The Shakespeare Lectures as arranged for Blackwood were probably written out by one of Coleridge’s friends. The History of Philosophy consisted of the Lectures commenced 14th December 1818. The Logic is still in MS. (Dykes Campbell, Life, 251, note).

Mrs. Coleridge and Sara came to Highgate and remained till the end of February (Ainger, ii, 65, 71). Mrs. Coleridge wrote that “our visits to Highgate have been productive of the greatest satisfaction to all parties.” It was at this time that Sara and her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, first met.

Letter 208. To Allsop

As I shall rely on your spending Sunday here, and with me alone, I shall defer to that time all but my tenderest regards to Mrs. Allsop, and the superfluous assurance that I am evermore, my dearest Allsop,

P.S.—You will be delighted with my new room.

Letter 209. To Allsop

Letter 210. To Mrs. Allsop

Indeed, indeed you have sadly misunderstood my last hurried note. So over and over again has Mr. Allsop been assured that every invitation to him included you, so often has he been asked to consider one meant for both, that in a few lines scrawled in the dark, with a distracting, quick, thick, and noisy beating as of a distant forge-hammer in my head, and, lastly, written, not so much under any expectation of seeing him (in fact for Christmas-day I had none), as from a nervous jealousy of any customary mark of respect and affection being omitted, the ceremony of expressing your name did not occur to me. But the blame, whatever it be, lies with me, wholly, exclusively on me; for on asking Mr. Gillman whether an invitation had been sent to you, he replied by asking me if I had not spoken, and on my saying it was now too late, he still desired me to write, his words being,—“For though Allsop must know how glad we always are to see him, yet still, as far as it is a mark of respect, it is his due.” Accordingly I wrote. But after the letter had been sent to the post, on going to Mrs. Gillman to learn how she was, and saying that I had just scrawled a note in the dark in order not to miss the post, she expressed her disapprobation as nearly as I can remember in these words:—“I do not think a mere ceremony any mark of respect to intimate friends. How, in such weather as this, and short days, can it be supposed that Mrs. Allsop could either leave the children or take them? But to expect Mr. Allsop to dine away from his family at this time is what I would not even appear to do, for I should think it very wrong if he did.” I was vexed, and could only reply,—“This comes of doing things of a hurry. However, Allsop knows me too well to attribute to me any other feeling or purpose than the real ones.” I give you my word and honour, my dear madame, that these were, to the best of my recollection, the very words; but I am quite certain that they contain the same substance. And for this reason, knowing how it would vex and fret on her spirits that you had been offended, and (if the letter of itself without any interpretation derived from the character or known sentiments of the writer were to decide it), justly offended, I have not shown her your note, nor mentioned the circumstance to her; for this sad accident has pulled her down sadly, coming too in conjunction with the distressful state of my health and spirits; for such is my state at present, that though I would myself have run any hazard to have spent to-morrow with Miss Southey, my own Sara’s friend and twin-sister, and with Miss Wordsworth at Monkhouse’s, in Gloster-place; yet Mr. Gillman has both dissuaded and forbidden me as my medical adviser. I trust, therefore, that finding Mrs. Gillman more than blameless, and that in me the blame was in the judgment and not in the intention, you will think no more of it, but do me the justice to believe that any intentions or feelings of which I have been conscious have ever been of a kind most contrary to any form of disrespect, omissive or commissive; to which, let me add, that I should be doing what Mr. Allsop (I am sure) would not do, if having shown you consciously any disrespect I continued to subscribe myself his friend, not to speak of any profession of being what in very truth I am, my dear Mrs. Allsop,

Thomas Monkhouse referred to in the above letter was a cousin of Mrs. Wordsworth, with whom Lamb on 4th March 1823 “dined in Parnassus with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Rogers, and Tom Moore, half the poetry of England clustered and constellated in Gloucester Place” (Ainger, ii, 69).

Letter 211. To Mr. and Mrs. Allsop

My dear Allsop,

You I know will have approved of my instant compliance with Mr. Gillman’s request of returning with him; and I know, too, that both Mrs. Allsop and yourself will think it superfluous in me to tell you what you must be sure I cannot but feel. I trust that when I next return from you, I shall have—not to thank you less—but with less painful recollections of the trouble and anxiety I have occasioned you.

In the agitation of leaving Mrs. Allsop, I forgot to take with me the translation of Virgil. Could I, that is, dared I, wait till Sunday, I might make it one way of inducing you to spend the day with me. Upon the whole, however, I had better send than increase my anxieties, so I will send Riley with this note.

My Grandfatherly love and kisses to the Fairy Prattler and the meek boy. I did heave a long-drawn wish this morning, as the sun and the air too were so genial, that the latter had been in the good woman’s house at Highgate well wrapped up. A fortnight would do wonders for the dear little fellow. You and Mrs. Allsop may rely on it that I would see him every day during his stay here, if there were only one hour in which it did not rain vehemently.

Coleridge wrote about this time to Wordsworth regarding his translation of part of Virgil (Knight’s Life of Wordsworth, ii, 302), and threw cold water on the project of Wordsworth’s entering into rivalry with Dryden.

Letter 212. To Allsop

Letter 213. To Allsop

I direct this to your house, or firm should I say? because I should not think myself justified in exciting in Mrs. Allsop an alarm, for which I have no more grounds than my own apprehensions and unlearned conjectures. And yet having these bodings, I cannot feel quite easy in withholding them from you. On Saturday, the morning Mrs. Allsop was here, I was in high hope, the little boy looking so much clearer and livelier than on the Thursday; but the weather since then being on the whole genial, and the baby showing no mark of progress, but rather the reverse, and it seeming to me each returning day to require a stronger effort to rouse its attention, and the relapse to a dulness, which it is evident the upright posture alone prevented from being a doze, becoming more immediate, I cannot repel the boding that there is either some mesenteric affection, which sometimes exists in infants without betraying itself by any notable change in the ingestion or the egesta, yet producing on the brain an effect similar to that which flatulence, or confined gas pressing on the nerves of the stomach, will do; or else that it is a case of chronic (slow) hydrocephalus. Against this fear I have to say, first, that I have not been able to detect any insensibility to light in the pupil of its eyes, and that the little innocent has no convulsive twitches, and neither starts nor screams in its sleep. For the first I have no opportunity (the sun being clouded) of making a decisive experiment, and requested Mrs. Constable to try it with a candle, as soon as it was taken up after dark; and though the presence of this symptom is an infallible evidence of the presence of effusion, or some equivalent cause of pressure, its absence is no sure proof of the absence of the disease, though it is a presumption in favour of the degree. The freedom from perturbation in sleep, however, is altogether a favourable circumstance, and allows a hope that the continued heaviness and immediate relapse into slumber on being placed horizontally may be the effect of weakness. But then the poor little fellow habitually keeps its hand to its head, and there is a sensible heat and throbbing at the temples. On the whole, you should be prepared for the possible event, and Mrs. Constable is naturally very anxious on this point, not merely lest any neglect should be suspected on her part, but likewise from an anticipation of the mother’s agitation, should she at any time come up just to witness the baby’s last struggles, or to find no more what she was expecting to see in incipient recovery.

Do not misunderstand me, my dearest friend, nor let this letter alarm you beyond what the facts require. I have seen no decisive marks, no positive change for the worse, no measurable retro-gression. I have of course repeatedly spoken to Mr. Gillman, but he says it is impossible to form any conclusive opinion. There is no proof that it may not be weakness at present and hitherto, but neither dare he determine what the continuance of the weakness may not produce. Nothing can warrantably be attempted in this uncertainty but mild alteratives, watchful attention to the infant’s regularity, with as cordial nourishment as can be given without endangering heat or inflammatory action.

I do not think that I have been able to remain undisturbed an hour together for the last three days, such a tumble in of persons with requests or claims on me has there been. House-hunting, etc., etc.

*         *         *         *         *         *         *

*         *         *         *         *         *

The genial glow of Friendship once deadened can never be rekindled.

P.S. To my great surprise and delight, Mr. Anster came in on us this afternoon, and in perfect health and spirits.[133]

It was about this time that Coleridge wrote his beautiful Youth and Age,[134] in which occurs the fine designation of Friendship as “a Sheltering Tree.”

The following opinion of Coleridge by Mrs. Gillman is taken from The Bright Side of Life by Dr. Prentiss, an American, who visited Mrs. Gillman in 1842, and will fittingly close this chapter:

CHAPTER XXVIII
THE NEW ACADEME

Many men who afterwards attained to eminence in their several departments gathered at the Grove to hear Coleridge discourse. Charles and Mary Lamb, Basil Montagu and his wife, J. Hookham Frere, Henry Crabb Robinson, John Sterling, Henry Nelson Coleridge, Allsop, and Joseph Henry Green, may be regarded as the planets who revolved around the central sun. The planets, too, occasionally brought their satellites. Joseph Henry Green made Coleridge’s acquaintance in 1817. Deeply interested in philosophy, he imbibed Coleridge’s principles, and afterwards wrote a book on the Logos, published in 1865 as Spiritual Philosophy. Edward Irving also sat at the feet of Coleridge; he brought Carlyle to Highgate in 1824, who wrote his impressions of Coleridge to his brother the same year, and twenty years later depicted Coleridge in colours which will remain beside those of Hazlitt, De Quincey, Noon Talfourd, Henry Nelson Coleridge, and Clement Carlyon and T. Colley Grattan, one of the fine gallery of contemporary literary portraits of Coleridge. Dr. Chalmers came in 1827 and caught occasional glimpses of meaning, (Memoir by Hanna, ii, 126–27): and Emerson called in 1833, without, however, any vital feeling of spiritual inter-relationship springing up between them, (English Traits).

During 1824 Coleridge was much engaged with Religious subjects; and then composed those Letters afterwards published as Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit.

Our next letter refers to the Aids to Reflection which Coleridge was now having published. The germs of the volume may be found in the long Theological Letter to Cottle of 1807, in which Coleridge extols Leighton as the best of the old divines, and in a letter to John Murray of 18th January 1822 (Letters, 717) in which he projected a selection of Beauties from Leighton. Its theory of Atonement also lies in germ in the play of Osorio, 1797, (Remorse of 1813). The Aids to Reflection not only became the most popular of Coleridge’s works; it helped to forward interest in his other writings.]

The Aids to Reflection first appeared in 1825. The original title was Aids to Reflection in the formation of a manly character on the several grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion; illustrated by select passages from our elder divines, especially from Archbishop Leighton. In an advertisement to the first edition, the Author mentions that the work was proposed and begun as a mere selection from the writings of Leighton, with a few notes and a biographical preface by the selector, but underwent a revolution of plan and object. “It would, indeed,” he adds, “be more correct to say, that the present volume owed its accidental origin to the intention of compiling one of a different description than to speak of it as the same work.” “Still, however, the selections from Leighton, which will be found in the fundamental and moral sections of this work, and which I could retain consistently with its present form and matter, will, both from the intrinsic excellence and from the characteristic beauty of the passages, suffice to answer two prominent purposes of the original plan; that of placing in a clear light the principle which pervades all Leighton’s writings—his sublime view, I mean, of Religion and Morality as the means of reforming the human soul in the Divine Image (Idea); and that of exciting an interest in the works, and an affectionate reverence for the name and memory of this severely tried and truly primitive Churchman.”

Neither Hume nor Clarendon, I believe, mentions the persecution of Archbishop Leighton’s father by the Prelatical party of his day; and yet it was one of their worst acts, and that which most excited wrath and indignation against the Primate—so faithful is their portrait of those times! Never can I read Mr. Wordsworth’s sublime sonnet to Laud, especially the lines,

without thinking of another “old weak man for vengeance laid aside”—of Laud in the day of his power pulling off his hat and thanking God for the inhuman sentence that had been passed upon the already wasted victim[135]—of the miserable den to which the mangled man was committed for life after that sentence had been executed in all its multiplication and precision of barbarity—then calling to mind the words of our Saviour, They that take the sword shall perish with the sword, and Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy. It was not mercy alone that was violated by these acts—but law and justice; and if he who instigated and rejoiced in them received neither justice nor mercy in his turn, is he worthy of the sacred name of Martyr? May we not say that the vengeance which fell upon this persecutor was the Lord’s vengeance, even if it came to pass by evil instruments, and fell upon a head already bowed down, and in some respects a noble one? Can the glory and honour of meeting death with firmness,—nay even with “sublime” piety, cast its beams backward and bathe in one pure luminous flood a life darkened with such deep shadows, as those that chequer the sunshine of Laud’s career?—the parts really brightened with the light of heaven? Plainness, sincerity, integrity, learning, munificence to a cause[136]—can virtues like these outweigh or neutralize such faults of head, heart, and temper, as lie to the charge of this Bishop in the church of Christ? As well might we set the cold bright morning dews, that rest on the stony crown of Vesuvius, against the burning lava that bursts from its crater, and expect them to quench the fire or reduce it to a moderate heat. Some abatement must be made from the guilt of his violences from consideration of the times; but to subtract the whole on that account, or even to make light of it, is surely too much to make moral good and evil dependent on circumstance. What? Have Arundel, Bonner, Gardiner little or nothing to answer for? Was there ever yet a persecutor that persecuted from mere speculative inhumanity? Even through Clarendon’s account we may discern, I think, that Laud’s private passions, in part at least, engaged him in the cause of Intolerance. He had been exasperated, before he attained power, by Puritan molestations and oppositions,—he became the persecutor of Puritans after he attained it; as schoolboys that have been tormented while they were in a low form, torment in their turn when they get into a high one,—not their tormentors but unfortunates who represent them to their imagination. An eminently good and wise man is above his times, if not in all, yet in many things; but Laud was the very impersonation of his times—the impersonated spirit of his age and his party. (Compare his over ceremonious consecration of St. Catherine’s Church, gloated over by Hume, with Archdeacon Hare’s remarks on his neglect of his diocese, in The Mission of the Comforter.) They who are of that party still, who would still swathe religion by way of supporting it, and dizen by way of dressing it, and gaze with fond regretful admiration upon the giant forms of Spiritual Despotism and Exaggerated Externalism, as they loom shadowy and magnificent through the vapoury vista of ages, to them no wonder that he is a giant too. And there are others, far above that or any other party, who in their love and zeal for the Church, abstract the how and the why of Laud’s public warfare, and see him abstractedly as the Champion of the Church of England. “God knows my heart,” says Mr. Coleridge, (in a marginal note on Mr. Southey’s article on the History of Dissenters, in the Quarterly Review of October 1813,) “how bitterly I abhor all intolerance, how deeply I pity the actors when there is reason to suppose them deluded; but is it not clear that this theatrical scene of Laud’s death, who was the victim of almost national indignation, is not to be compared with ‘bloody sentences’ in the coolness of secure power? As well might you palliate the horrible atrocities of the Inquisition, every one of which might be justified on the same grounds that Southey has here defended Laud, by detailing the vengeance taken on some of the Inquisitors.” I do not see that here my honoured Uncle defends the Primate: he says, “We are not the apologists of Laud; in some things he was erroneous, in some imprudent, in others culpable. Evil, which upon the great scale is ever made conducive to good, produces evil to those by whom it comes.” And how wise and beautiful is this sentiment a little further on! “It especially behoves the historian to inculcate charity, and take part with the oppressed, whoever may have been the oppressors.”

As some excuse for my Father’s expression, “theatrical scene,” I allege that sentence of Laud’s; “Never did man put off mortality with a better courage, nor look upon his bloody and malicious enemies with more Christian charity.” My Father adds: “I know well how imprudent and unworldly these my opinions are. The Dissenters will give me no thanks, because I prefer and extol the present Church of England, and the partizans of the Church will calumniate me, because I condemn particular members, and regret particular æras, of the former Church of England. Would that Southey had written the whole of his review in the spirit of this beautiful page.” (Page 102.) In that very interesting collection of meditative Sonnets by the late Sir Aubrey de Vere is one upon Laud, against which I ventured to write, “If anything done in the name of principle must needs be righteous, then the tortures and long languishing of Leighton are no impeachment of Laud’s righteousness.” There was a second edition of the Aids in 1831, a fifth in 1843.

The little work On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the Idea of each, first appeared in 1830, and went into a second edition in the same year. It is now joined with the Lay Sermons in one volume. To the Church and State are appended Notes on Taylor’s History of Enthusiasm, and A Dialogue between Demosius and Mystes.

[Letter 214. To Allsop

Is there any definite service, or any chance of any definite service, great or small, that I can do or promote, or expedite, by coming to town? If there be, let me have a line or a monosyllable Yes, and mention the time. I would have set off and taken the chance without asking the question, but that I have so many irons in the fire at this present moment,—1, my Preface; 2, my Essay; 3, a Work prepared for the press by my Hebrew Friend,[137] in which I am greatly interested, morally and crumenically, though not like the Modern Descendants of Heber, one of a crumenimulga Natio, i.e. a purse-milking set; and 4, Revisal, etc., for a friend only less near than yourself.

Mr. Chance, I take it for granted, has written to you. My opinion is, that he will be a valuable man, not only generally, but especially to that which alone concerns me—your comfort and happiness. He is a self-satisfied man, but of the very kindest and best sort. Prosperous in all his concerns, and with peace in his own conscience and family, I regard such vainness but as the overflow of humanity. I do not like him the better for it; but I should not like him the better without it. Meantime he is active, shrewd, a thorough man of business; sanguine I should think, both by constitution and habitual success: and, under any sudden emergency, I think that Mr. Chance, not so deeply interested, and yet (such is his nature) with equal liveliness in feeling, would be a comfort to you.

I shall miss the post if I do more than add, that whatever really serves you, will (and on his death-pillow quite as much as in his present garret) delight

Letter 215. To Allsop

Having disburdened myself of the main loads of outward obligation at least that pressed upon me, my Essay for the R. S. L.,[139] and my Aids to Reflection, with other matters not so expressly my own, but having the same, if not greater, demands on such quantity of time, as bodily pain and disqualification, with unprecludible interruption, have enabled me to make use of, I take the very first moment of the Furlough to tell you that I have been perplexed both by your silence and your absence. In fact, I had taken for granted you were in Derbyshire, till this afternoon, when I saw one who had met you yesterday.

Now I cannot recollect anything that can—I am sure, ought to have given you offence, unless it were my non-performance of the request communicated to me by Mr. Jameson.

I was ever in the stifle of my reflected anxieties, i.e. anxieties felt by reflection from those of others, and my Tangle of Things-to-be-done, solicitous to see and talk with you. You must not feel wounded if, loving you so truly as I do, and feeling more and more every week that nothing is worth living for but the consciousness of living aright, I was nervous if you will, with regard to the effect of this undertaking on the frame of your moral and intellectual Being. In the meantime, you never came near me, so that I might have been able to rectify my opinions, or rather to form them; and I felt, and still feel, that I would gladly go into a garret and work from morning to late night, at any work I could get money by, and more than share my pittance with you and yours, than see you unhappy with twenty thousand at your command.

Do not, my dearest friend, therefore let my perplexities, derived in great measure from my unacquaintance with the facts, and to which my ever-wakeful affection gave the origin, prevent you from treating, as you were wont to do.

Letter 216. To Allsop

Letter 217. To Allsop

On the Histories of Universities generally, the most interesting Features in the History of the most celebrated Universities in Great Britain, Germany, France, etc. Reduction of all Universities of any name, with respect to their construction and constitution, to three Classes. 2. The Meaning of the Term, University, and the one true and only adequate Scheme of a University stated and unfolded from the Seed (i.e. the idea) to the full Tree with all its Branches. 3. The advantages, moral, intellectual, national, developed from reason and established by proofs of History; and, lastly, a plan (and sketch of the means) of approximating to the Ideal, adapted and applied to this Metropolis. (N.B. The Plan in detail, salaries only not mentioned—the particular sums, I mean.) The obstacles, the favourable circumstances, the pro and con regarding the question of Collegiate Universities, etc. etc. That I could make these subjects not only highly interesting but even entertaining, I have not the least doubt. But would the subject excite an interest of curiosity? Would the anticipation of what I might say attract an audience of respectable smallclothes and petticoats sufficiently large to produce something more than, with the same exertions of Head and Hand, I might earn in my Garret (to give the precise Top-ography of my abode) here at Nemorosi, alias Houses in the Grove. For the expense of coach-hire, the bodily fatigue, and (to borrow a phrase from poor Charles Lloyd) “the hot huddle of indefinite sensations” that hustle my inward man in the monster city and a Crown and Anchor Room demand a +, and would an =, after all expenses paid, but ragged economy, unless I were certain of effecting more good in this than in a quieter way of industry.

I wrote to Mr. B. Montagu for his advice; but he felt no interest himself in the subject, and naturally therefore was doubtful of any number of others feeling any. But he promised to talk with his friend Mr. Irving about it! On the other hand, I heard from Mr. Hughes and a Mr. Wilkes (a clever Solicitor-sort of a man who lives in Finsbury-square, has a great sway with the Slangi yclept the Religious Public, and, this I add as a whitewasher, was a regular attendant on my lectures), that the subject itself is stirring up the Mud-Pool of the Public Mind in London with the vivacity of a Bottom wind. If you can find time, I wish you would talk with Jameson about it, and obtain the opinion of as many as are likely to think aright; and let me know your own opinion and anticipation above all, and at all events, and as soon as possible. We dine on Friday with Mr. Chance. I wish you were with us, for I am sure he would be glad to see you. Need I say that my thoughts, wishes, and prayers follow you in all your doings and strivings, for I am evermore, my dearest friend.

My kindest remembrances to Mrs. Allsop, with kisses for little Titania Puckinella.

Years have passed since I heard the Nightingales sing as they did this evening in Mr. Robart’s Garden Grounds; so many, and in such full song, particularly that giddy voluminous whirl of notes which you never hear but when the Birds feel the temperature of the air voluptuous.

P.S. If I undertook these Lectures, I should compose the three, and write them out with as much care and polish as if for the Press, though I should probably make no use of the MS. in speaking, or at all attempt to recollect it. It would, relatively to my vivâ voce addresses, be only a way of premeditating the subject.

Letter 218. To Allsop

The person to whom I alluded in my last is a Mr. T...,[140] who, within the last two or three years, has held a situation in the Colonial Office, but what, I do not know. From his age and comparatively recent initiation into the office, it is probably not a very influensive one; and, on the other hand, from the rank and character of his friends, he has occasionally brought up with him to our Thursday evening conver-, or, to mint a more appropriate term, one-versazione, it must be a respectable one. Mr. T... is Southey’s friend, and more than a literary acquaintance to me, only in consequence of my having had some friendly intercourse with his uncle during my abode in the north. Of him personally I know little more than that he is a remarkably handsome fashionable-looking young man, a little too deep or hollow mouthed and important in his enunciation, but clever and well read; and I have no reason to doubt that he would receive any one whom I had introduced to him as a friend of mine in whose welfare I felt anxious interest, with kindness and a disposition to forward his object should it be in his power.

But again, my dearest Friend, you must allow me to express my regret that I am acting in the dark, without any conviction on my mind that your present proceeding is not the result of wearied and still agitated spirits, an impetus of despondency, that fever which accompanies exhaustion. I can too well sympathise with you; and bitterly do I feel the unluckiness of my being in such a deplorable state of health just at the time when for your sake I should be most desirous to have the use of all my faculties. May God bless you, and your little-able but most sincere friend,

CHAPTER XXIX
ALARIC WATTS

The most finished production of Coleridge’s latest period is Alice Du Clos, a ballad of the Romantic Movement. Much speculation as to the date of its origin has been put forth, some thinking it belongs to the time when the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and the Three Graves were written, others placing it between the publication of the last two Editions of the Collected Poems, 1829–1834. But in Letter 205 of date 8th October 1822, the quotation of the two lines