_that_ being secured by the universal spirit of brotherly and social
feeling amongst the dalesmen of the lake district. He was even liberal
and generous, if we may rely upon the few instances reported by W. W.
His life of heroic money-getting had not, it seems, made his heart
narrow in that particular direction, though it must not be forgotten
that the calls upon him were rare and trivial. But however _that_ may
have been, the heart of stone had usurped upon the heart of flesh in all
that regarded the spiritualities of his office. He was conscientious, we
dare say, in what related to the _sacramentum militaire_ (as construed
by himself) of his pastoral soldiership. He would, perhaps, have died
for the doctrines of his church, and we do not like him the worse for
having been something of a bigot, being ourselves the most malignant of
Tories (thank Heaven for all its mercies!). But what tenderness or
pathetic breathings of spirituality _could_ that man have, who had no
time beyond a few stray quarters of an hour for thinking of his own
supreme relations to heaven, or to his flock on behalf of heaven? How
could that man cherish or deepen the motions of religious truth within
himself, whose thoughts were habitually turned to the wool market?
Ninety and odd years he lived on earth labouring like a bargeman or a
miner. Assuredly he was not one of the _fainéans_. And within a narrow
pastoral circle he left behind him a fragrant memory that will, perhaps,
wear as long as most reputations in literature. Nay, he even acquired by
acclamation a sort of title, viz., the posthumous surname of the
_wonderful_; pointing, however, we fear, much less to anything in
himself than to the unaccountable amount of money which he left behind
him--unaccountable by comparison with any modes of industry which he
practised, all of which were indomitably persevering, but all humble in
their results. Finally, he has had the honour (which, much we fear, men
far more interesting in the same situation, but in a less homely way,
never _would_ have had) of a record from the pen of Wordsworth. We and
others have always remarked it as one of the austere Roman features in
the mind of Wordsworth, that of all poets he has the least sympathy,
effeminate or not effeminate, with romantic disinterestedness. He cannot
bear to hear of a man working by choice for nothing, which certainly
_is_ an infirmity, where at all it arises from want of energy or of just
self-appreciation, but still an amiable one, and in certain directions a
sublime one. Walker had no such infirmity. He laboured in those fields
which ensure instant payment. Verily he _had_ his reward: ten per cent.,
at least, beyond all other men, without needing to think of reversions,
either above or below. The unearthly was suffocated in _him_ by the
earthly. Let us leave him, and return to a better man, viz., to the Rev.
John Coleridge, author of the _Quale-quare-quidditive_ case--a man equal
in simplicity o£ habits and in humility, but better in the sight of God,
because he laboured in the culture of his higher and not his lower
faculties.
Mr. John Coleridge married a second time; and we are perplexed to say
_when_. The difficulty is this: he had by his second wife ten children.
Now, as _the_ Coleridge, the youngest of the flock, was born in 1772,
the space between that year and 1760 seems barely adequate to such a
succession of births. Yet, on the other hand, _before_ 1760 he could not
probably have seen his second wife, unless, indeed, on some casual trip
to Devonshire. Her name was Anne Bowden; and she was of a respectable
family, that had been long stationary in Devonshire, but of a yeomanly
rank; and people of that rank a century back did not often make visits
as far as Southampton. The question is not certainly of any great
importance; and we notice it only to make a parade of our chronologic
acumen. Devilish sly is Josy Bagstock! It is sufficient that her last
child was her illustrious child; and, if S. T. C.'s theory has any
foundation, we must suppose him illustrious _because_ he was the last.
For he imagines that in any long series of children the last will,
according to all experience, have the leonine share of intellect. But
this contradicts our own personal observation; and, besides, it seems to
be unsound upon an _à priori_ ground, viz., that to be the first child
carries a meaning with it: _that_ place in the series has a real
physiologic value; and we have known families in which, from generation
to generation, the first-born child had physical advantages denied to
all that followed. But to be the last child must very often be the
result of accident, and has in reality no meaning in any sense known to
nature. The sixth child, let us suppose, is a blockhead. And soon after
the birth of this sixth child, his father, being drunk, breaks his neck.
That accident cannot react upon this child to invest him with the
privileges of absolute juniority. Being a blockhead, he will remain a
blockhead. Yet he is the youngest; but, then, nature is no party to his
being such, and probably she is no party (by means of any physical
change in the parents) once in a thousand births to a case of absolute
and predeterminate juniority.
Whether with or without the intention of nature, S. T. C. was fated to
be the last of his family. He was the tenth child of the second flock,
and possibly there might have been an eleventh or even a twentieth, but
for the following termination of his father's career, which we give in
the words of his son. 'Towards the latter end of September, 1781, my
father went to Plymouth with my brother Francis, who was to go out as'
(a) 'midshipman under Admiral Graves--a friend of my father's. He
settled Frank as he wished, and returned on the 4th of October, 1781. He
arrived at Exeter about six o'clock, and was pressed to take a bed there
by the friendly family of the Harts; but he refused, and, to avoid their
entreaties, he told them that he had never been superstitious, but that
the night before he had had a dream, which had made a deep impression on
him. He dreamed that Death had appeared to him, as he is commonly
painted, and had touched him with his dart. Well, he returned home; and
all his family, _I_ excepted, were up. He told my mother his dream; but
he was in good health and high spirits; and there was a bowl of punch
made, and my father gave a long and particular account of his travels,
and that he had placed Frank under a religious captain, and so forth. At
length he went to bed, very well and in high spirits. A short time after
he had lain down, he complained of a pain to which he was subject. My
mother got him some peppermint water, which he took; and after a pause
he said, "I am much better now, my dear!" and lay down again. In a
minute my mother heard a noise in his throat, and spoke to him; but he
did not answer, and she spoke repeatedly in vain. Her shriek awaked me,
and I said, "Papa is dead!" I did not know of my father's return, but I
knew that he was expected. How I came to think of his death, I cannot
tell; but so it was. Dead he was. Some said it was gout in the heart;
probably it was a fit of apoplexy. He was an Israelite without guile,
simple, generous; and, taking some Scripture texts in their literal
sense, he was conscientiously indifferent to the good and evil of this
world.'
This was the account of his father's sudden death in 1781, written by S.
T. Coleridge in 1797. 'Thirty years afterwards' (but after 1781 or after
1797?), says Mr. H. N. Coleridge, 'S. T. C. breathed a wish for such a
death, "if," he added, "like him I were an Israelite without guile!" and
then added, "The image of my father, my revered, kind, learned,
simple-hearted father, is a religion to me."'
In his ninth year, therefore, thus early and thus suddenly, Coleridge
lost his father; and in the result, though his mother lived for many a
year after, he became essentially an orphan, being thrown upon the
struggles of this world, and for ever torn from his family, except as a
visitor when equally he and they had changed. Yet such is the world, and
so inevitably does it grow thorns amongst its earliest roses, that even
that dawn of life when he had basked in the smiles of two living
parents, was troubled for _him_ by a dark shadow that followed his steps
or ran before him, obscuring his light upon every path. This was Francis
Coleridge, one year older, that same boy whom his father had in his last
journey upon earth accompanied to Plymouth.
We shall misconceive the character of Francis if we suppose him to have
been a boy of bad nature. He turned out a gallant young man, and
perished at twenty-one from over exertion in Mysore, during the first
war with Tippoo Sahib. How he came to be transferred from the naval to
the land service, is a romantic story, for which, as it has no relation
to _the_ Coleridge, we cannot find room.
In that particular relation, viz., to _the_ Coleridge, Francis may seem
at first to have been unamiable, and especially since the little Samuel
was so entirely at the mercy of his superior hardiness and strength;
but, in fact, his violence arose chiefly from the contempt natural to a
bold adventurous nature for a nursery pet, and a contempt irritated by a
counter admiration which he could not always refuse. 'Frank,' says S. T.
C., looking back to these childish days, 'had a violent love of beating
me; but, whenever _that_ was superseded by any humour or circumstances,
he was always very fond of me, and used to regard me with a strange
mixture of admiration and contempt. Strange it was not; for he hated
books, and loved climbing, fighting, playing, robbing orchards, to
distraction.'
In the latter part of 1778, when S. T. C. was six years old, and
recently admitted to King's School at Ottery, he and his brother George
(that brother to whom his early poems were afterwards dedicated) caught
a putrid fever at the same time. But on this occasion Frank displayed
his courageous kindness; for, in contempt of orders to the contrary, and
in contempt of the danger, he stole up to the bedside of little Samuel
and read Pope's 'Homer' to him. This made it evident that Frank's
partiality for thumping S. T. C. did really arise very much out of a
lurking love for him; since George, though a most amiable boy, and ill
of the same fever in another room, was left to get well in the usual
way, by medicine and slops, without any thumping certainly, but also
without any extra consolations from either Iliad or Odyssey. But what
ministered perpetual fuel to the thumping-mania of Francis Coleridge was
a furor of jealousy--strangely enough not felt by him, but felt _for_
him by his old privileged nurse. She could not inspire her own passions
into Francis, but she could point his scorn to the infirmities of his
rival. Francis had once reigned paramount in the vicarage as universal
pet. But he had been dethroned by Samuel, who now reigned in his stead.
Samuel felt no triumph at that revolution; Francis no anger. But the
nurse suffered the pangs of a baffled stepmother, and looked with
novercal eyes of hatred and disgust upon little Sam that had stolen away
the hearts of men and women from one that in _her_ eyes was a thousand
times his superior. In that last point nurse was not so entirely wrong,
but that nine-tenths of the world (and therefore, we fear, of our
dearly-beloved readers) would have gone along with her, on which account
it is that we have forborne to call her 'wicked old nurse.' Francis
Coleridge, her own peculiar darling, was memorable for his beauty. All
the brothers were handsome--'remarkably handsome,' says S. T. C., 'but
_they_,' he adds, 'were as inferior to Francis as _I_ am to _them_.'[11]
Reading this and other descriptions of Frank Coleridge's beauty (in our
Indian army he was known as the _handsome Coleridge_), we are disposed
to cry out with Juliet,
'Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feathered raven!'
when we find how very nearly his thoughtless violence had hurried poor
S. T. C. into an early death. The story is told circumstantially by
Coleridge himself in one of the letters to Mr. Poole; nor is there any
scene more picturesque than this hasty sketch in Brookes's 'Fool of
Quality.' We must premise that S. T. C. had asked his mother for a
particular indulgence requiring some dexterity to accomplish. The
difficulty, however, through _her_ cautious manipulations, had just been
surmounted, when Samuel left the room for a single instant, and found
upon his return that the beautiful Francis had confounded all Mama's
labours, and had defeated his own enjoyment. What followed is thus told
by Samuel nearly twenty years after: 'I returned, saw the exploit, and
flew at Frank. He pretended to have been seriously hurt by my blow,
flung himself upon the ground, and there lay with outstretched limbs.'
This is good comedy: the pugnacious Frank affecting to be an Abel,
killed by a blow from Cain such as doubtless would not have 'made a dint
in a pound of butter.' But wait a little. Samuel was a true penitent as
ever was turned off for fratricide at Newgate. 'I,' says the unhappy
murderer, 'hung over him mourning and in great fright;' but the murdered
Frank by accident came to life again. 'He leaped up, and with a hoarse
laugh gave me a severe blow in the face.' This was too much. To have
your grief flapped back in your face like a wet sheet is bad, but also
and at the same time to have your claret uncorked is unendurable. The
'Ancient Mariner,' then about seven years old, could not stand this.
'With _his_ cross-bow'--no, stop! what are we saying? Nothing better
than a kitchen knife was at hand--and 'this,' says Samuel, 'I seized,
and was running at him, when my mother came in and took me by the arm. I
expected a whipping, and, struggling from her, I ran away to a little
hill or slope, at the bottom of which the Otter flows, about a mile from
Ottery. There I stayed, my rage died away; but my obstinacy vanquished
my fears, and taking out a shilling book, which had at the end morning
and evening prayers, I very devoutly repeated them, thinking at the same
time with a gloomy inward satisfaction how miserable my mother must be.
I distinctly remember my feelings when I saw a Mr. Vaughan pass over the
bridge at about a furlong's distance, and how I watched the calves in
the fields beyond the river. It grew dark, and I fell asleep. It was
towards the end of October, and it proved a stormy night. I felt the
cold in my sleep, and dreamed that I was pulling the blanket over me,
and actually pulled over me a dry thorn-bush which lay on the ground
near me. In my sleep I had rolled from the top of the hill till within
three yards of the river, which flowed by the unfenced edge of the
bottom. I awoke several times, and, finding myself wet and cold and
stiff, closed my eyes again that I might forget it.
'In the meantime my mother waited about half an hour, expecting my
return when the _sulks_ had evaporated. I not returning, she sent into
the churchyard and round the town. Not found! Several men and all the
boys were sent out to ramble about and seek me. In vain. My mother was
almost distracted, and at ten o'clock at night I was cried by the crier
in Ottery and in two villages near it, with a reward offered for me. No
one went to bed; indeed, I believe half the town were up all the night.
To return to myself. About five in the morning, or a little after, I was
broad awake, and attempted to get up and walk, but I could not move. I
saw the shepherds and workmen at a distance and cried, but so faintly
that it was impossible to hear me thirty yards off. And there I might
have lain and died, for I was now almost given over, the ponds, and even
the river (near which I was lying), having been dragged. But
providentially Sir Stafford Northcote, who had been out all night,
resolved to make one other trial, and came so near that he heard me
crying. He carried me in his arms for nearly a quarter of a mile, when
we met my father and Sir Stafford's servants. I remember, and never
shall forget, my father's face as he looked upon me while I lay in the
servant's arms--so calm, and the tears stealing down his face, for I was
the child of his old age. My mother, as you may suppose, was outrageous
with joy. Meantime in rushed a young lady, crying out, "_I hope you'll
whip him, Mrs. Coleridge_." This woman still lives at Ottery, and
neither philosophy nor religion has been able to conquer the antipathy
which I feel towards her whenever I see her.' So says Samuel. We
ourselves have not yet seen this young lady, and now in 1849,
considering that it is about eighty years from the date of her
wickedness, it seems unlikely that we shall. But _our_ antipathy we
declare to be also, alas! quite unconquerable by the latest supplements
to the Transcendental philosophy that we have yet received from
Deutschland. Whip the Ancient Mariner, indeed! A likely thing _that_:
and at the very moment when he was coming off such a hard night's duty,
and supporting a character which a classical Roman has pronounced to be
a spectacle for Olympus--viz., that of '_Puer bonus cum malâ-fortunâ
compositus_' (a virtuous boy matched in duel with adversity)! The sequel
of the adventure is thus reported: 'I was put to bed, and recovered in a
day or so. But I was certainly injured; for I was weakly and subject to
ague for many years after.' Yes; and to a worse thing than ague, as not
so certainly to be cured, viz., rheumatism. More than twenty years after
this cold night's rest, _à la belle étoile_, we can vouch that Coleridge
found himself obliged to return suddenly from a tour amongst the
Scottish Highlands solely in consequence of that painful rheumatic
affection, which was perhaps traceable to this childish misadventure.
Alas! Francis the beautiful scamp, that caused the misadventure, and
probably the bad young lady that prescribed whipping as the orthodox
medicine for curing it, and the poor Ancient Mariner himself--that had
to fight his way through such enemies at the price of ague, rheumatism,
and tears uncounted--are all asleep at present, but in graves how widely
divided! One near London; one near Seringapatam; and the young lady, we
suppose, in Ottery churchyard, but her offence, though beyond the power
of Philosophy to pardon, is not remembered, we trust, in her epitaph!
We are sorry that S. T. C. having been so much of a darling with his
father, and considering that he looked back to the brief connection
between them as solemnized by its pathetic termination, had not reported
some parts of their graver intercourse. One such fragment he does
report; it is an elementary lesson upon astronomy, which his father gave
him in the course of a walk upon a starry night. This is in keeping with
the grandeur and responsibility of the paternal relation. But really, in
the only other example (which immediately occurs) of Papa's attempt to
bias the filial intellect, we recognise nothing but what is mystical;
and involuntarily we think of him in the modern slang character of
'governor,' rather than as a 'guide, philosopher, and friend.' It seems
that one Saturday, about the time when the Rev. Walker in Furness must
have been sitting down to his _exegesis_ of hard sayings in the _Town
and Country Magazine_, the Rev. Coleridge thought fit to reward S. T. C.
for the most singular act of virtue that we have ever heard imputed to
man or boy--to 'saint, to savage, or to sage'--viz., the act of eating
beans and bacon to a large amount. The stress must be laid on the word
_large_; because simply to masticate beans and bacon, we do not
recollect to have been regarded with special esteem by the learned
vicar; it was the liberal consumption of them that entitled Samuel to
reward. That reward was one penny, so that in degree of merit, after
all, the service may not have ranked high. But what perplexes us is the
_kind_ of merit. Did it bear some mystical or symbolic sense? Was it
held to argue a spirit of general rebellion against Philosophy, that S.
T. C. should so early in life, by one and the same act, proclaim
mutinous disposition towards two of the most memorable amongst earth's
philosophers--Moses and Pythagoras; of whom the latter had set his face
against beans, laying it down for his opinion that to eat beans and to
cut one's father's throat were acts of about equal atrocity; whilst the
other, who tolerated the beans, had expressly forbidden the bacon? We
are really embarrassed; finding the mere fact recorded with no further
declaration of the rev. governor's reasons, than that such an
'attachment' (an _attachment_ to beans and bacon!) 'ought to be
encouraged'; but upon what principle we no more understand than we do
the principle of the _Quale-quare-quidditive_ case.
The letters in which these early memorabilia of Coleridge's life are
reported did not proceed beyond the fifth. We regret this greatly, for
they would have become instructively interesting as they came more and
more upon the higher ground of his London experience in a mighty world
of seven hundred boys--insulated in a sort of monastic but troubled
seclusion amongst the billowy world of London; a seclusion that in
itself was a wilderness to a home-sick child, but yet looking verdant as
an oasis amongst that other wilderness of the illimitable metropolis.
It is good to be mamma's darling; but not, reader, if you are to leave
mamma's arms for a vast public school in childhood. It is good to be the
darling of a kind, pious, and learned father--but not if that father is
to be torn away from you for ever by a death without a moment's warning,
whilst as yet you yourself are but nine years old, and he has not
bestowed a thought on your future establishment in life. Upon poor S. T.
C. the Benjamin of his family, descended first a golden dawn within the
Paradise of his father's and his mother's smiles--descended secondly and
suddenly an overcasting hurricane of separation from both father and
mother for ever. How dreadful, if audibly declared, this sentence to a
poor nerve-shattered child: Behold! thou art commanded, before thy first
decennium is completed, to see father and mother no more, and to throw
thyself into the wilderness of London. Yet _that_ was the destiny of
Coleridge. At nine years old he was precipitated into the stormy arena
of Christ's Hospital. Amongst seven hundred boys he was to fight his way
to distinction; and with no other advantages of favour or tenderness
than would have belonged to the son of a footman. Sublime are these
democratic institutions rising upon the bosom of aristocratic England.
Great is the people amongst whom the foundations of kings _can_ assume
this popular character. But yet amidst the grandeur of a national
triumph is heard, at intervals, the moaning of individuals; and from
many a grave in London rises from time to time, in arches of sorrow
audible to God, the lamentation of many a child seeking to throw itself
round for comfort into some distant grave of the provinces, where rest
the ear and the heart of its mother.
Concerning this chapter of Coleridge's childhood, we have therefore at
present no vestige of any record beyond the exquisite sketches of his
schoolfellow, Charles Lamb. The five letters, however, though going over
so narrow a space, go far enough to throw a pathetic light upon
Coleridge's frailties of temperament. They indicate the sort of nervous
agitation arising from contradictory impulses, from love too tender, and
scorn too fretful, by which already in childish days the inner peace had
been broken up, and the nervous system shattered. This revelation,
though so unpretending and simple in manner, of the drama substantially
so fearful, that was constantly proceeding in a quiet and religious
parsonage--the bare possibility that sufferings so durable in their
effects should be sweeping with their eternal storms a heart so
capacious and so passively unresisting--are calculated to startle and to
oppress us with the sense of a fate long prepared, vested in the very
seeds of constitution and character; temperament and the effects of
early experience combining to thwart all the morning promise of
greatness and splendour; the flower unfolding its silken leaves only to
suffer canker and blight; and to hang withering on the stalk, with only
enough of grace and colour left to tell pathetically to all that looked
upon it what it might have been.
EDITOR'S NOTE TO THIS ESSAY.