HENRY CRABB ROBINSON
[Among the men who met Coleridge, and recorded their impressions of
his talk, Henry Crabb Robinson occupies a prominent place. He was
one of the leading genius tasters of the time, and made pilgrimages
to great living men in place of visiting the relics of departed
worth or the shrines of the saints, which serves with others the
same purpose. He thus came into contact with as wide a circle of
intellectuality as any man of his day, his list including Goethe,
Schiller, Wieland, and many of the Germans, Madame De Staël,
Wordsworth, Lamb, and a host of others well known to readers of his
lively _Diary_. Henry Crabb Robinson met Coleridge for the first
time in 1810 at Lamb's, and was at once smitten with Coleridge's
talk. He met him several times in the first month of their
acquaintanceship, and one of his entries in the _Diary_
reads--"Coleridge kept me on the stretch of attention and admiration
from half past three to twelve o'clock." But for a long time
Robinson did not rank Coleridge as high as Wordsworth, with whom he
had been familiar before meeting the former, and he was rather
surprised when Lamb put Coleridge above the poet of Rydal (_Diary_,
i, 319).
Robinson frequently visited Coleridge at Highgate. Indeed he was
among the first of Coleridge's acquaintances to be asked to dine at
the Grove. On 17th June 1817 we find Coleridge asking him to make an
appointment so that he might bring Ludwig Tieck with him to meet
John Hookham Frere (_Letters_, 671). He induces him to come to
Highgate to have a walk or drive "in Caen Wood and its delicious
groves and alleys (the finest in England), a grand Cathedral aisle
of giant lime-trees, Pope's favourite composition walk when with the
old Earl, a brother rogue of yours in the law line." He informs
Robinson that he has read two pages of _Lallah Rookh_, which he
pronounces "Crockery-ware!"
The following is a specimen of the many entries in the
_Diary_--"December 24, 1822. This afternoon I spent at Aders.[118] A
large party--a splendid dinner, prepared by a French cook; and music
in the evening. Coleridge was the star of the evening. He talked in
his usual way, though with more liberality than when I saw him last
some years ago. But he was somewhat less animated and brilliant and
paradoxical. The music was enjoyed by Coleridge, but I could have
dispensed with it for the sake of his conversation" (_Diary_, ii,
239).
The letters of Coleridge to Robinson preserved in the _Diary_, are
as follows: I, May 1808 (ii, 266-7); II, 1811 (ii, 360-4); III, 7th
Dec. 1812 (iii, 423-4); IV, June 1817 (iii, 57-8); V, 3rd May 1818
(iii, 93-95). The letters to Robinson in Brandl's _Life_ are--p. 322
(1811); p. 323, 18th Nov. 1811; p. 354, 3rd December 1817; p. 362,
20th June 1817.]
FOOTNOTES:
[118] [Mrs. Aders was the daughter of Raphael Smith, the engraver.
Coleridge's poem _The Two Founts_ was written to her.]