It is an instance of Coleridge's carelessness that he, who had as

little of fixed ill-nature in his temper as any person whom I have ever

known, managed, in reporting this story at the time of its occurrence,

to get himself hooked into a personal quarrel, which hung over his

head unsettled for nine or ten years. A Liverpool merchant, who was

then meditating a house in the Vale of Grasmere, and perhaps might

have incurred Coleridge's anger by thus disturbing, with inappropriate

intrusions, this loveliest of all English landscapes, had connected

himself a good deal with Hatfield during his Keswick masquerade; and

was said even to have carried his regard to that villain so far as

to have christened one of his own children by the names of "Augustus

Hope." With these and other circumstances, expressing the extent of

the infatuation amongst the swindler's dupes, Coleridge made the

public merry. Naturally, the Liverpool merchant was not amongst those

who admired the facetiousness of Coleridge on this occasion, but

swore vengeance whenever they should meet. They never _did_ meet,

until ten years had gone by; and then, oddly enough, it was in the

Liverpool man's own house--in that very nuisance of a house which had,

I suppose, first armed Coleridge's wrath against him. This house, by

time and accident, in no very wonderful way, had passed into the hands

of Wordsworth as tenant. Coleridge, as was still less wonderful, had

become the visitor of Wordsworth on returning from Malta; and the

Liverpool merchant, as was also natural, either seeking his rent, or on

the general errand of a friendly visit, calling upon Wordsworth, met

Coleridge in the hall. Now came the hour for settling old accounts. I

was present, and can report the case. Both looked grave, and coloured

a little. But ten years work wonders: an armistice of that duration

heals many a wound; and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, requesting his enemy's

company in the garden, entered upon a long metaphysical dissertation,

bordering upon what you might call _philosophical rigmarole_, and

rather puzzling to answer. It seemed to be an expansion, by Thomas

Aquinas, of that parody upon a well-known passage in Shenstone, where

the writer says--

"He kick'd me down-stairs with such a sweet grace

That I thought he was handing me up."

And, in the upshot, this conclusion _eventuated_ (to speak

Yankeeishly), that purely on principles of good neighbourhood and

universal philanthropy could Coleridge have meditated or executed the

insult offered in the "Morning Post." The Liverpool merchant rubbed his

forehead, and seemed a little perplexed; but he was a most good-natured

man; and he was eminently a gentleman. At length, considering, perhaps,

how very like Duns Scotus, or Albertus Magnus, Coleridge had shown

himself in this luminous explanation, he might begin to reflect that,

had any one of those distinguished men offered a similar affront, it

would have been impossible to resent it; for who could think of kicking

the "Doctor Seraphicus," or would it tell to any man's advantage

in history that he had caned Thomas Aquinas? On these principles,

therefore, without saying one word, Liverpoliensis held out his hand,

and a lasting reconciliation followed.

Not very long, I believe, after this affair of Hatfield, Coleridge went

to Malta.[69] His inducement to such a step must have been merely a

desire to see the most interesting regions of the Mediterranean under

the shelter and advantageous introduction of an official station.

It was, however, an unfortunate chapter of his life: for, being

necessarily thrown a good deal upon his own resources in the narrow

society of a garrison, he there confirmed and cherished, if he did not

there form, his habit of taking opium in large quantities. I am the

last person in the world to press conclusions harshly or uncandidly

against Coleridge; but I believe it to be notorious that he first began

the use of opium, not as a relief from any bodily pains or nervous

irritations (since his constitution was strong and excellent), but as

a source of luxurious sensations. It is a great misfortune, at least it

is a great peril, to have tasted the enchanted cup of youthful rapture

incident to the poetic temperament. That fountain of high-wrought

sensibility once unlocked experimentally, it is rare to see a

submission afterwards to the insipidities of daily life. Coleridge, to

speak in the words of Cervantes, wanted better bread than was made of

wheat; and, when youthful blood no longer sustained the riot of his

animal spirits, he endeavoured to excite them by artificial stimulants.

[69] In April 1804.--M.

At Malta he became acquainted with Commodore Decatur and other

Americans of distinction; and this brought him afterwards into

connexion with Allston, the American artist. Of Sir Alexander Ball,

one of Lord Nelson's captains in the battle of the Nile, and Governor

of Malta, he spoke and wrote uniformly in a lavish style of panegyric,

for which plainer men found it difficult to see the slightest ground.

It was, indeed, Coleridge's infirmity to project his own mind, and his

own very peculiar ideas, nay, even his own expressions and illustrative

metaphors, upon other men, and to contemplate these reflex images

from himself as so many characters having an absolute ground in some

separate object. "Ball and Bell"--"Bell and Ball,"[70] were two of

these pet subjects; he had a "craze" about each of them; and to each

he ascribed thoughts and words to which, had they been put upon the

rack, they never would have confessed.

[70] "_Ball and Bell_"--"_Bell and Ball_":--viz. Sir Alexander

Ball, Governor of Malta, and Dr. Andrew Bell, the importer into

England from Madras of that machinery for facilitating popular

education which was afterwards fraudulently appropriated by Joseph

Lancaster. The Bishop of Durham (Shute Barrington) gave to Dr.

Bell, in reward of his Madras services, the princely Mastership of

Sherborne Hospital. The doctor saved in this post £125,000, and

with this money founded Trinity College, Glenalmond, in

Perthshire. Most men have their enemies and calumniators: Dr. Bell

had _his_, who happened rather indecorously to be his wife--from

whom he was legally separated, or (as in Scotch law it is called)

_divorced_; not, of course, divorced _à vinculo matrimonii_ (which

only amounts to a divorce in the English sense--such a divorce as

enables the parties to contract another marriage), but simply

divorced _à mensâ et thoro_. This legal separation, however, did

not prevent the lady from persecuting the unhappy doctor with

everlasting letters, indorsed outside with records of her enmity

and spite. Sometimes she addressed her epistles thus:--"To that

supreme of rogues, who looks the hang-dog that he is, Doctor (such

a doctor!) Andrew Bell." Or again:--"To the ape of apes, and the

knave of knaves, who is recorded to have once paid a debt--but a

small one, you may be sure, it was that he selected for this

wonderful experiment--in fact, it was 4-1/2d. Had it been on the

other side of 6d., he must have died before he could have achieved

so dreadful a sacrifice." Many others, most ingeniously varied in

the style of abuse, I have heard rehearsed by Coleridge, Southey,

Lloyd, &c.; and one, in particular, addressed to the doctor, when

spending a summer at the cottage of Robert Newton, an old soldier,

in Grasmere, presented on the back two separate adjurations: one

specially addressed to Robert himself, pathetically urging him to

look sharply after the rent of his lodgings; and the other more

generally addressed to the unfortunate person, as yet undisclosed

to the British public (and in this case turning out to be myself)

who might be incautious enough to pay the postage at Ambleside.

"Don't grant him an hour's credit," she urged upon the person

unknown, "if I had any regard to my family." "_Cash down!_" she

wrote twice over. Why the doctor submitted to these annoyances,

nobody knew. Some said it was mere indolence; but others held it

to be a cunning compromise with her inexorable malice. The letters

were certainly open to the "public" eye; but meantime the "public"

was a very narrow one; the clerks in the post-office had little

time for digesting such amenities of conjugal affection; and the

chance bearer of the letters to the doctor would naturally solve

the mystery by supposing an _extra_ portion of madness in the

writer, rather than an _extra_ portion of knavery in the reverend

receiver.

From Malta, on his return homewards,[71] he went to Rome and Naples.

One of the cardinals, he tells us, warned him, by the Pope's wish,

of some plot, set on foot by Bonaparte, for seizing him as an

anti-Gallican writer. This statement was ridiculed by the anonymous

assailant in "Blackwood" as the very consummation of moonstruck

vanity; and it is there compared to John Dennis's frenzy in retreating

from the sea-coast, under the belief that Louis XIV had commissioned

emissaries to land on the English shore and make a dash at his person.

But, after all, the thing is not so entirely improbable. For it is

certain that some orator of the Opposition (Charles Fox, as Coleridge

asserts) had pointed out all the principal writers in the "Morning

Post" to Napoleon's vengeance, by describing the war as a war "of that

journal's creation."[72] And, as to the insinuation that Napoleon was

above throwing his regards upon a simple writer of political essays,

_that_ is not only abundantly confuted by many scores of established

cases, but also is specially put down by a case circumstantially

recorded in the Second Tour to Paris by the celebrated John Scott of

Aberdeen.[73] It there appears that, on no other ground whatever than

that of his connexion with the London newspaper press, some friend of

Mr. Scott's had been courted most assiduously by Napoleon during the

_Hundred Days_. Assuredly Coleridge deserved, beyond all other men

that ever were connected with the daily press, to be regarded with

distinction. Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss,

never to be disentombed or restored to human admiration. Like the sea,

it has swallowed treasures without end, that no diving-bell will bring

up again. But nowhere, throughout its shoreless magazines of wealth,

does there lie such a bed of pearls confounded with the rubbish and

"purgamenta" of ages, as in the political papers of Coleridge. No more

_appreciable_ monument could be raised to the memory of Coleridge than

a republication of his essays in the "Morning Post," and afterwards

in the "Courier." And here, by the way, it may be mentioned that

the sagacity of Coleridge, as applied to the signs of the times, is

illustrated by this fact, that distinctly and solemnly he foretold the

restoration of the Bourbons, at a period when most people viewed such

an event as the most romantic of visions, and not less chimerical than

that "march upon Paris" of Lord Hawkesbury's which for so many years

supplied a theme of laughter to the Whigs.

[71] He left Malta 27th September 1805.--M.

[72] Coleridge had long been a contributor to the _Morning

Post_.--M.

[73] _Paris Revisited in 1815 by way of Brussels_ is the title of

this publication in 1816 of the Aberdonian John Scott. He had

previously published _A Visit to Paris in 1814_. He wrote other

things, and was editor of the _London Magazine_ from January 1820

till his death, February 1821, the result of a duel.--M.

Why Coleridge left Malta, is as difficult to explain upon any

principles of ordinary business, as why he had ever gone thither. The

post of secretary, if it imposed any official attendance of a regular

kind, or any official correspondence, must have been but poorly filled

by _him_; and Sir Alexander Ball, if I have collected his character

justly, was not likely to accept the gorgeous philosophy of Coleridge

as an indemnification for irregular performance of his public duties.

Perhaps, therefore, though on the best terms of mutual regard, mutually

they might be pleased to part. Part they did, at any rate, and poor

Coleridge was sea-sick the whole of his homeward (as he had been

through the whole of his outward) voyage.

* * * * *

It was not long after this event that my own introduction to Coleridge

occurred. At that time some negotiation was pending between him and the

Royal Institution, which ended in their engaging him to deliver a course

of lectures on Poetry and the Fine Arts during the ensuing winter.

For this series (twelve or sixteen, I think) he received a sum of one

hundred guineas. And, considering the slightness of the pains which

he bestowed upon them, he was well remunerated. I fear that they did

not increase his reputation; for never did any man treat his audience

with less respect, or his task with less careful attention. I was in

London for part of the time, and can report the circumstances, having

made a point of attending duly at the appointed hours. Coleridge was

at that time living uncomfortably enough at the "Courier" office, in

the Strand.[74] In such a situation, annoyed by the sound of feet

passing his chamber-door continually to the printing-rooms of this

great establishment, and with no gentle ministrations of female hands

to sustain his cheerfulness, naturally enough his spirits flagged; and

he took more than ordinary doses of opium. I called upon him daily, and

pitied his forlorn condition. There was no bell in the room; which for

many months answered the double purpose of bedroom and sitting-room.

Consequently, I often saw him, picturesquely enveloped in nightcaps,

surmounted by handkerchiefs indorsed upon handkerchiefs, shouting from

the attics of the "Courier" office, down three or four flights of

stairs, to a certain "Mrs. Brainbridge," his sole attendant, whose

dwelling was in the subterranean regions of the house. There did I

often see the philosopher, with the most lugubrious of faces, invoking

with all his might this uncouth name of "Brainbridge," each syllable

of which he intonated with long-drawn emphasis, in order to overpower

the hostile hubbub coming downwards from the creaking press, and the

roar from the Strand, which entered at all the front windows. "Mistress

Brainbridge! I say, Mistress Brainbridge!" was the perpetual cry,

until I expected to hear the Strand, and distant Fleet Street, take

up the echo of "Brainbridge!" Thus unhappily situated, he sank more

than ever under the dominion of opium; so that, at two o'clock, when

he should have been in attendance at the Royal Institution, he was too

often unable to rise from bed. Then came dismissals of audience after

audience, with pleas of illness; and on many of his lecture days I have

seen all Albemarle Street closed by a "lock" of carriages, filled with

women of distinction, until the servants of the Institution or their

own footmen advanced to the carriage-doors with the intelligence that

Mr. Coleridge had been suddenly taken ill. This plea, which at first

had been received with expressions of concern, repeated too often,

began to rouse disgust. Many in anger, and some in real uncertainty

whether it would not be trouble thrown away, ceased to attend. And we

that were more constant too often found reason to be disappointed with

the quality of his lecture. His appearance was generally that of a

person struggling with pain and overmastering illness. His lips were

baked with feverish heat, and often black in colour; and, in spite

of the water which he continued drinking through the whole course

of his lecture, he often seemed to labour under an almost paralytic

inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower. In such a state, it

is clear that nothing could save the lecture itself from reflecting

his own feebleness and exhaustion, except the advantage of having

been precomposed in some happier mood. But that never happened: most

unfortunately he relied upon his extempore ability to carry him

through. Now, had he been in spirits, or had he gathered animation,

and kindled by his own motion, no written lecture could have been

more effectual than one of his unpremeditated colloquial harangues.

But either he was depressed originally below the point from which

any re-ascent was possible, or else this re-action was intercepted by

continual disgust from looking back upon his own ill-success; for,

assuredly, he never once recovered that free and eloquent movement

of thought which he could command at any time in a private company.

The passages he read, moreover, in illustrating his doctrines, were

generally unhappily chosen, because chosen at haphazard, from the

difficulty of finding at a moment's summons those passages which his

purpose required. Nor do I remember any that produced much effect,

except two or three, which I myself put ready marked into his hands,

among the Metrical Romances edited by Ritson.

[74] The very accurate memoir prefixed to Messrs. Macmillan's

four-volume edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works states that

Stuart, who had been proprietor of the _Morning Post_, and had

become proprietor of the _Courier_, gave Coleridge apartments in

the _Courier_ office to save expense in his contributorship to

that newspaper.--M.

Generally speaking, the selections were as injudicious and as

inappropriate as they were ill delivered; for, amongst Coleridge's

accomplishments, good reading was not one; he had neither voice

(so, at least, _I_ thought) nor management of voice. This defect is

unfortunate in a public lecturer; for it is inconceivable how much

weight and effectual pathos can be communicated by sonorous depth and

melodious cadences of the human voice to sentiments the most trivial;

nor, on the other hand, how the grandest are emasculated by a style of

reading which fails in distributing the lights and shadows of a musical

intonation. However, this defect chiefly concerned the immediate

impression; the most afflicting to a friend of Coleridge's was the

entire absence of his own peculiar and majestic intellect; no heart,

no soul, was in anything he said; no strength of feeling in recalling

universal truths; no power of originality or compass of moral relations

in his novelties: all was a poor faint reflection from jewels once

scattered in the highway by himself in the prodigality of his early

opulence--a mendicant dependence on the alms dropped from his own

overflowing treasury of happier times.

The next opportunity I had of seeing Coleridge was at the Lakes, in

the winter of 1809, and up to the autumn of the following year. During

this period it was that he carried on the original publication of "The

Friend"[75]; and for much the greater part of the time I saw him

daily. He lived as a visitor in the house occupied by Mr. Wordsworth.

This house (Allan Bank by name) was in Grasmere; and in another part

of the same vale, at a distance of barely one mile, I myself had a

cottage, and a considerable library. Many of my books being German,

Coleridge borrowed them in great numbers. Having a general license

from me to use them as he would, he was in the habit of accumulating

them so largely at Allan Bank (the name of Mr. Wordsworth's house)

that sometimes as many as five hundred were absent at once: which

I mention in order to notice a practice of Coleridge's, indicating

his very scrupulous honour in what regarded the rights of ownership.

Literary people are not always so strict in respecting property of this

description; and I know more than one celebrated man who professes

as a maxim that he holds it no duty of honour to restore a borrowed

book; not to speak of many less celebrated persons, who, without

openly professing such a principle, do however, in fact, exhibit a lax

morality in such cases. The more honourable it was to poor Coleridge,

who had means so trifling of buying books for himself, that, to prevent

my flocks from mixing and being confounded with the flocks already

folded at Allan Bank (his own and Wordsworth's), or rather that they

_might_ mix without danger, he duly inscribed my name in the blank

leaves of every volume; a fact which became rather painfully made known

to me; for, as he had chosen to dub me _Esquire_, many years after

this it cost myself and a female friend some weeks of labour to hunt

out these multitudinous memorials and to erase this heraldic addition;

which else had the appearance to a stranger of having been conferred by

myself.

[75] The first number of this celebrated but unfortunate

periodical, "printed on stamped paper by a printer of the name of

Brown at Penrith," was issued, the already cited memoir of

Coleridge informs us, on Thursday, 1st June 1809, and the last on

15th March 1810.--M.

"The Friend," in its original publication, was, as a pecuniary

speculation, the least judicious, both for its objects and its means,

I have ever known. It was printed at Penrith, a town in Cumberland, on

the outer verge of the Lake district, and precisely twenty-eight miles

removed from Coleridge's abode. This distance, enough of itself, in

all conscience, was at least trebled in effect by the interposition

of Kirkstone, a mountain which is scaled by a carriage ascent of

three miles long, and so steep in parts that, without four horses,

no solitary traveller can persuade the neighbouring innkeepers to

carry him. Another road, by way of Keswick, is subject to its own

separate difficulties. And thus, in any practical sense, for ease, for

certainty, and for despatch, Liverpool, ninety-five miles distant,

was virtually nearer. Dublin even, or Cork, was more eligible. Yet,

in this town, so situated as I have stated, by way of purchasing

such intolerable difficulties at the highest price, Coleridge was

advised, and actually persuaded, to set up a printer, to buy, to lay

in a stock of paper, types, &c., instead of resorting to some printer

already established in Kendal, a large and opulent town not more than

eighteen miles distant, and connected by a daily post, whereas between

himself and Penrith there was no post at all. Building his mechanical

arrangements upon this utter "upside-down" inversion of all common

sense, it is not surprising (as "madness ruled the hour") that in all

other circumstances of plan or execution the work moved by principles

of downright crazy disregard to all that a judicious counsel would

have suggested. The subjects were chosen obstinately in defiance of

the popular taste; they were treated in a style studiously disfigured

by German modes of thinking, and by a German terminology; no attempt

was made to win or conciliate public taste; and the plans adopted for

obtaining payment were of a nature to insure a speedy bankruptcy to

the concern. Coleridge had a list--nobody could ever say upon whose

authority gathered together--of subscribers. He tells us himself that

many of these renounced the work from an early period; and some (as

Lord Corke) rebuked him for his presumption in sending it unordered,

but (as Coleridge asserts) neither returned the copies nor remitted

the price. And even those who were conscientious enough to do this

could not remit four or five shillings for as many numbers without

putting Coleridge to an expense of treble postage at the least. This

he complains of bitterly in his "Biographia Literaria," forgetting

evidently that the evil was due exclusively to his own defective

arrangements. People necessarily sent their subscriptions through

such channels as were open to them, or such as were pointed out by

Coleridge himself. It is also utterly unworthy of Coleridge to have

taxed, as he does, many of his subscribers (or really, for anything

that appears, the whole body) with neglecting to pay at all. Probably

not one neglected. And some ladies, to my knowledge, scrupulously

anxious about transmitting their subscriptions, paid three times over.

Managed as the reader will collect from these indications, the work

was going down-hill from the first. It never gained any accessions of

new subscribers; from what source, then, was the continual dropping

off of names to be supplied? The printer became a bankrupt: Coleridge

was as much in arrear with his articles as with his lectures at the

Royal Institution. _That_ he was from the very first; but now he

was disgusted and desponding; and with No. 28 or 29 the work came

to a final stop. Some years after, it was re-cast and re-published.

But, in fact, this re-cast was altogether and absolutely a new work.

The sole contributors to the original work had been, first of all,

Wordsworth who gave a very valuable paper on the principles concerned

in the composition of Epitaphs; and, secondly, Professor Wilson, who,

in conjunction with Mr. (now Dr.) Blair, an early friend,[76] then

visiting Mr. W. on Windermere, wrote the letter signed "Mathetes," the

reply to which came from Wordsworth.

[76] Alexander Blair, LL.D., Professor of English Literature in

University College, London, from 1830 to 1836.--M.

At the Lakes, and summoned abroad by scenery so exquisite--living, too,

in the bosom of a family endeared to him by long friendship and by

sympathy the closest with all his propensities and tastes--Coleridge

(it may be thought) could not sequester himself so profoundly as at

the "Courier" Office within his own shell, or shut himself out so

completely from that large dominion of eye and ear amongst the hills,

the fields, and the woods, which once he had exercised so delightfully

to himself, and with a participation so immortal, through his exquisite

poems, to all generations. He was not now reduce to depend upon "Mrs.

Brainbridge"----(Mistress Brain--Brain--Brainbridge, I say----Oh

heavens! _is_ there, can there, was there, _will_ there ever at any

future period be, an undeniable use in saying and in pressing upon the

attention of the Strand and Fleet Street at their earliest convenience

the painful subject of Mistress Brain--Brain--Brainbridge, I say----

Do you hear, Mrs. Brain--Brain--Brainbridge----? Brain or Bain, it

matters little--Bran or Brain, it's all one, I conceive):--here, on

the contrary, he looked out from his study windows upon the sublime

hills of _Seat Sandal_ and _Arthur's Chair_, and upon pastoral cottages

at their feet; and all around him he heard hourly the murmurings of

happy life, the sound of female voices, and the innocent laughter of

children. But apparently he was not happy; opium, was it, or what was

it, that poisoned all natural pleasure at its sources? He burrowed

continually deeper into scholastic subtleties and metaphysical

abstractions; and, like that class described by Seneca in the luxurious

Rome of _his_ days, he lived chiefly by candlelight. At two or four

o'clock in the afternoon he would make his first appearance. Through

the silence of the night, when all other lights had disappeared in the

quiet cottages of Grasmere, _his_ lamp might be seen invariably by the

belated traveller, as he descended the long steep from Dunmailraise;

and at seven or eight o'clock in the morning, when man was going forth

to his labour, this insulated son of reverie was retiring to bed.

Society he did not much court, because much was not to be had; but

he did not shrink from any which wore the promise of novelty. At

that time the leading person about the Lakes, as regarded rank and

station, amongst those who had any connexion with literature, was

Dr. Watson, the well-known Bishop of Llandaff.[77] This dignitary I

knew myself as much as I wished to know him; he _was_ interesting;

yet also _not_ interesting; and I will speak of him circumstantially.

Those who have read his Autobiography, or are otherwise acquainted

with the outline of his career, will be aware that he was the son of

a Westmoreland schoolmaster. Going to Cambridge, with no great store

of classical knowledge, but with the more common accomplishment of

Westmoreland men, and one better suited to Cambridge, viz. a sufficient

basis of mathematics, and a robust though commonplace intellect for

improving his knowledge according to any direction which accident

should prescribe--he obtained the Professorship of Chemistry without

one iota of chemical knowledge up to the hour when he gained it; and

then, setting eagerly to work, that he might not disgrace the choice

which had thus distinguished him, long before the time arrived for

commencing his prelections he had made himself capable of writing

those beautiful essays on that science which, after a revolution and a

counter-revolution so great as succeeding times have witnessed, still

remain a cardinal book of introductory discipline to such studies:

an opinion deliberately expressed to myself by the late Sir Humphry

Davy, and in answer to an earnest question which I took the liberty

of proposing to him on that point. Sir Humphry said that he could

scarcely imagine a time, or a condition of the science, in which the

Bishop's "Essays" would be superannuated.[78] With this experimental

proof that a Chemical Chair might be won and honoured without previous

knowledge even of the chemical alphabet, he resolved to play the same

feat with the Royal Chair of Divinity; one far more important for

local honour and for wealth. Here, again, he succeeded; and this time

he extended his experiment; for, whereas both Chairs had been won

without _previous_ knowledge, he resolved that in this case it should

be maintained without _after_ knowledge. He applied himself simply to

the improvement of its income, which he raised from £300 to at least

£1000 per annum. All this he had accomplished before reaching the age

of thirty-five.

[77] Bishop Richard Watson (1737-1816) is perhaps best remembered

now for his _Apology for the Bible_; of which George III said,

when he heard of it, "What, what! Apology for the Bible! Didn't

know that it needed an apology." There were, however, two

_Apologies_, published together in 1806,--one for Christianity

against Gibbon, the other for the Bible against Thomas Paine.--M.

[78] _Chemical Essays_, in 5 vols., published 1781-7.--M.

Riches are with us the parent of riches; and success, in the hands of

an active man, is the pledge of further success. On the basis of this

Cambridge preferment Dr. Watson built upwards, until he had raised

himself, in one way or other, to a seat in the House of Lords, and to a

commensurate income. For the latter half of his life, he--originally a

village schoolmaster's son--was able to associate with the _magnates_

of the land upon equal terms. And that fact, of itself, without another

word, implies, in this country, a degree of rank and fortune which one

would think a sufficient reward even for merit as unquestionable as

was that of Dr. Watson, considering that in _quality_ it was merit of

so vulgar a class. Yet he was always a discontented man, a railer at

the government and the age which could permit merit such as his to pine

away ingloriously in one of the humblest amongst the bishoprics, with

no other addition to its emoluments than the richest professorship in

Europe, and such other accidents in life as gave him in all, perhaps,

not above five thousand per annum! Poor man!--only five thousand per

annum! What a trial to a man's patience!--and how much he stood in need

of philosophy, or even of religion, to face so dismal a condition!

This bishop was himself, in a secondary way, no uninteresting study.

What I mean is, that, though originally the furthest removed from

an interesting person, being a man remarkable indeed for robust

faculties, but otherwise commonplace in his character, worldly-minded,

and coarse, even to obtuseness, in his sensibilities, he yet became

interesting from the strength of _degree_ with which these otherwise

repulsive characteristics were manifested. He was one of that numerous

order in whom even the love of knowledge is subordinate to schemes

of advancement; and to whom even his own success, and his own honour

consequent upon that success, had no higher value than according to

their use as instruments for winning further promotion. Hence it

was that, when by such aids he had mounted to a certain eminence,

beyond which he saw little promise of further ascent through any

assistance of _theirs_--since at this stage it was clear that party

connexion in politics must become his main reliance--he ceased to

regard his favourite sciences with interest. The very organs of his

early advancement were regarded with no gratitude or tenderness, when

it became clear that they could yield no more. Even chemistry was

now neglected. This, above all, was perplexing to one who did not

understand his character. For hither one would have supposed he might

have retreated from his political disappointments, and have found a

perpetual consolation in honours which no intrigues could defeat,

and in the esteem, so pure and untainted, which still attended the

honourable exertions of his youth. But he had not feeling enough for

that view; he looked at the matter in a very different light. Other

generations had come since then, and "other palms were won." To keep

pace with the advancing science, and to maintain his station amongst

his youthful competitors, would demand a youthful vigour and motives

such as theirs. But, as to himself, chemistry had given all it _could_

give. Having first raised himself to distinction by that, he had since

married into an ancient family--one of the leaders amongst the landed

aristocracy of his own county: he had thus entitled himself to call

the head of that family--a territorial potentate with ten thousand per

annum--by the contemptuous sobriquet of "Dull Daniel"; he looked down

upon numbers whom, twenty years before, he scarcely durst have looked

up to, except perhaps as a cat is privileged to look at a king; he had

obtained a bishopric. Chemistry had done all this for him; and had,

besides, co-operating with luck, put him in the way of reaping a large

estate from the gratitude and early death of his pupil, Mr. Luther. All

this chemistry had effected. Could chemistry do anything more? Clearly

not. It was a burnt-out volcano. And here it was that, having lost his

motives for cultivating it farther, he regarded the present improvers

of the science, not with the feelings natural to a disinterested

lover of such studies on their own account, but with jealousy, as men

who had eclipsed or had bedimmed his own once brilliant reputation.

Two revolutions had occurred since his own "palmy days"; Sir Humphry

Davy, he said, might be right; and all might be gold that glistened;

but, for his part, he was too old to learn new theories--he must be

content to hobble to his grave with such old-fashioned creeds as had

answered in his time, when, for aught he could see, men prospered as

much as in this newfangled world. Such was the tone of his ordinary

talk; and, in one sense--as regards personal claims, I mean--it was

illiberal enough; for the leaders of modern chemistry never overlooked

_his_ claims. Professor Thomson of Glasgow always spoke of his "Essays"

as of a book which hardly any revolution could antiquate; and Sir

Humphry Davy, in reply to a question which I put to him upon that

point in 1813, declared that he knew of no book better qualified as

one of introductory discipline to the youthful experimenter, or as an

apprenticeship to the taste in elegant selection of topics.

Yet, querulous and discontented as the bishop was, when he adverted

either to chemistry or to his own position in life, the reader must not

imagine to himself the ordinary "complement" and appurtenances of that

character--such as moroseness, illiberality, or stinted hospitalities.

On the contrary, his lordship was a joyous, jovial, and cordial host.

He was pleasant, and even kind, in his manners; most hospitable in his

reception of strangers, no matter of what party; and I must say that

he was as little overbearing in argument, and as little stood upon his

privilege in his character of a church dignitary, as any "big wig" I

have happened to know. He was somewhat pompous, undoubtedly; but that,

in an old academic hero, was rather agreeable, and had a characteristic

effect. He listened patiently to all your objections; and, though

steeped to the lips in prejudice, he was really candid. I mean to say

that, although, generally speaking, the unconscious pre-occupation of

his understanding shut up all avenues to new convictions, he yet did

his best to open his mind to any views that might be presented at the

moment. And, with regard to his querulous egotism, though it may appear

laughable enough to all who contrast his real pretensions with their

public appreciation as expressed in his acquired opulence and rank,

and who contrast, also, _his_ case with that of other men in his own

profession--with that of Paley, for example--yet it cannot be denied

that fortune had crossed his path, latterly, with foul winds, no less

strikingly than his early life had been seconded by her favouring

gales. In particular, Lord Holland[79] mentioned to a friend of my

own the following anecdote:--"What you say of the bishop may be very

true" (they were riding past his grounds at the time, which had turned

the conversation upon his character and public claims): "but to _us_"

(Lord Holland meant to the Whig party) "he was truly honourable and

faithful; insomuch that my uncle" (meaning, of course, Charles Fox)

"had agreed with Lord Grenville to make him Archbishop of York, _sede

vacante_;--all was settled; and, had we staid in power a little

longer, he would, beyond a doubt, have had that dignity."

[79] It was _Lady_ Holland. I know not how I came to make such a

mistake. And the friend was Wordsworth.

Now, if the reader happens to recollect how soon the death of

Dr. Markham followed the sudden dissolution of that short-lived

administration in 1807, he will see how narrowly Dr. Watson missed

this elevation; and one must allow for a little occasional spleen

under such circumstances. How grand a thing, how princely, to be an

English archbishop! Yet, what an archbishop! He talked openly, at his

own table, as a Socinian; ridiculed the miracles of the New Testament,

which he professed to explain as so many chemical tricks, or cases

of legerdemain; and certainly had as little of devotional feeling as

any man that ever lived. It is, by comparison, a matter of little

consequence that, so slightly regarding the Church of which he called

himself a member in her spiritual interest, he should, in her temporal

interests, have been ready to lay her open to any assaults from almost

any quarter. He could naturally have little reverence for the rights

of the shepherds, having so very little for the pastoral office

itself, or for the manifold duties it imposes. All his public, all his

professional duties, he systematically neglected. He was a lord in

Parliament, and for many a year he never attended in his place: he was

a bishop, and he scarcely knew any part of his diocese by sight, living

three hundred miles away from it: he was a professor of divinity,

holding the richest professorship in Europe--the weightiest, for its

functions, in England--drawing, by his own admission, one thousand

per annum from its endowments (deducting some stipend to his _locum

tenens_ at Cambridge), and for thirty years he never read a lecture, or

performed a public exercise. Spheres how vast of usefulness to a man

as able as himself!--subjects of what bitter anguish on his deathbed

to one who had been tenderly conscientious! In his political purism,

and the unconscious partisanship of his constitutional scruples, he

was a true Whig, and thoroughly diverting. That Lord Lonsdale or that

the Duke of Northumberland should interfere with elections, this he

thought scandalous and awful; but that a lord of the house of Cavendish

or Howard, a Duke of Devonshire or Norfolk, or an Earl of Carlisle,

should traffic in boroughs, or exert the most despotic influence as

landlords, _mutato nomine_, he viewed as the mere natural right of

property; and so far was he from loving the pure-hearted and unfactious

champions of liberty, that, in one of his printed works, he dared

to tax Milton with having knowingly, wilfully, deliberately told a

falsehood.[80]

[80] This supposed falsehood respected the sect called Brownists,

and occurs in the "Defensio pro Pop. Anglicano." The whole charge

is a blunder, and rests upon the bishop's own imperfect Latinity.

Could Coleridge--was it possible that he could reverence a man

like this? Ordinary men might, because they were told that he had

defended Christianity against the vile blasphemers and impotent

theomachists of the day. But Coleridge had too pure an ideal of a

Christian philosopher, derived from the age of the English Titans

in theology, to share in that estimate. It is singular enough, and

interesting to a man who has ever heard Coleridge talk, but especially

to one who has _assisted_ (to speak in French phrase) at a talking

party between Coleridge and the Bishop, to look back upon an article

in the "Quarterly Review," where, in connexion with the Bishop's

Autobiography, some sneers are dropped with regard to the intellectual

character of the neighbourhood in which he had settled. I have been

told, on pretty good authority, that this article was written by the

late Dr. Whittaker of Craven, the topographical antiquarian; a pretty

sort of person, doubtless, to assume such a tone, in speaking of a

neighbourhood so dazzling in its intellectual pretensions as that

region at that time. Listen, reader, and judge!

The Bishop had fixed his abode on the banks of Windermere. In a small,

but by the necessity of its situation a beautiful park, he had himself

raised a plain, but handsome and substantial mansion; Calgarth, or

Calgarth Park, was its name. Now, at Keswick (I am looking back to the

sneer of the "Quarterly Review") lived Southey; twenty miles distant,

it is true, but still, for a bishop with a bishop's equipage, not

beyond a morning's drive. At Grasmere, about eight miles from Calgarth,

were to be found Wordsworth and Coleridge. At Brathay, about four

miles from Calgarth, lived Charles Lloyd; and he, far as he might be

below the others I have mentioned, could not in candour be considered

a common man. Common! he was a man never to be forgotten! He was

somewhat too _Rousseauish_; but he had, in conversation, the most

extraordinary powers for analysis of a certain kind, applied to the

philosophy of manners, and the most delicate _nuances_ of social life;

and his translation of "Alfieri," together with his own poems, shows

him to have been an accomplished scholar. Then, not much above a mile

from Calgarth, at his beautiful creation of Elleray, lived Professor

Wilson; of whom I need not speak. He, in fact, and Mr. Lloyd were on

the most intimate terms with the Bishop's family. The meanest of these

persons was able to have "taken the conceit" out of Dr. Whittaker and

all his tribe. But even in the town of Kendal, about nine miles from

Calgarth, there were many men of information, at least as extensive as

Dr. Watson's, and amply qualified to have met him upon equal terms in

conversation. Mathematics, it is well known, are extensively cultivated

in the north of England. Sedburgh, for many years, was a sort of

nursery or rural chapel-of-ease to Cambridge. Dawson of Sedburgh was

a luminary better known than ever Dr. Watson was, by mathematicians

both foreign and domestic. Gough, the blind mathematician and botanist

of Kendal, is known to this day; but many others in that town had

accomplishments equal to his; and, indeed, so widely has mathematical

knowledge extended itself throughout Northern England that, even

amongst the poor Lancashire weavers, mechanic labourers for their daily

bread, the cultivation of pure geometry, in the most refined shape, has

long prevailed; of which some accounts have been recently published.

Local pique, therefore, must have been at the bottom of Dr. Whittaker's

sneer. At all events, it was ludicrously contrasted with the true state

of the case, as brought out by the meeting between Coleridge and the

Bishop.

Coleridge was armed, at all points, with the scholastic erudition which

bore upon all questions that could arise in polemic divinity. The

philosophy of ancient Greece, through all its schools, the philosophy

of the schoolmen technically so called, Church history, &c., Coleridge

had within his call. Having been personally acquainted, or connected

as a pupil, with Eichhorn and Michaelis, he knew the whole cycle of

schisms and audacious speculations through which Biblical criticism

or Christian philosophy has revolved in Modern Germany. All this

was ground upon which the Bishop of Llandaff trod with the infirm

footing of a child. He listened to what Coleridge reported with the

same sort of pleasurable surprise, alternating with starts of doubt

or incredulity, as would naturally attend a detailed report from

Laputa--which aërial region of speculation does but too often recur to

a sober-minded person in reading of the endless freaks in philosophy

of Modern Germany, where the sceptre of Mutability, that potentate

celebrated by Spenser, gathers more trophies in a year than elsewhere

in a century; "the anarchy of dreams" presides in her philosophy; and

the restless elements of opinion, throughout every region of debate,

mould themselves eternally, like the billowy sands of the desert

as beheld by Bruce, into towering columns, soar upwards to a giddy

altitude, then stalk about for a minute, all aglow with fiery colour,

and finally unmould and "dislimn," with a collapse as sudden as the

motions of that eddying breeze under which their vapoury architecture

had arisen. Hartley and Locke, both of whom the bishop made into

idols, were discussed; especially the former, against whom Coleridge

alleged some of those arguments which he has used in his "Biographia

Literaria." The bishop made but a feeble defence; and upon some points

none at all. He seemed, I remember, much struck with one remark of

Coleridge's, to this effect:--"That, whereas Hartley fancied that

our very reasoning was an aggregation, collected together under the

law of association, on the contrary, we reason by counteracting that

law: just," said he, "as, in leaping, the law of gravitation concurs

to that act in its latter part; but no leap could take place were it

not by a counteraction of the law." One remark of the bishop's let me

into the secret of his very limited reading. Coleridge had used the

word "apperception," apparently without intention; for, on hearing

some objection to the word, as being "surely not a word that Addison

would have used," he substituted _transcendental consciousness_. Some

months afterwards, going with Charles Lloyd to call at Calgarth, during

the time when "The Friend" was appearing, the bishop again noticed

this obnoxious word, and in the very same terms:--"Now, this word

_apperception_, which Mr. Coleridge uses in the last number of 'The

Friend,' surely, surely it would not have been approved by Addison; no,

Mr. Lloyd, nor by Swift; nor even, I think, by Arbuthnot." Somebody

suggested that the word was a new word of German mintage, and most

probably due to Kant--of whom the bishop seemed never to have heard.

Meantime the fact was, and to me an amusing one, that the word had been

commonly used by Leibnitz, a _classical_ author on such subjects, 120

years before.

* * * * *

In the autumn of 1810, Coleridge left the Lakes; and, so far as I

am aware, for ever. I once, indeed, heard a rumour of his having

passed through with some party of tourists--some reason struck me

at the time for believing it untrue--but, at all events, he never

returned to them as a resident. What might be his reason for this

eternal self-banishment from scenes which he so well understood in all

their shifting forms of beauty, I can only guess. Perhaps it was the

very opposite reason to that which is most obvious: not, possibly,

because he had become indifferent to their attractions, but because

his undecaying sensibility to their commanding power had become

associated with too afflicting remembrances, and flashes of personal

recollections, suddenly restored and illuminated--recollections which

will

"Sometimes leap

From hiding-places ten years deep,"

and bring into collision the present with some long-forgotten past, in

a form too trying and too painful for endurance. I have a brilliant

Scotch friend, who cannot walk on the seashore--within sight of its

[Greek: anêrithmon gelasma], the multitudinous laughter of its waves,

or within hearing of its resounding uproar, because they bring up, by

links of old association, too insupportably to his mind the agitations

of his glittering, but too fervid youth. There is a feeling--morbid,

it may be, but for which no anodyne is found in all the schools

from Plato to Kant--to which the human mind is liable at times: it

is best described in a little piece by Henry More, the "Platonist."

He there represents himself as a martyr to his own too passionate

sense of beauty, and his consequent too pathetic sense of its decay.

Everywhere--above, below, around him, in the earth, in the clouds,

in the fields, and in their "garniture of flowers"--he beholds a

beauty carried to excess; and this beauty becomes a source of endless

affliction to him, because everywhere he sees it liable to the touch

of decay and mortal change. During one paroxysm of this sad passion,

an angel appears to comfort him; and, by the sudden revelation of her

immortal beauty, does, in fact, suspend his grief. But it is only a

suspension; for the sudden recollection that her privileged condition,

and her exemption from the general fate of beauty, is only by way of

exception to a universal rule, restores his grief: "And thou thyself,"

he says to the angel--

"And thou thyself, that com'st to comfort me,

Wouldst strong occasion of deep sorrow bring,

If thou wert subject to mortality!"

Every man who has ever dwelt with passionate love upon the fair face

of some female companion through life must have had the same feeling,

and must often, in the exquisite language of Shakspere's sonnets, have

commanded and adjured all-conquering Time, there, at least, and upon

that one tablet of his adoration,

"To write no wrinkle with his antique hand."

Vain prayer! Empty adjuration! Profitless rebellion against the laws

which season all things for the inexorable grave! Yet not the less

we rebel again and again; and, though wisdom counsels resignation,

yet our human passions, still cleaving to their object, force us

into endless rebellion. Feelings the same in kind as these attach

themselves to our mental power, and our vital energies. Phantoms of

lost power, sudden intuitions, and shadowy restorations of forgotten

feelings, sometimes dim and perplexing, sometimes by bright but furtive

glimpses, sometimes by a full and steady revelation, overcharged with

light--throw us back in a moment upon scenes and remembrances that we

have left full thirty years behind us. In solitude, and chiefly in the

solitudes of nature, and, above all, amongst the great and _enduring_

features of nature, such as mountains, and quiet dells, and the lawny

recesses of forests, and the silent shores of lakes, features with

which (as being themselves less liable to change) our feelings have a

more abiding association--under these circumstances it is that such

evanescent hauntings of our past and forgotten selves are most apt to

startle and to waylay us. These are _positive_ torments from which

the agitated mind shrinks in fear; but there are others _negative_

in their nature--that is, blank mementoes of powers extinct, and of

faculties burnt out within us. And from both forms of anguish--from

this twofold scourge--poor Coleridge fled, perhaps, in flying from the

beauty of external nature. In alluding to this latter, or negative form

of suffering--that form, I mean, which presents not the too fugitive

glimpses of past power, but its blank annihilation--Coleridge himself

most beautifully insists upon and illustrates the truth that all which

we find in Nature must be created by ourselves; and that alike whether

Nature is so gorgeous in her beauty as to seem apparelled in her

wedding-garment or so powerless and extinct as to seem palled in her

shroud. In either case,

"O, Lady, we receive but what we give,

And in _our_ life alone does nature _live_;

Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud.

It were a vain endeavour,

Though I should gaze for ever

On that green light that lingers in the west:

I may not hope from _outward_ forms to win

The passion and the life whose fountains are _within_."

This was one, and the most common, shape of extinguished power from

which Coleridge fled to the great city. But sometimes the same decay

came back upon his heart in the more poignant shape of intimations

and vanishing glimpses, recovered for one moment from the paradise

of youth, and from fields of joy and power, over which, for him, too

certainly, he felt that the cloud of night was settling for ever.

Both modes of the same torment exiled him from nature; and for the

same reasons he fled from poetry and all commerce with his own soul;

burying himself in the profoundest abstractions from life and human

sensibilities.

"For not to think of what I needs must feel,

But to be still and patient all I can;

And haply _by abstruse research to steal_,

_From my own nature, all the natural man_;

This was my sole resource, my only plan;

Till _that_, which suits a part, infects the whole,

And now is almost grown the habit of my soul."

Such were, doubtless, the true and radical causes which, for the final

twenty-four years of Coleridge's life, drew him away from those scenes

of natural beauty in which only, at an earlier stage of life, he found

strength and restoration. These scenes still survived; but their power

was gone, because _that_ had been derived from himself, and his ancient

self had altered. Such were the _causes_; but the immediate _occasion_

of his departure from the Lakes, in the autumn of 1810, was the

favourable opportunity then presented to him of migrating in a pleasant

way. Mr. Basil Montagu, the Chancery barrister, happened at that time

to be returning to London, with Mrs. Montagu, from a visit to the

Lakes, or to Wordsworth.[81] His travelling carriage was roomy enough

to allow of his offering Coleridge a seat in it; and his admiration of

Coleridge was just then fervent enough to prompt a friendly wish for

that sort of close connexion (viz. by domestication as a guest under

Mr. Basil Montagu's roof) which is the most trying to friendship,

and which in this instance led to a perpetual rupture of it. The

domestic habits of eccentric men of genius, much more those of a man so

irreclaimably irregular as Coleridge, can hardly be supposed to promise

very auspiciously for any connexion so close as this. A very extensive

house and household, together with the unlimited licence of action

which belongs to the _ménage_ of some great Dons amongst the nobility,

could alone have made Coleridge an inmate perfectly desirable. Probably

many little jealousies and offences had been mutually suppressed; but

the particular spark which at length fell amongst the combustible

materials already prepared, and thus produced the final explosion,

took the following shape:--Mr. Montagu had published a book against

the use of wine and intoxicating liquors of every sort.[82] Not out

of parsimony or under any suspicion of inhospitality, but in mere

self-consistency and obedience to his own conscientious scruples, Mr.

Montagu would not countenance the use of wine at his own table. So

far all was right. But doubtless, on such a system, under the known

habits of modern life, it should have been made a rule to ask no man

to dinner: for to force men, without warning, to a _single_ (and,

therefore, thoroughly useless) act of painful abstinence, is what

neither I nor any man can have a right to do. In point of sense, it is,

in fact, precisely the freak of Sir Roger de Coverley, who drenches his

friend the "Spectator" with a hideous decoction: not, as his confiding

visitor had supposed, for some certain and immediate benefit to follow,

but simply as having a _tendency_ (if well supported by many years'

continuance of similar drenches) to abate the remote contingency of the

stone. Hear this, ye Gods of the Future! I am required to perform a

most difficult sacrifice; and forty years hence I _may_, by persisting

so long, have some dim chance of reward. One day's abstinence could

do no good on _any_ scheme: and no man was likely to offer himself

for a second. However, such being the law of the castle, and that law

well known to Coleridge, he nevertheless, thought fit to ask to dinner

Colonel (then Captain) Pasley, of the Engineers, well known in those

days for his book on the "Military Policy of England," and since for

his "System of Professional Instruction." Now, where or in what land

abides that

"Captain, or Colonel, or Knight-in-arms,"

to whom wine in the analysis of dinner is a neutral or indifferent

element? Wine, therefore, as it was not of a nature to be omitted,

Coleridge took care to furnish at his own private cost. And so far,

again, all was right. But why must Coleridge give his dinner to the

captain in Mr. Montagu's house? There lay the affront; and, doubtless,

it was a very inconsiderate action on the part of Coleridge. I report

the case simply as it was then generally borne upon the breath, not of

scandal, but of jest and merriment. The result, however, was no jest;

for bitter words ensued--words that festered in the remembrance; and a

rupture between the parties followed, which no reconciliation has ever

healed.

[81] Basil Montagu (1770-1851) and his wife were celebrities in

London society for many years. Among his publications, besides

legal treatises, were an edition of Bacon's Works and a volume of

selections from the older English Prose-writers.

[82] _Inquiry into the Effects of Fermented Liquors. By a

Waterdrinker._ London. 1814.--M.

Meantime, on reviewing this story, as generally adopted by the learned

in literary scandal, one demur rises up. Dr. Parr, a lisping Whig

pedant, without personal dignity or conspicuous power of mind, was

a frequent and privileged inmate at Mr. Montagu's. Him now--this

Parr--there was no conceivable motive for enduring; that point is

satisfactorily settled by the pompous inanities of his works. Yet, on

the other hand, his habits were in their own nature far less endurable

than Samuel Taylor Coleridge's; for the monster smoked;--and how? How

did the "Birmingham Doctor"[83] smoke? Not as you, or I, or other

civilized people smoke, with a gentle cigar--but with the very coarsest

tobacco. And those who know how that abomination lodges and nestles in

the draperies of window-curtains will guess the horror and detestation

in which the old Whig's memory is held by all enlightened women.

Surely, in a house where the Doctor had any toleration at all, Samuel

Taylor Coleridge might have enjoyed an unlimited toleration.[84]

[83] "_Birmingham Doctor_":--This was a _sobriquet_ imposed on Dr.

Parr by "The Pursuits of Literature," that most popular of satires

at the end of the eighteenth and opening of the nineteenth

centuries. The name had a mixed reference to the Doctor's personal

connexion with Warwickshire, but chiefly to the Doctor's spurious

and windy imitation of Dr. Johnson. He was viewed as the

Birmingham (or mock) Dr. Johnson. Why the word _Birmingham_ has

come for the last sixty or seventy years to indicate in every

class of articles the spurious in opposition to the genuine, I

suppose to have arisen from the Birmingham habit of reproducing

all sorts of London or Paris trinkets, _bijouterie_, &c., in

cheaper materials and with inferior workmanship.

[84] It is at this point that De Quincey's revised reprint in 1854

of his Recollections of Coleridge stops. What follows is from the

unrevised sequel in _Tait's Magazine_ for January 1835. See note,

_ante_, p. 138.--M.

* * * * *

From Mr. Montagu's Coleridge passed, by favour of what introduction

I never heard, into a family as amiable in manners and as benign in

disposition as I remember to have ever met with. On this excellent

family I look back with threefold affection, on account of their

goodness to Coleridge, and because they were then unfortunate, and

because their union has long since been dissolved by death. The family

was composed of three members: of Mr. M----, once a lawyer, who had,

however, ceased to practise; of Mrs. M----, his wife, a blooming

young woman, distinguished for her fine person; and a young lady, her

unmarried sister.[85] Here, for some years, I used to visit Coleridge;

and, doubtless, as far as situation merely, and the most delicate

attentions from the most amiable women, _could_ make a man happy, he

must have been so at this time; for both the ladies treated him as

an elder brother, or as a father. At length, however, the cloud of

misfortune, which had long settled upon the prospects of this excellent

family, thickened; and I found, upon one of my visits to London, that

they had given up their house in Berners Street, and had retired to

a cottage in Wiltshire. Coleridge had accompanied them; and there I

visited them myself, and, as it eventually proved, for the last time.

Some time after this, I heard from Coleridge, with the deepest sorrow,

that poor M---- had been thrown into prison, and had sunk under the

pressure of his misfortunes. The gentle ladies of his family had

retired to remote friends; and I saw them no more, though often vainly

making inquiries about them.

[85] The Mr. M---- of this sentence was Mr. John Morgan. He had

known Coleridge and Southey in Bristol, and now lived in

London.--M.

Coleridge, during this part of his London life, I saw

constantly--generally once a day, during my own stay in London; and

sometimes we were jointly engaged to dinner parties. In particular, I

remember one party at which we met Lady Hamilton--Lord Nelson's Lady

Hamilton--the beautiful, the accomplished, the enchantress! Coleridge

admired her, as who would not have done, prodigiously; and she, in

her turn, was fascinated with Coleridge. He was unusually effective

in his display; and she, by way of expressing her acknowledgments

appropriately, performed a scene in Lady Macbeth--how splendidly, I

cannot better express than by saying that all of us who then witnessed

her performance were familiar with Mrs. Siddons's matchless execution

of that scene, and yet, with such a model filling our imaginations, we

could not but acknowledge the possibility of another, and a different

perfection, without a trace of imitation, equally original, and

equally astonishing. The word "magnificent" is, in this day, most

lavishly abused: daily I hear or read in the newspapers of magnificent

objects, as though scattered more thickly than blackberries; but for

my part I have seen few objects really deserving that epithet. Lady

Hamilton was one of them. She had Medea's beauty, and Medea's power of

enchantment. But let not the reader too credulously suppose her the

unprincipled woman she has been described. I know of no sound reason

for supposing the connexion between Lord Nelson and her to have been

other than perfectly virtuous. Her public services, I am sure, were

most eminent--for _that_ we have indisputable authority; and equally

sure I am that they were requited with rank ingratitude.

After the household of the poor M----s had been dissolved, I know not

whither Coleridge went immediately: for I did not visit London until

some years had elapsed. In 1823-24 I first understood that he had taken

up his residence as a guest with Mr. Gillman, a surgeon, in Highgate.

He had then probably resided for some time at that gentleman's: there

he continued to reside on the same terms, I believe, of affectionate

friendship with the members of Mr. Gillman's family as had made life

endurable to him in the time of the M----s; and there he died in July

of the present year. If, generally speaking, poor Coleridge had but

a small share of earthly prosperity, in one respect at least he was

eminently favoured by Providence: beyond all men who ever perhaps have

lived, he found means to engage a constant succession of most faithful

friends; and he levied the services of sisters, brothers, daughters,

sons, from the hands of strangers--attracted to him by no possible

impulses but those of reverence for his intellect, and love for his

gracious nature. How, says Wordsworth--

----"How can _he_ expect that others should

Sow for him, reap for _him_, and at his call

Love him, who for himself will take no thought at all?"

How can he, indeed? It is most unreasonable to do so: yet this

expectation, if Coleridge ought not to have entertained, at all events

he realized. Fast as one friend dropped off, another, and another,

succeeded: perpetual relays were laid along his path in life, of

judicious and zealous supporters, who comforted his days, and smoothed

the pillow for his declining age, even when it was beyond all human

power to take away the thorns which stuffed it.

And what _were_ those thorns?--and whence derived? That is a question

on which I ought to decline speaking, unless I could speak fully. Not,

however, to make any mystery of what requires none, the reader will

understand that _originally_ his sufferings, and the death within

him of all hope--the palsy, as it were, of that which is the life of

life, and the heart within the heart--came from opium. But two things

I must add--one to explain Coleridge's case, and the other to bring

it within the indulgent allowance of equitable judges:--_First_, the

sufferings from morbid derangements, originally produced by opium, had

very possibly lost that simple character, and had themselves re-acted

in producing secondary states of disease and irritation, not any longer

dependent upon the opium, so as to disappear with its disuse: hence,

a more than mortal discouragement to accomplish this disuse, when the

pains of self-sacrifice were balanced by no gleams of restorative

feeling. Yet, _secondly_, Coleridge did make prodigious efforts to

deliver himself from this thraldom; and he went so far at one time in

Bristol, to my knowledge, as to hire a man for the express purpose,

and armed with the power of resolutely interposing between himself and

the door of any druggist's shop. It is true that an authority derived

only from Coleridge's will could not be valid against Coleridge's own

counter-determination: he could resume as easily as he could delegate

the power. But the scheme did not entirely fail; a man shrinks from

exposing to another that infirmity of will which he might else have but

a feeble motive for disguising to himself; and the delegated man, the

external conscience, as it were, of Coleridge, though destined--in the

final resort, if matters came to absolute rupture, and to an obstinate

duel, as it were, between himself and his principal--in that extremity

to give way, yet might have long protracted the struggle before coming

to that sort of _dignus vindice nodus_: and in fact, I know, upon

absolute proof, that, before reaching that crisis, the man showed

fight, and, faithful to his trust, and comprehending the reasons for

it, declared that, if he must yield, he would "know the reason why."

Opium, therefore, subject to the explanation I have made, was certainly

the original source of Coleridge's morbid feelings, of his debility,

and of his remorse. His pecuniary embarrassments pressed as lightly

as could well be expected upon him. I have mentioned the annuity of

£150 made to him by the two Wedgwoods. One half, I believe, could not

be withdrawn, having been left by a regular testamentary bequest. But

the other moiety, coming from the surviving brother, was withdrawn on

the plea of commercial losses, somewhere, I think, about 1815. That

would have been a heavy blow to Coleridge; and assuredly the generosity

is not very conspicuous of having ever suffered an allowance of that

nature to be left to the mercy of accident. Either it ought not to

have been granted in that shape--viz. as an _annual_ allowance, giving

ground for expecting its periodical recurrence--or it ought not to

have been withdrawn. However, this blow was broken to Coleridge by the

bounty of George IV, who placed Coleridge's name in the list of twelve

to whom he granted an annuity of 100 guineas per annum. This he enjoyed

so long as that Prince reigned. But at length came a heavier blow than

that from Mr. Wedgwood: a new King arose, who knew not Joseph. Yet

surely _he_ was not a King who could so easily resolve to turn adrift

twelve men of letters, many of them most accomplished men, for the sake

of appropriating a sum no larger to himself than 1200 guineas--no less

to some of them than the total freight of their earthly hopes?--No

matter: let the deed have been from whose hand it might, it was

done: [Greek: heirgastai], it was perpetrated, as saith the Medea of

Euripides; and it will be mentioned hereafter, "more than either once

or twice." It fell with weight, and with effect upon the latter days

of Coleridge; it took from him as much heart and hope as at his years,

and with his unworldly prospects, remained for man to blight: and, if

it did not utterly crush him, the reason was--because for himself he

had never needed much, and was now continually drawing near to that

haven in which, for himself, he would need nothing; secondly, because

his children were now independent of his aid; and, finally, because in

this land there are men to be found always of minds large enough to

comprehend the claims of genius, and with hearts, by good luck, more

generous, by infinite degrees, than the hearts of Princes.

Coleridge, as I now understand, was somewhere about sixty-two years

of age when he died.[86] This, however, I take upon the report of the

public newspapers; for I do not, of my own knowledge, know anything

accurately upon that point.

[86] Coleridge died at Highgate, 25th July 1834, in the

sixty-second year of his age, and the eighteenth of his residence

with Mr. Gillman.--M.

* * * * *

It can hardly be necessary to inform any reader of discernment or

of much practice in composition that the whole of this article

upon Mr. Coleridge, though carried through at intervals, and (as

it has unexpectedly happened) with time sufficient to have made it

a very careful one, has, in fact, been written in a desultory and

unpremeditated style. It was originally undertaken on the sudden

but profound impulse communicated to the writer's feelings by the

unexpected news of this great man's death; partly, therefore, to

relieve, by expressing, his own deep sentiments of reverential

affection to his memory, and partly, in however imperfect a way, to

meet the public feeling of interest or curiosity about a man who had

long taken his place amongst the intellectual _potentates_ of the age.

Both purposes required that it should be written almost _extempore_:

the greater part was really and unaffectedly written in that way,

and under circumstances of such extreme haste as would justify the

writer in pleading the very amplest privilege of licence and indulgent

construction which custom concedes to such cases. Hence it had occurred

to the writer, as a judicious principle, to create a sort of merit out

of his own necessity, and rather to seek after the graces which belong

to the epistolary form, or to other modes of composition professedly

careless, than after those which grow out of preconceived biographies,

which, having originally settled their plan upon a regular foundation,

are able to pursue a course of orderly development, such as _his_

slight sketch had voluntarily renounced from the beginning. That mode

of composition having been once adopted, it seemed proper to sustain

it, even after delays and interruption had allowed time for throwing

the narrative into a more orderly movement, and modulating it, as

it were, into a key of the usual solemnity. The _qualis ab incepto

processerit_--the _ordo_ prescribed by the first bars of the music

predominated over all other considerations, and to such an extent that

he had purposed to leave the article without any regular termination or

summing up--as, on the one hand, scarcely demanded by the character of

a sketch so rapid and indigested, whilst, on the other, he was sensible

that anything of so much pretension as a formal peroration challenged

a sort of consideration to the paper which it was the author's chief

wish to disclaim. That effect, however, is sufficiently parried by the

implied protest now offered; and, on other reasons, it is certainly

desirable that a general glance, however cursory, should be thrown over

the intellectual claims of Mr. Coleridge by one who knew him so well,

and especially in a case where those very claims constitute the entire

and sole justification of the preceding personal memoir. That which

furnishes the whole moving reason for any separate notice at all, and

forms its whole latent interest, ought not, in mere logic, to be left

without some notice itself, though as rapidly executed as the previous

biographical sketch, and, from the necessity of the subject, by many

times over more imperfect.

To this task, therefore, the writer now addresses himself; and by

way of gaining greater freedom of movement and of resuming his

conversational tone, he will here again take the liberty of speaking in

the first person.

If Mr. Coleridge had been merely a scholar--merely a philologist--or

merely a man of science--there would be no reason apparent for

travelling in our survey beyond the field of his intellect, rigorously

and narrowly so called. But, because he was a poet, and because he was

a philosopher in a comprehensive and a most _human_ sense, with whose

functions the moral nature is so largely interwoven, I shall feel

myself entitled to notice the most striking aspects of his _character_

(using that word in its common limited meaning), of his disposition,

and his manners, as so many reflex indications of his intellectual

constitution. But let it be well understood that I design nothing

elaborate, nothing comprehensive or ambitious: my purpose is merely to

supply a few hints and suggestions drawn from a very hasty retrospect,

by way of adding a few traits to any outline which the reader may have

framed to himself, either from some personal knowledge, or from more

full and lively memorials.

One character in which Mr. Coleridge most often came before the public

was that of politician. In this age of fervent partisanship, it will,

therefore, naturally occur as a first question to inquire after his

party and political connexions: was he Whig, Tory, or Radical? Or,

under a new classification, were his propensities Conservative or

Reforming? I answer that, in any exclusive or emphatic sense, he

was none of these; because, as a philosopher, he was, according to

circumstances, and according to the object concerned, all of these by

turns. These are distinctions upon which a cloud of delusion rests.

It would not be difficult to show that in the speculations built upon

the distinction of Whig and Tory, even by as philosophic a politician

as Edmund Burke, there is an oversight of the largest practical

importance. But the general and partisan use of these terms superadds

to this [Greek: prôton pseudos] a second which is much more flagrant.

It is this: the terms Whig or Tory, used by partisans, are taken _extra

gradum_, as expressing the ideal or extreme cases of the several

creeds; whereas, in actual life, few such cases are found realized,

by far the major part of those who answer to either one or the other

denomination making only an approximation (differing by infinite

degrees) to the ideal or abstract type. A third error there is,

relating to the actual extent of the several denominations, even after

every allowance made for the faintest approximations. Listen to a Whig,

or to a Tory, and you will suppose that the great bulk of society range

under his banner: all, at least, who have any property at stake. Listen

to a Radical, and you will suppose that all are marshalled in the same

ranks with himself, unless those who have some private interest in

existing abuses, or have aristocratic privileges to defend. Yet, upon

going extensively into society as it is, you find that a vast majority

of good citizens are of no party whatsoever, own no party designation,

care for no party interest, but carry their good wishes by turns to men

of every party, according to the momentary purpose they are pursuing.

As to Whig and Tory, it is pretty clear that only two classes of men,

both of limited extent, acknowledge these as their distinctions:

first, those who make politics in some measure their profession or

trade--whether by standing forward habitually in public meetings as

leaders or as assistants, or by writing books and pamphlets in the same

cause; secondly, those whose rank, or birth, or position in a city,

or a rural district, almost pledges them to a share in the political

struggles of the day, under the penalty of being held _fainéans_,

truants, or even malignant recusants, if they should decline a warfare

which often, perhaps, they do not love in secret. These classes, which,

after all, are not numerous, and not entirely sincere, compose the

whole extent of professing Whigs and Tories who make any approach to

the standards of their two churches; and, generally speaking, these

persons have succeeded to their politics and their party ties, as they

have to their estates, viz. by inheritance. Not their way of thinking

in politics has dictated their party connexions; but these connexions,

traditionally bequeathed from one generation to another, have dictated

their politics. With respect to the Radical or the Reformer, the case

is otherwise; for it is certain that in this, as in every great and

enlightened nation, enjoying an intense and fervid communication of

thought through the press, there is, and must be, a tendency widely

diffused to the principles of sane reform--an anxiety to probe and

examine all the institutions of the land by the increasing lights

of the age--and a salutary determination that no acknowledged abuse

shall be sheltered by prescription, or privileged by its antiquity. In

saying, therefore, that _his_ principles are spread over the length

and breadth of the land, the Reformer says no more than the truth.

_Whig_ and _Tory_, as usually understood, express only two modes of

aristocratic partisanship: and it is strange, indeed, to find people

deluded by the notion that the reforming principle has any more natural

connexion with the first than the last. _Reformer_, on the other hand,

to a certain extent expresses the political creed and aspect of almost

every enlightened citizen: but, then, how? Not, as the _Radical_ would

insinuate, as pledging a man to a specific set of objects, or to any

visible and apparent party, having known leaders and settled modes of

action. British society, in its large majority, may be fairly described

as _Reformers_, in the sense of being favourably disposed to a general

spirit of ventilation and reform carried through all departments of

public business, political or judicial; but it is so far from being,

therefore, true that men in general are favourably disposed to any

known party, in or out of Parliament, united for certain objects and by

certain leaders, that, on the contrary, this reforming party itself has

no fixed unity, and no generally acknowledged heads. It is divided both

as to persons and as to things: the ends to be pursued create as many

schisms as the course of means proper for the pursuit, and the choice

of agents for conducting the public wishes. In fact, it would be even

more difficult to lay down the ideal standard of a Reformer, or his

abstract creed, than of a Tory: and, supposing this done, it would be

found, in practice, that the imperfect approximations to the pure faith

would differ by even broader shades as regarded the reforming creed

than as regarded that of the rigorous or ultra Tory.

With respect to Mr. Coleridge: he was certainly a friend to all

enlightened reforms; he was a friend, for example, to Reform in

Parliament. Sensible as he was of the prodigious diffusion of knowledge

and good sense amongst the classes immediately below the gentry in

British society, he could not but acknowledge their right to a larger

and a less indirect share of political influence. As to the plan, and

its extent, and its particular provisions,--upon those he hesitated

and wavered; as other friends to the same views have done, and will

continue to do. The only _avowed_ objects of modern Reformers which he

would strenuously have opposed, nay, would have opposed with the zeal

of an ancient martyr, are those which respect the Church of England,

and, therefore, most of those which respect the two Universities of

Oxford and Cambridge. There he would have been found in the first ranks

of the Anti-Reformers. He would also have supported the House of

Peers, as the tried bulwark of our social interests in many a famous

struggle, and sometimes, in the hour of need, the sole barrier against

despotic aggressions on the one hand, and servile submissions on the

other. Moreover, he looked with favour upon many modes of aristocratic

influence as balances to new-made commercial wealth, and to a far

baser tyranny likely to arise from that quarter when unbalanced. But,

allowing for these points of difference, I know of little else stamped

with the general seal of modern reform, and claiming to be a privileged

object for a national effort, which would not have had his countenance.

It is true,--and this I am sensible will be objected,--that his party

connexions were chiefly with the Tories; and it adds a seeming strength

to this objection, that these connexions were not those of accident,

nor those which he inherited, nor those of his youthful choice. They

were sought out by himself, and in his maturer years; or else they were

such as sought _him_ for the sake of his political principles; and

equally, in either case, they argued some affinity in his political

creed. This much cannot be denied. But one consideration will serve

greatly to qualify the inference from these facts. In those years when

Mr. Coleridge became connected with Tories, what was the predominating

and cardinal principle of Toryism, in comparison with which all else

was willingly slighted? Circumstances of position had thrown upon the

Tories the _onus_ of a great national struggle, the greatest which

History anywhere records, and with an enemy the most deadly. The Whigs

were then out of power: they were therefore in opposition; and that

one fact, the simple fact, of holding an anti-ministerial position,

they allowed, by a most fatal blunder, to determine the course of

their foreign politics. Napoleon was to be cherished simply because he

was a thorn in Mr. Pitt's side. So began their foreign policy--and in

that pettiest of personal views. Because they were anti-ministerial,

they allowed themselves passively to become anti-national. To be a

Whig, therefore, in those days, implied little more than a strenuous

opposition to foreign war; to be a Tory pledged a man to little

more than war with Napoleon Bonaparte. And this view of our foreign

relations it was that connected Coleridge with Tories,--a view which

arose upon no motives of selfish interest (as too often has been said

in reproach), but upon the changes wrought in the spirit of the French

Republic, which gradually transmuted its defensive warfare (framed

originally to meet a conspiracy of kings crusading against the new-born

democracy of French institutions, whilst yet in their cradle) into a

warfare of aggression and sanguinary ambition. The military strength

evoked in France by the madness of European kings had taught her the

secret of her own power--a secret too dangerous for a nation of vanity

so infinite, and so feeble in all means of moral self-restraint.

The temptation to foreign conquest was too strong for the national

principles; and, in this way, all that had been grand and pure in the

early pretensions of French Republicanism rapidly melted away before

the common bribes of vulgar ambition. Unoffending states, such as

Switzerland, were the first to be trampled under foot; no voice was

heard any more but the "brazen throat of war"; and, after all that

had been vaunted of a golden age, and a long career opened to the

sceptre of pure political justice, the clouds gathered more gloomily

than ever; and the sword was once more reinstated, as the sole arbiter

of right, with less disguise and less reserve than under the vilest

despotism of kings. The change was in the French Republicans, not in

their foreign admirers; they, in mere consistency, were compelled

into corresponding changes, and into final alienation of sympathy, as

they beheld, one after one, all titles forfeited by which that grand

explosion of pure democracy had originally challenged and sustained

their veneration. The mighty Republic had now begun to revolve through

those fierce transmigrations foreseen by Burke, to every one of which,

by turns, he had denounced an inevitable "purification by fire and

blood": no trace remained of her primitive character: and of that awful

outbreak of popular might which once had made France the land of hope

and promise to the whole human race, and had sounded a knell to every

form of oppression or abuse, no record was to be found, except in the

stupendous power which cemented its martial oligarchy. Of the people,

of the democracy--or that it had ever for an hour been roused from its

slumbers--one sole evidence remained; and that lay in the blank power

of destruction, and its perfect organization, which none but a popular

movement, no power short of that, could have created. The people,

having been unchained, and as if for the single purpose of creating

a vast system of destroying energies, had then immediately recoiled

within their old limits, and themselves become the earliest victim

of their own stratocracy. In this way France had become an object of

jealousy and alarm. It remained to see to what purpose she would apply

her new energies. That was soon settled; her new-born power was wielded

from the first by unprincipled and by ambitious men; and, in 1800,

it fell under the permanent control of an autocrat, whose unity of

purpose, and iron will, left no room for any hope of change.

Under these circumstances, under these prospects, coupled with this

retrospect, what became the duty of all foreign politicians? of

the English above all, as natural leaders in any hopeful scheme of

resistance? The question can scarcely be put with decency. Time and

season, place or considerations of party, all alike vanished before

an elementary duty to the human race, which much transcended any

duty of exclusive patriotism. Plant it, however, on that narrower

basis, and the answer would have been the same for all centuries,

and for every land under a corresponding state of circumstances. Of

Napoleon's real purposes there cannot _now_ be any reasonable doubt.

His confessions--and, in particular, his indirect revelations at St.

Helena--have long since removed all demurs or scruples of scepticism.

For England, therefore, as in relation to a man bent upon her ruin,

all distinctions of party were annihilated--Whig and Tory were merged

and swallowed up in the transcendent duties of patriots, Englishmen,

lovers of liberty. Tories, _as_ Tories, had here no peculiar or

separate duties--none which belonged to their separate creed in

politics. Their duties were paramount; and their partisanship had

here no application--was perfectly indifferent, and spoke neither

this way nor that. In one respect only they had peculiar duties, and

a peculiar responsibility; peculiar, however, not by any difference

of quality, but in its supreme degree; the same duties which belonged

to all, belonged to them by a heavier responsibility. And how, or

why? Not _as_ Tories had they, or could they have, any functions at

all applying to this occasion; it was as being then the ministerial

party, as the party accidentally in power at the particular crisis: in

_that_ character it was that they had any separate or higher degree

of responsibility; otherwise, and as to the _kind_ of their duty

apart from this degree, the Tories stood in the same circumstances

as men of all other parties. To the Tories, however, as accidentally

in possession of the supreme power, and wielding the national forces

at that time, and directing their application--to them it was that

the honour belonged of making a beginning: on them had devolved

the privilege of opening and authorizing the dread crusade. How

and in what spirit they acquitted themselves of that most enviable

task--enviable for its sanctity, fearful for the difficulty of its

adequate fulfilment--how they persevered, and whether, at any crisis,

the direst and most ominous to the righteous cause, they faltered or

gave sign of retreating--History will tell--History has already told.

To the Whigs belonged the duty of seconding their old antagonists:

and no wise man could have doubted that, in a case of transcendent

patriotism, where none of those principles could possibly apply by

which the two parties were divided and distinguished, the Whigs would

be anxious to show that, for the interests of their common country,

they could cheerfully lay aside all those party distinctions, and

forget those feuds which now had no pertinence or meaning. Simply as

Whigs, had they stood in no other relation, they probably would have

done so. Unfortunately, however, for their own good name and popularity

in after times, they were divided from the other party, not merely as

Whigs opposed to Tories, but also upon another and a more mortifying

distinction, which was not, like the first, a mere inert question of

speculation or theory, but involved a vast practical difference of

honours and emoluments:--they were divided, I say, on another and

more vexatious principle, as the _Outs_ opposed to the _Ins_. Simply

as Whigs, they might have coalesced with the Tories _quoad hoc_, and

merely for this one purpose. But, as men _out_ of power, they could

not coalesce with those who were _in_. They constituted "his Majesty's

Opposition"; and, in a fatal hour, they determined that it was fitting

to carry their general scheme of hostility even into this sacred and

privileged ground. That resolution once taken, they found it necessary

to pursue it with zeal. The case itself was too weighty and too

interesting to allow of any moderate tone for the abetters or opposers.

Passion and personal bitterness soon animated the contest: violent

and rash predictions were hazarded--prophecies of utter ruin and of

captivity for our whole army were solemnly delivered: and it soon

became evident, as indeed mere human infirmity made it beforehand but

too probable, that, where so much personal credit was at stake upon the

side of our own national dishonour, the wishes of the prophet had been

pledged to the same result as the credit of his political sagacity.

Many were the melancholy illustrations of the same general case. Men

were seen fighting against the evidences of some great British victory

with all the bitterness and fierce incredulity which usually meet the

first rumours of some private calamity: that was in effect the aspect

in their eyes of each national triumph in its turn. Their position,

connected with the unfortunate election made by the Whig leaders of

their tone, from the very opening of the contest, gave the character of

a calamity for them and for their party to that which to every other

heart in Britain was the noblest of triumphs in the noblest of causes;

and, as a party, the Whigs mourned for years over those events which

quickened the pulses of pleasure and sacred exultation in every other

heart. God forbid that all Whigs should have felt in this unnatural

way! I speak only of the tone set by the Parliamentary leaders. The

few who were in Parliament, and exposed to daily taunts from the just

exultation of their irritated opponents, had their natural feelings

poisoned and envenomed. The many who were out of Parliament, and not

personally interested in this warfare of the Houses, were left open to

natural influences of patriotic pride, and to the contagion of public

sympathy: and these, though Whigs, felt as became them.

These are things too unnatural to be easily believed, or, in a land

where the force of partisanship is less, to be easily understood. Being

true, however, they ought not to be forgotten: and at present it is

almost necessary that they should be stated for the justification of

Coleridge. Too much has been written upon this part of his life, and

too many reproaches thrown out upon his levity or his want of principle

in his supposed sacrifice of his early political connexions, to make

it possible for any reverencer of Coleridge's memory to pass over the

case without a full explanation. That explanation is involved in the

strange and scandalous conduct of the Parliamentary Whigs. Coleridge

passed over to the Tories only in that sense in which all patriots did

so at that time, and in relation to our great _foreign_ interest--viz.

by refusing to accompany the Whigs in their almost perfidious demeanour

towards Napoleon Bonaparte. Anti-_ministerial_ they affect to style

their policy, but in the most eminent sense it was anti-_national_. It

was thus far--viz. exclusively, or almost exclusively, in relation to

our great feud with Napoleon--that Coleridge adhered to the Tories.

But, because this feud was so capital and so earth-shaking a quarrel

that it occupied all hearts and all the councils of Christendom,

suffering no other question almost to live in its neighbourhood, hence

it happened that he who acceded to the Tories in this one chapter

of their policy was regarded as an ally in the most general sense.

Domestic politics were then, in fact, forgotten; no question, in any

proper sense a Tory one, ever arose in that era; or, if it had, the

public attention would not have settled upon it, and it would speedily

have been dismissed.

_Hence_ I deduce as a possibility, and, from my knowledge of Coleridge,

I deduce it as a fact, that his adhesion to the Tories was bounded by

his approbation of their foreign policy; and even of _that_ rarely in

its executive details, rarely even in its military plans (for these he

assailed with more keenness of criticism than to me the case seemed

to justify), but solely in its animating principle, its moving and

sustaining force, viz. the doctrine and entire faith that Napoleon

Bonaparte ought to be resisted, was not a proper object of diplomacy or

negotiation, and could be resisted hopefully and triumphantly. Thus far

he went along with the Tories: in all else he belonged quite as much

to other parties--so far as he belonged to any. And that he did not

follow any bias of private interest in connecting himself with Tories,

or rather in allowing Tories to connect themselves with him, appears

(rather more indeed than it ought to have appeared) on the very surface

of his life. From Tory munificence he drew nothing at all, unless it

should be imputed to his Tory connexions that George IV selected him

for one of his academicians. But this slight mark of royal favour he

owed, I believe, to other considerations; and I have reason to think

that this way of treating political questions, so wide of dogmatism,

and laying open so vast a field to scepticism that might else have

gone unregarded, must have been held as evidence of too latitudinarian

a creed to justify a title to Toryism. And, upon the whole, I am of

opinion that few events of Mr. Coleridge's life were better calculated

to place his disinterested pursuit of truth in a luminous aspect. In

fact, his carelessness of all worldly interests was too notorious to

leave him open to suspicions of that nature: nor was this carelessness

kept within such limits as to be altogether meritorious. There is no

doubt that his indolence concurred, in some degree, to that line of

conduct and to that political reserve which would, at all events, have

been pursued, in a degree beyond what honour the severest, or delicacy

the most nervous, could have enjoined.

It is a singular anecdote, after all, to report of Coleridge, who

incurred the reproach of having _ratted_ solely by his inability to

follow the friends of his early days into what his heart regarded as a

monstrous and signal breach of patriotism, that in any eminent sense he

was _not_ a patriot. His understanding, in this, as in many instances,

was too active, too restless, for any abiding feelings to lay hold of

him, unless when they coincided with some palpable command of nature.

Parental love, for instance, was too holy a thing to be submitted

for an instant to any scrutiny or any jealousy of his hair-splitting

understanding. But it must be something as sacred and as profound as

that which with Coleridge could long support the endless attrition of

his too active intellect. In this instance, he had the same defect,

derived in part from the same cause, as a contemporary, one of the

idols of the day, more celebrated, and more widely celebrated, than

Coleridge, but far his inferior in power and compass of intellect.

I speak of Goethe: he also was defective, and defective under far

stronger provocations and excitement, in patriotic feeling. He cared

little for Weimar, and less for Germany. And he was, thus far, much

below Coleridge--that the passion which he could not feel Coleridge

yet obliged himself practically to obey in all things which concerned

the world, whereas Goethe disowned this passion equally in his acts,

his words, and his writings. Both are now gone--Goethe and Coleridge;

both are honoured by those who knew them, and by multitudes who did

not. But the honours of Coleridge are perennial, and will annually grow

more verdant; whilst from those of Goethe every generation will see

something fall away, until posterity will wonder at the subverted idol,

whose basis, being hollow and unsound, will leave the worship of their

fathers an enigma to their descendants.

NOTE REFERRED TO ON PAGE 143

I have somewhere seen it remarked with respect to these charges of

plagiarism, that, however incontrovertible, they did not come with any

propriety or grace from myself as the supposed friend of Coleridge,

and as writing my sketch of slight reminiscences on the immediate

suggestion of his death. My answer is this: _I_ certainly was the first

person (first, I believe, by some years) to point out the plagiarisms

of Coleridge, and above all others that circumstantial plagiarism, of

which it is impossible to suppose him unconscious, from Schelling. Many

of his plagiarisms were probably unintentional, and arose from that

confusion between things floating in the memory and things self-derived

which happens at times to most of us that deal much with books on the

one hand, and composition on the other. An author can hardly have

written much and rapidly who does not sometimes detect himself, and

perhaps, therefore, sometimes fail to detect himself, in appropriating

the thoughts, images, or striking expressions of others. It is enough

for his conscientious self-justification, that he is anxiously vigilant

to guard himself from such unacknowledged obligations, and forward to

acknowledge them as soon as ever they are pointed out. But no excess

of candour the most indulgent will allow us to suppose that a most

profound speculation upon the original relations _inter se_ of the

subjective and the objective, literally translated from the German,

and stretching over some pages, could, after any interval of years,

come to be mistaken by the translator for his own. This amounted to

an entire essay. But suppose the compass of the case to lie within

a single word, yet if that word were so remarkable, so provocative

to the curiosity, and promising so much weight of meaning (which

reasonably any great departure from ordinary diction must promise),

as the word _esemplastic_,[87] we should all hold it impossible for

a man to appropriate this word inadvertently. I, therefore, greatly

_understated_ the case against Coleridge, instead of giving to it

an undue emphasis. Secondly, in stating it at all, I did so (as at

the time I explained) in pure kindness. Well I knew that, from the

direction in which English philosophic studies were now travelling,

sooner or later these appropriations of Coleridge must be detected;

and I felt that it would break the force of the discovery, as an

unmitigated sort of police detection, if first of all it had been

announced by one who, in the same breath, was professing an unshaken

faith in Coleridge's philosophic power. It could not be argued that

one of those who most fervently admired Coleridge had professed such

feelings only because he was ignorant of Coleridge's obligations to

others. Here was a man who had actually for himself, unguided and

unwarned, discovered these obligations; and yet, in the very act of

making that discovery, this man clung to his original feelings and

faith. But, thirdly, I must inform the reader that I was not, nor ever

had been, the "friend" of Coleridge in any sense which could have a

right to restrain my frankest opinions upon his merits. I never had

lived in such intercourse with Coleridge as to give me an opportunity

of becoming his friend. To _him_ I owed nothing at all; but to the

public, to the body of his own readers, every writer owes the truth,

and especially on a subject so important as that which was then before

me.

[87] "_Esemplastic_":--A writer in "Blackwood," who carried a

wrath into the discussion for which I and others found it hard to

account, made it a sort of charge against myself, that I had

overlooked this remarkable case. If I _had_, there would have been

no particular reason for anger or surprise, seeing that the

particular German work in which these plagiarisms were traced had

been lent to me under most rigorous limitations as to the time for

returning it; the owner of the volume was going out of London, and

a very few hours (according to my present remembrance only two)

were all that he could allow me for hunting through the most

impracticable of metaphysical thickets (what Coleridge elsewhere

calls "the holy jungle of metaphysics"). Meantime I had _not_

overlooked the case of _esemplastic_; I had it in my memory, but

hurry of the press and want of room obliged me to omit a good

deal. Indeed, if such omissions constituted any reproach, then the

critic in "Blackwood" was liable to his own censure. For I

remember to this hour several Latin quotations made by Schelling,

and repeated by Coleridge as his own, which neither I nor my too

rigorous reviewer had drawn out for public exposure. As regarded

myself, it was quite sufficient that I had indicated the grounds,

and opened the paths, on which the game must be sought; that I

left the rest of the chase to others, was no subject for blame,

but part of my purpose; and, under the circumstances, very much a

matter of necessity.--In taking leave of this affair, I ought to

point out a ground of complaint against my reviewer under his

present form of expression, which I am sure could not have been

designed. It happened that I had forgotten the particular title of

Schelling's work; naturally enough, in a situation where no

foreign books could be had, I quoted it under a false one. And

this inevitable error of mine on a matter so entirely irrelevant

is so described that the neutral reader might suppose me to have

committed against Coleridge the crime of Lauder against

Milton--that is, taxing him with plagiarism by referring, not to

real works of Schelling, but to pretended works, of which the very

titles were forgeries of my own. This, I am sure, my unknown

critic never could have meant. The plagiarisms were really there;

more and worse in circumstances than any denounced by myself; and,

of all men, the "Blackwood" critic was the most bound to proclaim

this; or else what became of his own clamorous outcry? Being,

therefore, such as I had represented, of what consequence was the

special title of the German volume to which these plagiarisms were

referred?--[The reference in this footnote, written by De Quincey

in 1854, is to an article on "The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge,"

which had appeared in _Blackwood_ for March 1840, the writer of

which had animadverted on De Quincey's previous disclosures on the

subject in his _Tait_ papers of 1834-5.--M.]

With respect to the comparatively trivial case of Pythagoras, an

author of great distinction in literature and in the Anglican Church

has professed himself unable to understand what room there could be

for plagiarism in a case where the solution ascribed to Coleridge

was amongst the commonplaces of ordinary English academic tuition.

Locally this may have been so; but hardly, I conceive, in so large

an extent as to make that solution _publici juris_. Yet, however

this may be, no help is given to Coleridge; since, according to Mr.

Poole's story, whether the interpretation of the riddle were or were

_not_ generally diffused, Coleridge claimed it for his own.--[In Mrs.

Sandford's _Thomas Poole and his Friends_ (1888), vol. ii. pp. 304-6,

there is printed a letter of Mr. Poole's, dated June 1835, doubting the

accuracy of De Quincey's story of their discourse in 1807, respecting

Coleridge's plagiarisms.--M.]

Finally--for distance from the press and other inconveniences of

unusual pressure oblige me to wind up suddenly--the whole spirit of my

record at the time (twenty years ago), and in particular the special

allusion to the last Duke of Ancaster's case, as one which ran parallel

to Coleridge's, involving the same propensity to appropriate what

generally were trifles in the midst of enormous and redundant wealth,

survives as an indication of the _animus_ with which I approached this

subject, starting even from the assumption that I was bound to consider

myself under the restraints of friendship--which, for the second time

let me repeat, I was _not_. In reality, the notes contributed to the

Aldine edition of the "Biographia Literaria," by Coleridge's admirable

daughter, have placed this whole subject in a new light; and, in doing

this, have unavoidably reflected some degree of justification upon

myself. Too much so, I understand to be the feeling in some quarters.

This lamented lady is thought to have shown partialities in her

distributions of praise and blame upon this subject. I will not here

enter into that discussion. But, as respects the justification of her

father, I regard her mode of argument as unassailable. Filial piety the

most tender never was so finely reconciled with candour towards the

fiercest of his antagonists. Wherever the plagiarism was undeniable,

she has allowed it; whilst palliating its faultiness by showing the

circumstances under which it arose. But she has also opened a new view

of other circumstances under which an apparent plagiarism arose that

was not real. I myself, for instance, knew cases where Coleridge gave

to young ladies a copy of verses, headed thus--"Lines on----, from the

German of Hölty." Other young ladies made transcripts of these lines;

and, caring nothing for the German authorship, naturally fathered

them upon Coleridge, the translator. These lines were subsequently

circulated as Coleridge's, and as if on Coleridge's own authority. Thus

arose many cases of apparent plagiarism. And, lastly, as his daughter

most truly reports, if he took--he gave. Continually he fancied other

men's thoughts his own; but such were the confusions of his memory that

continually, and with even greater liberality, he ascribed his own

thoughts to others.