). [116] The eight “Letters on the Spaniards,” which Coleridge contributed to the Courier in December, January, 1809-10, are reprinted in Essays on His Own Times, ii. 593-676. [117] The character of Pitt appeared in the Morning Post, March 19, 1800; the letters to Fox, on November 4, 9, 1802; the Essays on the French Empire, etc., September 21, 25, and October 2, 1802; the Essay on the restoration of the Bourbons, October, 1802. They are reprinted in the second volume of Essays on His Own Times. Six Letters to Judge Fletcher on Catholic Emancipation, which appeared at irregular intervals in the Courier, September-December, 1814, are reprinted in Essays on His Own Times, iii. 677-733. The Essay on Taxation forms the seventh Essay of Section the First, on the Principles of Political Knowledge. The Friend; Coleridge’s Works, Harper & Brothers, 1853, ii. 208-222. [118] Neither the original nor the transcript of this letter has, to my knowledge, been preserved. [119] He reverts to this “turning of the worm” in a letter to Morgan dated January 5, 1818. He threatened to attack publishers and printers in “a vigorous and harmonious satire” to be called “Puff and Slander.” I am inclined to think that the remarkable verses entitled “A Character,” which were first printed in 1834, were an accomplished instalment of “these two long satires.” Letter in British Museum. MSS. Addit. 25612. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative by J. Dykes Campbell, p. 234, note; Poetical Works, pp. 195, 642. [120] A work which should contain all knowledge and proclaim all philosophy had been Coleridge’s dream from the beginning, and, as no such work was ever produced, it may be said to have been his dream to the end. And yet it was something more than a dream. Besides innumerable fragments of metaphysical and theological speculation which have passed into my hands, he actually did compose and dictate two large quarto volumes on formal logic, which are extant. “Something more than a volume,” a portentous introduction to his magnum opus, was dictated to his amanuensis and disciple, J. H. Green, and is now in my possession. A commentary on the Gospels and some of the Epistles, of which the original MS. is extant, and of which I possess a transcription, was an accomplished fact. I say nothing of the actual or relative value of this unpublished matter, but it should be put on record that it exists, that much labour, ill-judged perhaps, and ineffectual labour, was expended on the outworks of the fortresses, and that the walls and bastions are standing to the present day. [121] The appearance of these “Essays on the Fine Arts” was announced in the Bristol Journal of August 6, 1814. They were reprinted in 1837 by Cottle, in his Early Recollections, ii. 201-240, and by Thomas Ashe in 1885, in his Miscellanies, Æsthetic and Literary, pp. 5-35. Coleridge himself “set a high value” on these essays. See Table Talk of January 1, 1834. [122] The working editor of the Courier. [123] The third letter to Judge Fletcher on Ireland was published in the Courier, October 21, 1814. It is reprinted in Essays on His Own Times, iii. 690-697. [124] John Cartwright, 1740-1824, known as Major Cartwright, was an ardent parliamentary reformer and an advocate of universal suffrage. He refused to fight against the United States and wrote Letters on American Independence (1774). [125] Lord Erskine’s Bill for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was brought forward in the House of Lords May 15, 1809, and was passed without a division. The Bill was read a second time in the House of Commons but was rejected on going into committee, the opposition being led by Windham in a speech of considerable ability. By “imperfect” duties Coleridge probably means “duties of imperfect obligation.” [126] This article, a review of “The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton; with a Supplement of Interesting Letters by Distinguished Personages. 2 vols. 8vo. Lovewell and Co. London. 1814,” appeared in No. xxi. of The Quarterly Review, for April, 1814. The attack is mainly directed against Lady Hamilton, but Nelson, with every pretence of reluctance and of general admiration, is also censured on moral grounds, and his letters are held up to ridicule. [127] A partner in the publishing firm of Ridgeway and Symonds. Letters of R. Southey, iii. 65. [128] The reference is to Swift’s famous “Drapier” Letters. Swift wrote in the assumed character of a draper, and dated his letters “From my shop in St. Francis Street,” but why he adopted the French instead of the English spelling of the word does not seem to have been satisfactorily explained. Notes and Queries, III. Series, x. 55. [129] The View of the State of Ireland, first published in 1633. [130] John Kenyon, 1783-1856, a poet and philanthropist. He settled at Woodlands near Stowey in 1802, and became acquainted with Poole and Poole’s friends. He was on especially intimate terms with Southey, who writes of him (January 11, 1827) to his still older friend Wynne, as “one of the very best and pleasantest men whom I have ever known, one whom every one likes at first sight, and likes better the longer he is known.” With Coleridge himself the tie was less close, but he was, I know, a most kind friend to the poet’s wife during those anxious years, 1814-1819, when her children were growing up, and she had little else to depend upon but Southey’s generous protection and the moiety of the Wedgwood annuity. Kenyon’s friendship with the Brownings belongs to a later chapter of literary history. [131] Poetical Works, p. 176; Appendix H, pp. 525, 526. [132] Poetical Works, p. 450. [133] In 1815 an act was brought in by Mr. Robinson (afterwards Lord Ripon) and passed, permitting the importation of corn when the price of home-grown wheat reached 80s. a quarter. During the spring of the year, January-March, while the bill was being discussed, bread-riots took place in London and Westminster. [134] It would seem that Coleridge had either overlooked or declined to put faith in Wordsworth’s Apology for The Excursion, which appeared in the Preface to the First Edition of 1814. He was, of course, familiar with the “poem on the growth of your mind,” the hitherto unnamed and unpublished Prelude, and he must have been at least equally familiar with the earlier books of The Excursion. Why then was he disappointed with the poem as a whole, and what had he looked for at Wordsworth’s hands? Not, it would seem, for an “ante-chapel,” but for the sanctuary itself. He had been stirred to the depths by the recitation of The Prelude at Coleorton, and in his lines “To a Gentleman,” which he quotes in this letter, he recapitulates the arguments of the poem. This he considered was The Excursion, “an Orphic song indeed”! and as he listened the melody sank into his soul. But that was but an exordium, a “prelusive strain” to The Recluse, which might indeed include the Grasmere fragment, the story of Margaret and so forth, but which in the form of poetry would convey the substance of divine philosophy. He had looked for a second Milton who would put Lucretius to a double shame, for a “philosophic poem,” which would justify anew “the ways of God to men;” and in lieu of this pageant of the imagination there was Wordsworth prolific of moral discourse, of scenic and personal narrative—a prophet indeed, but “unmindful of the heavenly Vision.” [135] The Rev. William Money, a descendant of John Kyrle, the “Man of Ross,” eulogised alike by Pope and Coleridge, was at this time in possession of the family seat of Whetham, a few miles distant from Calne, in Wiltshire. Coleridge was often a guest at his house. [136] A controversial work on the inspiration of Scripture. A thin thread of narrative runs through the dissertation. It was the work of the Rev. J. W. Cunningham, Vicar of Harrow, and was published in 1813. [137] The Hon. and Rev. T. A. Methuen, Rector of All Cannings, was the son of Paul Methuen, Esq., M. P., afterward Lord Methuen of Corsham House. He contributed some reminiscences of Coleridge at this period to the Christian Observer of 1845. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, 1894, p. 208. [138] The annual payments for board and lodging, which were made at first, for some time before Coleridge’s death fell into abeyance. The approximate amount of the debt so incurred, and the circumstances under which it began to accumulate, are alike unknown to me. The fact that such a debt existed was, I believe, a secret jealously guarded by his generous hosts, but as, with the best intentions, statements have been made to the effect that there was no pecuniary obligation on Coleridge’s part, it is right that the truth should be known. On the other hand, it is only fair to Coleridge’s memory to put it on record that this debt of honour was a sore trouble to him, and that he met it as best he could. We know, for instance, on his own authority, that the profits of the three volume edition of his poems, published in 1828, were made over to Mr. Gillman. [139] Zapolya: A Christmas Tale, in two Parts, was published by Rest Fenner late in 1817. A year before, after the first part had been rejected by the Drury Lane Committee, Coleridge arranged with Murray to publish both parts as a poem, and received an advance of £50 on the MS. He had, it seems, applied to Murray to be released from this engagement, and on the strength of an ambiguous reply, offered the work to the publishers of Sybilline Leaves. From letters to Murray, dated March 26 and March 29, 1817, it is evident that the £50 advanced on A Christmas Tale was repaid. In acknowledging the receipt of the sum, Murray seems to have generously omitted all mention of a similar advance on “a play then in composition.” In his letter of March 29, Coleridge speaks of this second debt, which does not appear to have been paid. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, p. 223; Memoirs of John Murray, i. 301-306. [140] Murray had offered Coleridge two hundred guineas for “a small volume of specimens of Rabbinical Wisdom,” but owing to pressure of work the project was abandoned. “Specimens of Rabbinical Wisdom selected from the Mishna” had already appeared in the original issue of The Friend (Nos. x., xi.), and these, with the assistance of his friend Hyman Hurwitz, Master of the Hebrew Academy at Highgate, he intended to supplement and expand into a volume. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, p. 224 and note. [141] Apart from internal evidence, there is nothing to prove that this article, a review of “Christabel,” which appeared in the Edinburgh Review, December, 1816, was written by Hazlitt. It led, however, to the insertion of a footnote in the first volume of the Biographia Literaria, in which Coleridge accused Jeffrey of personal and ungenerous animosity against himself, and reminded him of hospitality shown to him at Keswick, and of the complacent and flattering language which he had employed on that occasion. Not content with commissioning Hazlitt to review the book, Jeffrey appended a long footnote signed with his initials, in which he indignantly repudiates the charge of personal animus, and makes bitter fun of Coleridge’s susceptibility to flattery, and of his boasted hospitality. Southey had offered him a cup of coffee, and Coleridge had dined with him at the inn. Voila tout. Both footnotes are good reading. Biographia Literaria, ed. 1817, i. 52 note; Edinburgh Review, December, 1817. [142] Two letters from Tieck to Coleridge have been preserved, a very long one, dated February 20, 1818, in which he discusses a scheme for bringing out his works in England, and asks Coleridge if he has succeeded in finding a publisher for him, and the following note, written sixteen years later, to introduce the German painter, Herr von Vogelstein. I am indebted to my cousin, Miss Edith Coleridge, for a translation of both letters. Dresden, April 30, 1834. I hope that my dear and honoured friend Coleridge still remembers me. To me those delightful hours at Highgate remain unforgettable. I have seen your friend Robinson, once here in Dresden, but you—At that time I believed that I should come again to England—and in such hopes we grow old and wear away. My kindest remembrances to your excellent hosts at Highgate. It is with especial emotion that I look again and again at the Anatomy of Melancholy [a present from Mr. Gillman], as well as the Lay Sermons, Christabel, and the Biographia Literaria. Herr von Vogelstein, one of the most esteemed historical painters of Germany, brings you this letter from your loving Ludwig Tieck. [143] Henry Crabb Robinson, whose admirable diaries, first published in 1869, may, it is hoped, be reËdited and published in full, died at the age of ninety-one in 1867. He was a constant guest at my father’s house in Chelsea during my boyhood. I have, too, a distinct remembrance of his walking over Loughrigg from Rydal Mount, where he was staying with Mrs. Wordsworth, and visiting my parents at High Close, between Grasmere and Langdale, then and now the property of Mr. Wheatley Balme. This must have been in 1857, when he was past eighty years of age. My impression is that his conversation consisted, for the most part, of anecdotes concerning Wieland and Schiller and Goethe. Of Wordsworth and Coleridge he must have had much to say, but his words, as was natural, fell on the unheeding ears of a child. [144] The Right Hon. John Hookham Frere, 1769-1846, now better known as the translator of Aristophanes than as statesman or diplomatist, was a warm friend to Coleridge in his later years. He figures in the later memoranda and correspondence as ? ?a?????a???, the ideal Christian gentleman. [145] Samuel Purkis, of Brentford, tanner and man of letters, was an early friend of Poole’s, and through him became acquainted with Coleridge and Sir Humphry Davy. When Coleridge went up to London in June, 1798, to stay with the Wedgwoods at Stoke House, in the village of Cobham, he stayed a night at Brentford on the way. In a letter to Poole of the same date, he thus describes his host: “Purkis is a gentleman, with the free and cordial and interesting manners of the man of literature. His colloquial diction is uncommonly pleasing, his information various, his own mind elegant and acute.” Thomas Poole and his Friends, i. 271, et passim. [146] For an account of Coleridge’s relations with his publishers, Fenner and Curtis, see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, p. 227. See, too, Lippincott’s Mag. for June, 1870, art. “Some Unpublished Correspondence of S. T. Coleridge,” and Brandl’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Romantic School, 1887, pp. 351-353. [147] J. H. Frere was, I believe, one of those who assisted Coleridge to send his younger son to Cambridge. [148] John Taylor Coleridge (better known as Mr. Justice Coleridge), and George May Coleridge, Vicar of St. Mary Church, Devon, and Prebendary of Wells. Another cousin who befriended Hartley, when he was an undergraduate at Merton, and again later when he was living with the Montagus, in London, was William Hart Coleridge, afterward Bishop of Barbados. The poet’s own testimony to the good work of his nephews should be set against Allsop’s foolish and uncalled for attack on “the Bishop and the Judge.” Letters, etc., of S. T. Coleridge, 1836, i. 225, note. [149] Poole’s reply to this letter, dated July 31, 1817, contained an invitation to Hartley to come to Nether Stowey. Mrs. Sandford tells us that it was believed that “the young man spent more than one vacation at Stowey, where he was well-known and very popular, though the young ladies of the place either themselves called him the Black Dwarf, or cherished a conviction that that was his nickname at Oxford.” Thomas Poole and his Friends, ii. 256-258. [150] The Rev. H. F. Cary, 1772-1844, the well-known translator of the Divina Commedia. His son and biographer, the Rev. Henry Cary, gives the following account of his father’s first introduction to Coleridge, which took place at Littlehampton in the autumn of 1817:— “It was our custom to walk on the sands and read Homer aloud, a practice adopted partly for the sake of the sea-breezes.... For several consecutive days Coleridge crossed us in our walk. The sound of the Greek, and especially the expressive countenance of the tutor, attracted his notice; so one day, as we met, he placed himself directly in my father’s way and thus accosted him: ‘Sir, yours is a face I should know. I am Samuel Taylor Coleridge.’” Memoir of H. F. Cary, ii. 18. [151] It appears, however, that he underrated his position as a critic. A quotation from Cary’s Dante, and a eulogistic mention of the work generally, in a lecture on Dante, delivered by Coleridge at Flower-de-Luce Court, on February 27, 1818, led, so his son says, to the immediate sale of a thousand copies, and notices “reËchoing Coleridge’s praises” in the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews. Memoir of H. F. Cary, ii. 28. [152] From the Destiny of Nations. [153] Joseph Henry Green, 1791-1863, an eminent surgeon and anatomist. In his own profession he won distinction as lecturer and operator, and as the author of the Dissector’s Manual, and some pamphlets on medical reform and education. He was twice, 1849-50 and 1858-59, President of the College of Surgeons. His acquaintance with Coleridge, which began in 1817, was destined to influence his whole career. It was his custom for many years to pass two afternoons of the week at Highgate, and on these occasions as amanuensis and collaborateur, he helped to lay the foundations of the Magnum Opus. Coleridge appointed him his literary executor, and bequeathed to him a mass of unpublished MSS. which it was hoped he would reduce to order and publish as a connected system of philosophy. Two addresses which he delivered, as Hunterian Orations in 1841 and 1847, on “Vital Dynamics” and “Mental Dynamics,” were published in his lifetime, and after his death two volumes entitled Spiritual Philosophy, founded on the Teaching of S. T. Coleridge, were issued, together with a memoir, by his friend and former pupil, Sir John Simon. His fame has suffered eclipse owing in great measure to his chivalrous if unsuccessful attempt to do honour to Coleridge. But he deserves to stand alone. Members of his own profession not versed in polar logic looked up to his “great and noble intellect” with pride and delight, and by those who were honoured by his intimacy he was held in love and reverence. To Coleridge he was a friend indeed, bringing with him balms more soothing than “poppy or mandragora,” the healing waters of Faith and Hope. Spiritual Philosophy, by J. H. Green; Memoir of the author’s life, i.-lix. [154] This must have been the impromptu lecture “On the Growth of the Individual Mind,” delivered at the rooms of the London Philosophical Society. According to Gillman, who details the circumstances under which the address was given, but does not supply the date, the lecturer began with an “apologetic preface”: “The lecture I am about to give this evening is purely extempore. Should you find a nominative case looking out for a verb—or a fatherless verb for a nominative case, you must excuse it. It is purely extempore, though I have thought and read much on this subject.” Life of Coleridge, pp. 354-357. [155] The “Essay on the Science of Method” was finished in December, 1817, and printed in the following January. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, 1894, p. 232. [156] The Hebrew text and Coleridge’s translation were published in the form of a pamphlet, and sold by “T. Boosey, 4 Old Broad Street, 1817.” The full title was “Israel’s Lament. Translation of a Hebrew dirge, chaunted in the Great Synagogue, St. James’ Place, Aldgate, on the day of the Funeral of her Royal Highness the Princess Charlotte. By Hyman Hurwitz, Master of the Hebrew Academy, Highgate, 1817.” The translation is below Coleridge at his worst. The “Harp of Quantock” must, indeed, have required stringing before such a line as “For England’s Lady is laid low” could have escaped the file, or “worn her” be permitted to rhyme with “mourner”! Poetical Works, p. 187; Editor’s Note, p. 638. [157] The Kritik der praktischen Vernunft was published in 1797. [158] This statement requires explanation. Franz Xavier von Baader, 1765-1841, was a mystic of the school of Jacob BÖhme, and wrote in opposition to Schelling. [159] Ludwig Tieck published his Sternbald’s Wanderungen in 1798. [160] Heinse’s Ardinghello was published in 1787. [161] Richter’s Vorschule der Aisthetik was published in 1804 (3 vols.). [162] See Table Talk for January 3 and May 1, 1823. See, also, The Friend, Essay iii. of the First Landing Place. Coleridge’s Works, Harper & Brothers, 1853, ii. 134-137, and “Notes on Hamlet,” Ibid. iv. 147-150. [163] Charles Augustus Tulk, described by Mr. Campbell as “a man of fortune with an uncommon taste for philosophical speculation,” was an eminent Swedenborgian, and mainly instrumental in establishing the “New Church” in Great Britain. It was through Coleridge’s intimacy with Mr. Tulk that his writings became known to the Swedenborgian community, and that his letters were read at their gatherings. I possess transcripts of twenty-five letters from Coleridge to Tulk, in many of which he details his theories of ontological speculation. The originals were sold and dispersed in 1882. A note on Swedenborg’s treatise, “De Cultu et Amore Dei,” is printed in Notes Theological and Political, London, 1853, p. 110, but a long series of marginalia on the pages of the treatise, “De Coelo et Inferno,” of which a transcript has been made, remains unpublished. For Coleridge’s views on Swedenborgianism, see “Notes on Noble’s Appeal,” Literary Remains; Coleridge’s Works, Harper & Brothers, 1853, v. 522-527. [164] It may be supposed that it was Blake, the mystic and the spiritualist, that aroused Tulk’s interest, and that, as an indirect consequence, the original edition of his poems, “engraved in writing-hand,” was sent to Coleridge for his inspection and criticism. The Songs of Innocence were published in 1787, ten years before the Lyrical Ballads appeared, and more than thirty years before the date of this letter, but they were known only to a few. Lamb, writing in 1824, speaks of him as Robert Blake, and after praising in the highest terms his paintings and engravings, says that he has never read his poems, “which have been sold hitherto only in manuscript.” It is strange that Coleridge should not have been familiar with them, for in 1812 Crabb Robinson, so he tells us, read them aloud to Wordsworth, who was “pleased with some of them, and considered Blake as having the elements of poetry, a thousand times more than either Byron or Scott.” None, however, of these hearty and genuine admirers appear to have reflected that Blake had “gone back to nature,” a while before Wordsworth or Coleridge turned their steps in that direction. Letters of Charles Lamb, 1886, ii. 104, 105, 324, 325; H. C. Robinson’s Diary, i. 385. [165] In the Aids to Reflection, at the close of a long comment on a passage in Field, Coleridge alludes to “discussions of the Greek Fathers, and of the Schoolmen on the obscure and abysmal subject of the divine A-seity, and the distinction between the ????a and the ????, that is, the Absolute Will as the universal ground of all being, and the election and purpose of God in the personal Idea, as Father.” Coleridge’s Works, 1853, i. 317. [166] The bill in which Coleridge interested himself, and in favour of which he wrote two circulars which were printed and distributed, was introduced in the House of Commons by the first Sir Robert Peel. The object of the bill was to regulate the employment of children in cotton factories. A bill for prohibiting the employment of children under nine was passed in 1833, but it was not till 1844 that the late Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, succeeded in passing the Ten Hours Bills. In a letter of May 3d to Crabb Robinson, Coleridge asks: “Can you furnish us with any other instances in which the legislature has interfered with what is ironically called ‘Free Labour’ (i. e. dared to prohibit soul-murder on the part of the rich, and self-slaughter on that of the poor!), or any dictum of our grave law authorities from Fortescue—to Eldon: for from the borough of Hell I wish to have no representatives.” Henry Crabb Robinson’s Diary, ii. 93-95. [167] James Maitland, 1759-1839, eighth Earl of Lauderdale, belonged to the party of Charles James Fox, and, like Coleridge, opposed the first war with France, which began in 1793. In the ministry of “All the Talents” he held the Great Seal of Scotland. Coleridge calls him plebeian because he inherited the peerage from a remote connection. He was the author of several treatises on finance and political economy. [168] It was, I have been told by an eyewitness, Coleridge’s habit to take a pinch of snuff, and whilst he was talking to rub it between his fingers. He wasted so much snuff in the process that the maid servant had directions to sweep up these literary remains and replace them in the canister. [169] A pet name for the Gillmans’ younger son, Henry. [170] Coleridge was fond of quoting these lines as applicable to himself. [171] Washington Allston. [172] Charles Robert Leslie, historical painter, 1794-1859, was born of American parents, but studied art in London under Washington Allston. A pencil sketch, for which Coleridge sat to him in 1820, is in my possession. Mr. Hamo Thornycroft, R. A., after a careful inspection of other portraits and engravings of S. T. Coleridge, modelled the bust which now (thanks to American generosity) finds its place in Poets’ Corner, mainly in accordance with this sketch. [173] Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, London, 1836, i. 1-3. [174] The Prospectus of the Lectures on the History of Philosophy was printed in Allsop’s Letters, etc., as Letter xliv., November 26, 1818, but the announcement of the time and place has been omitted. A very rare copy of the original prospectus, which has been placed in my hands by Mrs. Henry Watson, gives the following details:— “This course will be comprised in Fourteen Lectures, to commence on Monday evening, December 7, 1818, at eight o’clock, at the Crown and Anchor, Strand; and be continued on the following Mondays, with the intermission of Christmas week—Double Tickets, admitting a Lady and Gentleman, Three Guineas. Single Tickets, Two Guineas. Admission to a Single Lecture, Five Shillings. An Historical and Chronological Guide to the course will be printed.” A reporter was hired at the expense of Hookham Frere to take down the lectures in shorthand. A transcript, which I possess, contains numerous errors and omissions, but is interesting as affording proof of the conversational style of Coleridge’s lectures. See, for further account of Lectures of 1819, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, pp. 238, 239. [175] Thomas Phillips, R. A., 1770-1845, painted two portraits of Coleridge, one of which is in the possession of Mr. John Murray, and was engraved as the frontispiece of the first volume of the Table Talk; and the other in that of Mr. William Rennell Coleridge, of Salston, Ottery St. Mary. The late Lord Chief Justice used to say that the Salston picture was “the best presentation of the outward man.” No doubt it recalled his great-uncle as he remembered him. It certainly bears a close resemblance to the portraits of Coleridge’s brothers, Edward and George, and of other members of the family. [176] My impression is that this letter was written to Mrs. Aders, the beautiful and accomplished daughter of the engraver Raphael Smith, but the address is wanting and I cannot speak with any certainty. [177] Compare lines 16-20 of The Two Founts:— “As on the driving cloud the shiny bow, The poem as a whole was composed in 1826, and, as I am assured by Mrs. Henry Watson (on the authority of her grandmother, Mrs. Gillman), addressed to Mrs. Aders; but the fifth and a preceding stanza, which Coleridge marked for interpolation, in an annotated copy of Poetical Works, 1828 (kindly lent me by Mrs. Watson), must have been written before that date, and were, as I gather from an insertion in a note-book, originally addressed to Mrs. Gillman. Poetical Works, p. 196. See, too, for unprinted stanza, Ibid. Editor’s Note, p. 642. [178] “To Two Sisters.” Poetical Works, p. 179. [179] The so-called “Manchester Massacre,” nicknamed Peterloo, took place August 16, 1819. Towards the middle of October dangerous riots broke out at North Shields. Cries of “Blood for blood,” “Manchester over again,” were heard in the streets, and “so daring have the mob been that they actually threatened to burn or destroy the ships of war.” Annual Register, October 15-23, 1819. [180] “Fears in Solitude.” Poetical Works, p. 127. [181] Mrs. Gillman’s sister. [182] A collection of casts of antique gems, once, no doubt, the property of S. T. C., is now in the possession of Alexander Gillman, Esq., of Sussex Square, Brighton. [183] Edward Dubois, satirist, 1775-1850, was the author of The Wreath, a Translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron, 1804, and other works besides those mentioned in the text. Biographical Dictionary. [184] A late note-book of the Highgate period contains the following doggerel:— To the most veracious Anecdotist and Tom Hill who laughs at cares and woes, “The first time,” writes Miss Stuart, in a personal remembrance of Coleridge, headed “A Farewell, 1834,” “I dined in company at my father’s table, I sat between Coleridge and Mr. Hill (known as ‘Little Tommy Hill’) of the Adelphi, and Ezekiel then formed the theme of Coleridge’s eloquence. I well remember his citing the chapter of the Dead Bones, and his sepulchral voice as he asked, ‘Can these bones live?’ Then, his observation that nothing in the range of human thought was more sublime than Ezekiel’s reply, ‘Lord, thou knowest,’ in deepest humility, not presuming to doubt the omnipotence of the Most High.” Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 322. See, too, Letters from Hill to Stuart, Ibid. p. 435. [185] William Elford Leach, 1790-1836, a physician and naturalist, was at this time Curator of the Natural History Department at the British Museum. By Lawrencian, Coleridge means a disciple of the eminent surgeon William Lawrence, whose “Lectures on the Physiology, ZoÖlogy, and Natural History of Man,” which were delivered in 1816, are alluded to more than once in his “Theory of Life.” “Theory of Life” in Miscellanies, Æsthetic and Literary, Bohn’s Standard Library, pp. 377, 385. [186] Included in the Omniana of 1809-1816. Table Talk, etc., Bell & Sons, 1884, p. 400. [187] Compare a letter of Coleridge to Allsop, dated October 8, 1822, in which he details “the four griping and grasping sorrows, each of which seemed to have my very heart in its hands, compressing or wringing.” It was the publication of this particular letter, with its thinly-veiled allusions to Wordsworth, Southey, and to Coleridge’s sons, which not only excited indignation against Allsop, but moved Southey to write a letter to Cottle. Letters, Conversation, etc., 1836, ii. 140-146. [188] Compare “The Wanderer’s Farewell to Two Sisters” (Mrs. Morgan and Miss Brent), 1807. Miss Brent made her home with her married sister, Mrs. J. J. Morgan, and during the years 1810-1815, when Coleridge lived under the Morgans’ roof at Hammersmith, in London, and in the West of England, he received from these ladies the most affectionate care and attention, both in sickness and in health. Poetical Works, pp. 179, 180. [189] The Reverend Edward Coleridge, 1800-1883, the sixth and youngest son of Colonel James Coleridge, was for many years a Master and afterwards a Fellow of Eton. He also held the College living of Mapledurham near Reading. He corresponded with his uncle, who was greatly attached to him, on philosophical and theological questions. It was to him that the “Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit” were originally addressed in the form of letters. [190] Colonel Coleridge’s only daughter, Frances Duke, was afterwards married to the Honourable Mr. Justice Patteson, a Judge of the Queen’s Bench. Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore “Youth and Age,” ll. 12-15. Poetical Works, p. 191. A MS. copy of “Youth and Age” in my possession, of which the probable date is 1822, reads “boats” for “skiffs.” [192] Sir Alexander Johnston, 1775-1849, a learned orientalist. He was Advocate General (afterwards Chief Justice) of Ceylon, and had much to do with the reorganisation of the constitution of the island. He was one of the founders of the Royal Asiatic Society. Dict. of Nat. Biog. art. “Johnston, Sir Alexander.” [193] Gabriele Rossetti, 1783-1854, the father of Dante G. Rossetti, etc., first visited England as a political exile in 1824. In 1830 he was appointed Professor of the Italian language at King’s College. He is best known as a commentator on Dante. He presented Coleridge with a copy of his work, Dello Spirito Antipapale che Produsse la Riforma, and some of his verses in MS., which are in my possession. [194] From the letter of Wordsworth to Lord Lonsdale, of February 5, 1819, it is plain that the translation of three books of the Æneid had been already completed at that date. Another letter written five years later, November 3, 1824, implies that the work had been put aside, and, after a long interval, reattempted. In the mean time a letter of Coleridge to Mrs. Allsop, of April 8, 1824, tells us that the three books had been sent to Coleridge and must have remained in his possession for some time. The MS. of this translation appears to have been lost, but “one of the books,” Professor Knight tells us, was printed in the Philological Museum, at Cambridge, in 1832. Life of W. Wordsworth, ii. 296-303. [195] Coleridge was at this time (1824) engaged in making a selection of choice passages from the works of Archbishop Leighton, which, together with his own comment and corollaries, were published as Aids to Reflection, in 1825. See Letter CCXXX. [196] Conversations of Lord Byron, etc., by Captain Medwin. [197] The frontispiece of the second volume of the Antiquary represents Dr. Dousterswivel digging for treasure in Misticot’s grave. The resemblance to Coleridge is, perhaps, not wholly imaginary. [198] John Taylor Coleridge was editor of the Quarterly Review for one year, 1825-1826. Southey’s Life and Correspondence, v. 194, 201, 204, 239, etc.; Letters of Robert Southey, iii. 455, 473, 511, 514, etc. [199] Henry Hart Milman, 1791-1868, afterwards celebrated as historian and divine (Dean of St. Paul’s, 1849), was, at this time, distinguished chiefly as a poet. His Fall of Jerusalem was published in 1820. He was a contributor to the Quarterly Review. [200] Afterward the wife of Sir George Beaumont, the artist’s son and successor in the baronetcy. [201] Almost the same sentence with regard to his address as Royal Associate occurs in a letter to his nephew, John Taylor Coleridge, of May 20, 1825. The “Essay on the Prometheus of Æschylus,” which was printed in Literary Remains, was republished in Coleridge’s Works, Harper & Brothers, 1853, iv. 344-365. See, also, Brandl’s Life of Coleridge, p. 361. [202] The portrait of William Hart Coleridge, Bishop of Barbadoes and the Leeward Islands, by Thomas Phillips, R. A., is now in the Hall of Christ Church, Oxford. [203] A sprig of this myrtle (or was it a sprig of myrtle in a nosegay?) grew into a plant. At some time after Coleridge’s death it passed into the hands of the late S. C. Hall, who presented it to the late Lord Coleridge. It now flourishes, in strong old age, in a protected nook outside the library at Heath’s Court, Ottery St. Mary. [204] George Dyer, 1755-1841, best remembered as the author of The History of the University of Cambridge, and a companion work on The Privileges of the University of Cambridge, began life as a Baptist minister, but settled in London as a man of letters in 1792. As a “brother-Grecian” he was introduced to Coleridge in 1794, in the early days of pantisocracy, and probably through him became intimate with Lamb and Southey. He contributed “The Show, an English Eclogue,” and other poems, to the Annual Anthology of 1799 and 1800. His poetry was a constant source of amused delight to Lamb and Coleridge. A pencil sketch of Dyer by Matilda Betham is in the British Museum. Letters of Charles Lamb, i. 125-128 et passim; Southey’s Life and Correspondence, i. 218 et passim. [205] George Cattermole, 1800-1868, to whose “peculiar gifts and powerful genius” Mr. Ruskin has borne testimony, was eminent as an architectural draughtsman and water-colour painter. With his marvellous illustrations of “Master Humphrey’s Clock” all the world is familiar. Dict. of Nat. Biog. art. “George Cattermole.” His brother Richard was Secretary of the Royal Society of Literature, of which Coleridge was appointed a Royal Associate in 1825. Copies of this and of other letters from Coleridge to Cattermole were kindly placed at my disposal by Mr. James M. Menzies of 24, Carlton Hill, St. John’s Wood. [206] Harriet Macklin, Coleridge’s faithful attendant for the last seven or eight years of his life. On his deathbed he left a solemn request in writing that his family should make a due acknowledgment of her services. It was to her that Lamb, when he visited Highgate after Coleridge’s death, made a present of five guineas. [207] Dr. Chalmers represented the visit as having lasted three hours, and that during that “stricken” period he only got occasional glimpses of what the prophet “would be at.” His little daughter, however, was so moved by the “mellifluous flow of discourse” that, when “the music ceased, her overwrought feelings found relief in tears.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, 1894, p. 260, footnote. [208] A disciple and amanuensis, to whom, it is believed, he dictated two quarto volumes on “The History of Logic” and “The Elements of Logic,” which originally belonged to Joseph Henry Green, and are now in the possession of Mr. C. A. Ward of Chingford Hatch. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, 1894, pp. 250, 251; AthenÆum, July 1, 1893, art. “Coleridge’s Logic.” [209] Henry Nelson Coleridge, 1798-1843, was the fifth son of Colonel James Coleridge of Heath’s Court, Ottery St. Mary. His marriage with the poet’s daughter took place on September 3, 1829. He was the author of Six Months in the West Indies, 1825, and an Introduction to the Study of the Greek Poets, 1830. He practised as a chancery barrister and won distinction in his profession. The later years of his life were devoted to the reËditing of his uncle’s published works, and to throwing into a connected shape the literary as distinguished from the philosophical section of his unpublished MSS. The Table Talk, the best known of Coleridge’s prose works, appeared in 1835. Four volumes of Literary Remains, including the “Lectures on Shakespeare and other Dramatists,” were issued 1836-1839. The third edition of The Friend, 1837, the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, 1840, and the fifth edition of Aids to Reflection, 1843, followed in succession. The second edition of the Biographia Literaria, which “he had prepared in part,” was published by his widow in 1847. A close study of the original documents which were at my uncle’s disposal enables me to bear testimony to his editorial skill, to his insight, his unwearied industry, his faithfulness. Of the charm of his appearance, and the brilliance of his conversation, I have heard those who knew him speak with enthusiasm. He died, from an affection of the spine, in January, 1843. [210] This lady was for many years governess in the family of Dr. Crompton of Eaton Hall, near Liverpool. Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge, London, 1873, i. 8 109-116. [211] Sir William Rowan Hamilton, 1805-1865, the great mathematician, was at this time Professor of Astronomy at Dublin. He was afterwards appointed Astronomer Royal of Ireland. He was, as is well known, a man of culture and a poet; and it was partly to ascertain his views on scientific questions, and partly to interest him in his verses, that Hamilton was anxious to be made known to Coleridge. He had begun a correspondence with Wordsworth as early as 1827, and Wordsworth, on the occasion of his tour in Ireland in 1829, visited Hamilton at the Observatory. Miss Lawrence’s introduction led to an interview, but a letter which Hamilton wrote to Coleridge in the spring of 1832 remained unanswered. In a second letter, dated February 3, 1833, he speaks of a “Lecture on Astronomy” which he forwards for Coleridge’s acceptance, and also of “some love-poems to a lady to whom I am shortly to be married.” The love-poems, eight sonnets, which are smoothly turned and are charming enough, have survived, but the lecture has disappeared. The interest of this remarkable letter lies in the double appeal to Coleridge as a scientific authority and a literary critic. Coleridge’s reply, if reply there was, would be read with peculiar interest. In a letter to Mr. Aubrey de Vere, May 28, 1832, he thus records his impressions of Coleridge: “Coleridge is rather to be considered as a Faculty than as a Mind; and I did so consider him. I seemed rather to listen to an oracular voice, to be circumfused in a Divine ?f?, than—as in the presence of Wordsworth—to hold commune with an exalted man.” Life of W. Wordsworth, iii. 157-174, 210, etc. [212] He is referring to a final effort to give up the use of opium altogether. It is needless to say that, after a trial of some duration, the attempt was found to be impracticable. It has been strenuously denied, as though it had been falsely asserted, that under the Gillmans’ care Coleridge overcame the habit of taking laudanum in more or less unusual quantities. Gillman, while he maintains that his patient in the use of narcotics satisfied the claims of duty, makes no such statement; and the confessions or outpourings from the later note-books which are included in the Life point to a different conclusion. That after his settlement at Highgate, in 1816, the habit was regulated and brought under control, and that this change for the better was due to the Gillmans’ care and to his own ever-renewed efforts to be free, none can gainsay. There was a moral struggle, and into that “sore agony” it would be presumption to intrude; but to a moral victory Coleridge laid no claim. And, at the last, it was “mercy,” not “praise,” for which he pleaded. [213] The notes on Asgill’s Treatises were printed in the Literary Remains, Coleridge’s Works, 1853, v. 545-550, and in Notes Theological and Political, London, 1853, pp. 103-109. [214] Admirers of Dr. Magee, 1765-1831, who was successively Bishop of Raphoe, 1819, and Archbishop of Dublin, 1822. He was the author of Discourses on the Scriptural Doctrines of the Atonement. He was grandfather of the late Archbishop of York, better known as Bishop of Peterborough. [215] I am indebted to Mr. John Henry Steinmetz, a younger brother of Coleridge’s friend and ardent disciple, for a copy of this letter. It was addressed, he informs me, to his brother’s friend, the late Mr. John Peirse Kennard, of Hordle Cliff, Hants, father of the late Sir John Coleridge Kennard, Bart., M. P. for Salisbury, and of Mr. Adam Steinmetz Kennard, of Crawley Court Hants, at whose baptism the poet was present, and to whom he addressed the well-known letter (Letter CCLX.), “To my Godchild, Adam Steinmetz Kennard.” [216] See Table Talk, August 14, 1832. [217] So, too, of Keats. See Table Talk, etc., Bell & Sons. 1884, Talk for August 14, 1832. Table p. 179. [218] “The sot would reject the poisoned cup, yet the trembling-hand with which he raises his daily or hourly draught to his lips has not left him ignorant that this, too, is altogether a poison.” The Friend, Essay xiv.; Coleridge’s Works, ii. 100. [219] The motto of this theme, (January 19, 1794), of which I possess a transcript in Coleridge’s handwriting, or perhaps the original copy, is— Quid fas The theme was selected by Boyer for insertion in his Liber Aureus of school exercises in prose and verse, now in the possession of James Boyer, Esq., of the Coopers’ Company. The sentence to which Coleridge alludes ran thus: “As if we were in some great sea-vortex, every moment we perceive our ruin more clearly, every moment we are impelled towards it with greater force.” The essay was printed for the first time in the Illustrated London News, April 1, 1893. [220] This letter, which is addressed in Coleridge’s handwriting, “Mrs. Aders, favoured by H. Gillman,” and endorsed in pencil, “S. T. C.’s letter for Miss Denman,” refers to the new edition of his poetical works which Coleridge had begun to see through the press. Apparently he had intended that the “Epitaph” should be inscribed on the outline of a headstone, and that this should illustrate, by way of vignette, the last page of the volume. [221] Of the exact date of Sterling’s first visit to Highgate there is no record. It may, however, be taken for granted that his intimacy with Coleridge began in 1828, when he was in his twenty-third year, and continued until the autumn of 1833,—perhaps lasted until Coleridge’s death. Unlike Maurice, and Maurice’s disciple, Kingsley, Sterling outlived his early enthusiasm for Coleridge and his acceptance of his teaching. It may be said, indeed, that, thanks to the genius of his second master, Carlyle, he suggests both the reaction against and the rejection of Coleridge. Of that rejection Carlyle, in his Life of Sterling, made himself the mouth-piece. It is idle to say of that marvellous but disillusioning presentment that it is untruthful, or exaggerated, or unkind. It is a sketch from the life, and who can doubt that it is lifelike? But other eyes saw another Coleridge who held them entranced. To them he was the seer of the vision beautiful, the “priest of invisible rites behind the veil of the senses,” and to their ears his voice was of one who brought good tidings of reconciliation and assurance. Many, too, who cared for none of these things, were attracted to the man. Like the wedding-guest in the Ancient Mariner, they stood still. No other, they felt, was so wise, so loveable. They, too, were eye-witnesses, and their portraiture has not been outpainted by Carlyle. Apart from any expression of opinion, it is worth while to note that Carlyle saw Coleridge for the last time in the spring of 1825, and that the Life of Sterling was composed more than a quarter of a century later. His opinion of the man had, indeed, changed but little, as the notes and letters of 1824-25 clearly testify, but his criticism of the writer was far less appreciative than it had been in Coleridge’s lifetime. The following extracts from a letter of Sterling to Gillman, dated “Hurstmonceaux, October 9, 1834,” are evidence that his feelings towards Coleridge were at that time those of a reverent disciple:— “The Inscription [in Highgate Church] will forever be enough to put to shame the heartless vanity of a thousand such writers as the Opium Eater. As a portrait, or even as a hint for one, his papers seem to me worse than useless. “If it is possible, I will certainly go to Highgate, and wait on Mrs. Gillman and yourself. I have travelled the road thither with keen and buoyant expectation, and returned with high and animating remembrances oftener than any other in England. Hereafter, too, it will not have lost its charm. There is not only all this world of recollection, but the dwelling of those who best knew and best loved his work.” Life of Sterling, 1871, pp. 46-54; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, pp. 259-261; British Museum, add. MS. 34,225, f. 194. [222] The following unpublished lines were addressed by Coleridge to this young lady, a neighbour, I presume, and friend of the Gillmans. They must be among the last he ever wrote:— ELISA. The whole adapted from an epigram of Claudius by substituting Thura for mella, the original distich being in return for a Present of Honey. Imitation. Another on the same subject by S. T. C. himself:— Semper, Eliza! mihi tu suaveolentia donas: Literal translation: Always, Eliza! to me things of sweet odour thou presentest. For whatever thou presentest, I fancy redolent of thyself. Whate’er thou giv’st, it still is sweet to me, [223] Philip Van Artevelde. [224] Sir Henry Taylor. 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