I hoped that a sufficient number of such Readers would gradually be obtained, as to secure for the Paper that small extent of circulation and immediate Sale, which would permit the Editor to carry it on to its conclusion, and that they might so far interest themselves in recommending it to men of kindred judgments among their acquaintances, that the alterations in my list of Subscribers should not be exclusively of a discouraging nature. Hitherto, indeed, I have only to express gratitude, and acknowledge constancy; but I do not attempt to disguise from myself that I owe this, in many instances, to a generous reluctance hastily to withdraw from an Undertaking in its first struggles, and before the Adventurer had had a fair opportunity of displaying the quality of his goods, or the foundations of his credit.

* * *—the one tantum vidi: the other I know by his works only and his public character. To profess indifference to their praises would convict me either of insensibility or insincerity. Yet (and I am sure, that you will both understand, and sympathize with, the feeling) my delight was not unalloyed by a something like pain, as if I were henceforward less free to express my admiration of them with the same warmth and affection, which I have been accustomed to do, before I had even anticipated the honour of such a communication. You will therefore not judge me too harshly, if so confirmed and cheered, I have sometimes in the warmth of composition, and while I was reviewing the materials of the more important part of my intended Essays, if I had sometimes permitted my Hopes a bolder flight; and counted on a share of favour and protection from the soberly zealous among the professionally Learned, when the Principles of The Friend shall have been brought into clear view, and Specimens have been given of the mode and the direction in which I purpose to apply and enforce them.

There are charges, the very suspicion of which is painful to an ingenuous mind in exact proportion as they are unfounded and inapplicable. I can bear with resignation a charge of enthusiasm. Even if accused of presumption, I will repay myself by deriving from the accusation an additional motive to increased watchfulness over myself, that I may remain entitled to plead, Not guilty! to it in the Court of my own conscience. But if my anxiety to obviate hasty judgments and misapprehensions is imputed to a less honourable motive than the earnest wish to exert my best faculties, as to the most beneficial purposes, so in the way most likely to effectuate them, I can give but one answer: that however great my desires of profit may be, they cannot be greater than my ignorance of the world, if I have chosen a weekly paper planned, as The Friend is, written on such subjects, and composed in such a style, as the most promising method of gratifying them.

Letter 146. To Cantab

I thank the “Friend’s friend and a Cantab” for his inspiriting Letter, and assure him, that it was not without its intended effect, of giving me encouragement. That this was not needless, he would feel as well as know, if I could convey to him the anxious thoughts and gloomy anticipations, with which I write any single paragraph, that demands the least effort of attention, or requires the Reader to enter into himself and question his own mind as to the truth of that which I am pressing on his notice. But both He and my very kind Malton Correspondent, and all of similar dispositions, may rest assured, that with every imaginable endeavour to make The Friend, collectively, as entertaining as is compatible with the main Object of the Work, I shall never so far forget the duty, I owe to them and to my own heart, as not to remember that mere amusement is not that main Object. I have taken upon myself (see Letter 145) all the blame that I could acknowledge without adulation to my readers and hypocritical mock-humility. But the principal source of the obscurity imputed must be sought for in the want of interest concerning the truths themselves. (Revel. iii, 17.) My sole Hope (I dare not say expectation) is, that if I am enabled to proceed with the work through an equal number of Essays with those already published, it will gradually find for itself its appropriate Public.

Coleridge worked pretty hard at The Friend. He was ably assisted by Miss Sarah Hutchinson, who acted as amanuensis. The Friend was first issued on 1st June 1809, and ceased with the twenty-seventh number on 10th March 1810. Like The Watchman, The Friend was published by subscription and was not a financial success. In The Friend Coleridge wrote in his most diffuse style. The long intricate sentence, imitative of that of the seventeenth century divines and political writers, was his favourite medium when writing on the Permanent Principles of things, and in it he often ran into prolixity. In a letter to Poole, of 28th January 1810 (Letters, 556), Coleridge defends himself for abandoning the Frenchified style of the Spectator, and the eighteenth-century Belles-Lettrists, who, in his estimation, had contributed to the taste for “unconnected writing” and “Reading made easy.” Coleridge tried to awaken a deeper note in the English magazine, and make the periodical a vehicle for profound reflection and logically connected thought; and although Coleridge’s own age was against him in this, the latter half of the nineteenth century has reversed the verdict in his favour.

While busy with The Friend, Coleridge was again contributing to The Courier a series of letters supporting the Spaniards in their struggle against Napoleon, and endeavouring to maintain British sympathy for the inhabitants of the Peninsula. These letters are written with Coleridge’s accustomed virility when writing for The Courier, and are almost as good as his Letters to Fox of 1802. It is a curious fact that when Coleridge stepped into The Courier office, he abandoned for the time being his over-refinement of ideas and subtle disquisitive method of writing for a more popular style, as good as any leader-writer of the day. He had great versatility of talent in prose; in fact he had three styles of writing—his Philosophic style, his Journalist style, and his Letter-Writer’s style, in the last of which he abandoned himself to the most curious and humorous freaks of construction and imagery, as when he apologizes for some warmth of expression, calling it “the dexterous toss, necessary to turn an idea out of its pudding-bag, round and unbroken.”—Letters, 410.]

CHAPTER XVI
QUARREL WITH WORDSWORTH, SECOND COURSE OF LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE

[During the remainder of 1810, after the cessation of The Friend, Coleridge did nothing of importance except write letters to his acquaintances about new projects which grew up in the impetuosity of his conversation or in answering some enquiry to a correspondent. At the close of the year Coleridge had determined to go to London once more; and an unfortunate occurrence took place on his arrival in London. Basil Montagu with his wife and child were travelling from Scotland to London, and called upon the Wordsworths at Allan Bank, where Coleridge resided with brief intervals of absence from September 1808 to April 1810. Montagu invited Coleridge to travel to the metropolis with him in his chaise and stay some time at his residence. Wordsworth warned Montagu of Coleridge’s opium habit, and said something to the effect that “he had no hope” of Coleridge, and perhaps that he had been a “nuisance” in the Wordsworth family. On his arrival in London, Montagu informed Coleridge that Wordsworth had commissioned him to say that Wordsworth had no hope of him, and that certain habits of his had made him a nuisance in the Allan Bank household (Dykes Campbell’s Life, 179). Coleridge, of course, left the Montagus on hearing this communication, and repaired to 7, Portland Place, Hammersmith, then the abode of his old friend John Morgan, and his wife Mary Brent, and her sister Charlotte Brent, with whom the father of the ladies also lived (Letters, 598).

Coleridge was deeply stung that Wordsworth should have said such a thing to Montagu. Professor Knight in his Life of Wordsworth gives a pretty full narrative of the event, and believes that Wordsworth, though he said he had no hope of Coleridge, did not utter the more offensive assertion about Coleridge being a nuisance in his family. Henry Crabb Robinson effected a formal reconciliation between the two poets, in which both figure to some disadvantage. Wordsworth’s proposal to confront Coleridge, his best and closest friend, with Montagu, a comparative stranger to both of them, for cross-examination, and thus sift out the actual expression used by the latter to the former, seems like very hard dealing; and Coleridge’s vehemence of protestation to believe whatever Wordsworth asserted to be the true version, in contradistinction to anything that Montagu might say, savours of unreality. Wordsworth’s taking offence at Coleridge not going to Grasmere on the death of his child at a juncture when it was impossible for him to leave London while Remorse was being put on the stage, does not redound to the credit of the Bard of Rydal; and Coleridge’s failure to call on his old friend while in the Lake District for the last time is equally against the poet of Stowey. The estrangement died down rather than was reconciled; but the irritation against Wordsworth remained long in Coleridge’s heart, and it is more than probable that after the excitement of the reconciliation made by Crabb Robinson was over, Coleridge believed Montagu’s rather than Wordsworth’s version of what had occurred. This is endorsed by the fact that Montagu was again taken into favour, and he and his wife were regular guests at the Highgate Thursdays in after times.[26]

During 1811, while in London, Coleridge again met Godwin, to whom he softened in his opinion. The following two letters indicate that he did not occupy the same attitude to the author of Political Justice as he did when he wrote The Watchman.

Letter 147. To Godwin

I half caught from Lamb that you had written to Wordsworth, with a wish that he should versify some tale or other, and that Wordsworth had declined it. I told dear Miss Lamb that I had formed a complete plan of a poem, with little plates for children, the first thought, but that alone, taken from Gessner’s First Mariner; and this thought, I have reason to believe, was not an invention of Gessner’s. It is this—that in early times, in some island or part of the Continent, the ocean had rushed in, overflowing a vast plain of twenty or thirty miles, and thereby insulating one small promontory or cape of high land, on which was a cottage, containing a man and his wife, and an infant daughter. This is the one thought; all that Gessner has made out of it—(and I once translated into blank verse about half of the poem, but gave it up under the influence of a double disgust, moral and poetical)—I have rejected; and, strictly speaking, the tale in all its parts, that one idea excepted, would be original. The tale will contain the cause, the occasions, the process, with all its failures and ultimate success, of the construction of the first boat, and of the undertaking of the first naval expedition. Now, supposing you liked the idea (I address you and Mrs. G., and as commerciants, not you as the philosopher who gave us the first system in England that ever dared reveal at full that most important of all important truths, that morality might be built on its own foundation, like a castle built from the rock and on the rock, with religion for the ornaments and completion of its roof and upper stories—nor as the critic who, in the life of Chaucer, has given us, if not principles of æsthetic or taste, yet more and better data for principles than had hitherto existed in our language)if we pulling like two friendly tradesmen together, (for you and your wife must be one flesh, and I trust are one heart) you approve of the plan, the next question is, Whether it should be written in prose or in verse, and if the latter, in what metre—stanzas, or eight-syllable iambics with rhymes (for in rhyme it must be), now in couplets and now in quatrains, in the manner of Cooper’s admirable translation of the Vert-Vert of Gresset. (N.B. not the Cowper).

Another thought has struck me within the last month, of a school-book in two octavo volumes, of Lives in the manner of Plutarch—not, indeed, of comparing and coupling Greek with Roman, Dion with Brutus, and Cato with Aristides, of placing ancient and modern together: Numa with Alfred, Cicero with Bacon, Hannibal with Gustavus Adolphus, and Julius Cæsar with Buonaparte—or what perhaps might be at once more interesting and more instructive, a series of lives, from Moses to Buonaparte, of all those great men, who in states or in the mind of man had produced great revolutions, the effects of which still remain, and are more or less distant causes of the present state of the world.

I remain, with unfeigned and affectionate esteem,

Letter 148. To Godwin

My chief motive in undertaking The First Mariner is merely to weave a few tendrils around your destined walking-stick, which, like those of the woodbine (that, serpent-like climbing up, and with tight spires embossing the straight hazel, rewards the lucky schoolboy’s search in the winter copse) may remain on it, when the woodbine, root and branch, lies trampled in the earth. I shall consider the work as a small plot of ground given up to you, to be sown at your own hazard with your own seed (gold-grains would have been but a bad saw, and besides have spoilt the metaphor). If the increase should more than repay your risk and labour, why then let me be one of your guests at Hendcot House. Your last letter impressed and affected me strongly. Ere I had yet read or seen your works, I, at Southey’s recommendation, wrote a sonnet in praise of the author. When I had read them, religious bigotry, the but half-understanding your principles, and the not half-understanding my own, combined to render me a warm and boisterous anti-Godwinist. But my warfare was open; my unfelt and harmless blows aimed at an abstraction I had christened with your name; and at that time, if not in the world’s favor, you were among the captains and chief men in its admiration. I became your acquaintance, when more years had brought somewhat more temper and tolerance; but I distinctly remember that the first turn in my mind towards you, the first movements of a juster appreciation of your merits, was occasioned by my disgust at the altered tone of language of many whom I had long known as your admirers and disciples—some of them, too, men who had made themselves a sort of reputation in minor circles as your acquaintances, and therefore your echoes by authority, who had themselves aided in attaching an unmerited ridicule to you and your opinions by their own ignorance, which led them to think the best settled truths, and indeed every thing in your Political Justice, whether assertion, or deduction, or conjecture, to have been new thoughts—downright creations! and by their own vanity, which enabled them to forget that everything must be new to him who knows nothing; others again, who though gifted with high talents, had yet been indebted to you and the discussions occasioned by your work, for much of their development, who had often and often styled you the Great Master, written verses in your honour, and, worse than all, had now brought your opinions—with many good and worthy men—into as unmerited an odium, as the former class had into contempt, by attempts equally unfeeling and unwise, to realize them in private life, to the disturbance of domestic peace. And lastly, a third class; but the name of —— spares me the necessity of describing it. In all these there was such a want of common sensibility, such a want of that gratitude to an intellectual benefactor, which even an honest reverence for their past selves should have secured, as did then, still does, and ever will, disgust me. As for ——, I cannot justify him; but he stands in no one of the former classes. When he was young he just looked enough into your books to believe you taught republicanism and stoicism; ergo, that he was of your opinion and you of his, and that was all. Systems of philosophy were never his taste or forte. And I verily believe that his conduct originated wholly and solely in the effects which the trade of reviewing never fails to produce at certain times on the best minds,—presumption, petulance, callousness to personal feelings, and a disposition to treat the reputations of their contemporaries as playthings placed at their own disposal. Most certainly I cannot approve of such things; but yet I have learned how difficult it is for a man who has from earliest childhood preserved himself immaculate from all the common faults and weaknesses of human nature, and who, never creating any small disquietudes, has lived in general esteem and honour, to feel remorse, or to admit that he has done wrong. Believe me, there is a bluntness of conscience superinduced by a very unusual infrequency, as well as by a habit of frequency of wrong actions. “Sunt quibus cecidisse prodesset,” says Augustine. To this add that business of review-writing, carried on for fifteen years together, and which I have never hesitated to pronounce an immoral employment, unjust to the author of the books reviewed, injurious in its influences on the public taste and morality, and still more injurious on its influences on the head and heart of the reviewer himself. The prægustatores among the luxurious Romans soon lost their taste; and the verdicts of an old prægustator were sure to mislead, unless when, like dreams, they were interpreted into contraries. Our reviewers are the genuine descendants of these palate-seared taste dictators. I am still confined by indisposition, but mean to step out to Hazlitt’s—almost my next door neighbour—at his particular request. It is possible that I may find you there.

With kind remembrances to Mrs. Godwin,

From 19th April to 27th September 1811 Coleridge (Essays on his Own Times, 733–938) was busy contributing articles again to The Courier on all subjects of the day, their irony as bright, their imagery as fresh, their philosophy as sound as anything he had formerly written. But Coleridge ceased to write for The Courier when he discovered that it was not an independent paper. An article on the Duke of York written by Coleridge, after having been set up in type, was suppressed, at the instigation of the Government. He wrote to Beaumont on 7th December 1811: “I have not been at The Courier office for some months past. I detest writing politics even on the right side; and when I discovered that The Courier was not the independent paper I had been led to believe, and had myself over and over again asserted, I wrote no more for it.... I will write for the Permanent, or not at all.” (Coleorton Memorials ii, 162, 7th December 1811.)

During the winter of 1811–12 Coleridge did something for the Permanent in the shape of a new course of Lectures on Shakespeare. The course lasted from the beginning of November 1811 to 28th January 1812. The Lectures are published in T. Ashe’s edition (Bohn Library, pp. 33–165). The finest of the Lectures is No. IX, given on 16th December 1811. The Lectures were delivered at the London Philosophical Society’s Rooms, Fetter Lane, and were attended, according to Henry Crabb Robinson, by enthusiastic audiences; and the course closed with éclat. On one occasion Rogers and Byron were present. The following letter to Dr. Andrew Bell, whom, it will be remembered, he corresponded with while he was giving his first course, is a characteristic bit of Coleridge’s application of the Law of Association.

Letter 149. To Dr. Andrew Bell (Southey’s Life of Bell, ii, 645)

I wrote a long letter to you concerning the sophistications of your system at present in vogue, the inevitable consequences on the whole mass of moral feelings, even of the dissenters themselves, and the courage as well as fortitude, required for the effort to do one’s duty. But I asked myself why I should give you pain, and destroyed it. Yet come what will, the subject shall be treated fully, intrepidly, and by close deduction from settled first principles, in the first volume of the recommencing Friend, which I hope to bring out early in the spring, on a quarterly or four-monthly plan, in partnership with a publisher who is personally my friend, and who will take on himself all the business, and leave me exclusively occupied in the composition. Even to this day I have not received nearly one-half of the subscriptions for the former numbers, and am expiating the error by all sorts of perplexities and embarrassments. A man who has nothing better than prudence is fit for no world to come; and he who does not possess it in full activity, is as unfit for the present world. What then shall we say? Have both prudence and the moral sense, but subordinate the former to the latter; and so possess the flexibility and address of the serpent to glide through the brakes and jungles of this life, with the wings of the dove to carry us upward to a better!

May the Almighty bless and preserve you, my dear Sir! With most unfeigned love and honour, I remain—and till I lose all sense of my better being, of the veiled immortal within me, ever must remain, your obliged and grateful friend,

CHAPTER XVII
DANIEL STUART AND THE COURIER

Here[28] I may best introduce the remarks which have been made, and details which have been given, respecting Mr. Coleridge’s services to The Morning Post and The Courier, spoken of by him in Chapter X of the Biographia Literaria. That representation has been excepted against by Mr. Stuart, who was Editor of the former Paper when my Father wrote for it, and half proprietor of the other. The view which he takes of the case he has already made public;[29] he seems to be of opinion, that the language used by Mr. Coleridge in this work is calculated to give an impression of the amount of his actual performances on behalf of those papers beyond what the facts warrant; I have not thought it necessary or proper to withdraw that portion of Chapter X of which he complains, nor do I see that it must necessarily bear a construction at variance with his own statements: but neither would I republish it, without giving Mr. Stuart’s account of matters to which it refers, extracted from letters written by him to Mr. Coleridge’s late Editor. He writes as follows from Wykham Park, on the 7th of October, 1835.

“In August, 1795, I began to conduct The Morning Post, the sale of which was so low, only 350 per day, that a gentleman at that time made a bet with me that the Paper was actually extinct.

“At Christmas, 1797, on the recommendation of Mr. Mackintosh, Coleridge sent me several pieces of poetry; up to the time of his going to Germany, about 12 pieces.[30] Prose writing I never expected from him at that time. He went to Germany in the summer of 1798.

“He returned, I believe, about the end of 1799,[31] and proposed to me to come to London to reside near me, and write daily for the paper. I took lodgings for him in King Street, Covent Garden. The Morning Post then selling 2,000 daily. Coleridge wrote some things, particularly, I remember, Comments on Lord Grenville’s reply to Buonaparte’s Overtures of Peace, in January, 1800. But he totally failed in the plan he proposed of writing daily on the daily occurrences.”

Mr. Stuart then gives three short letters of Mr. C.’s, showing how often he was ill and incapable of writing for the paper, and the beginning of a long one dated Greta Hall, Keswick, 19th July, 1800,[32] in which he promises a second part of Pitt and Buonaparte, but speaks of it as uncertain whether or no he should be able to continue any regular species of employment for Mr. S.’s paper.

After noting that Mr. C. left London at the end of his first half year’s engagement, Mr. S. brings forward more letters, containing excuses on account of illness, but promising a number of essays: two on the war, as respecting agriculture; one on the raising of rents; one on the riots (corn riots in 1800); and one on the countenance by Government of calumnies on the King;—promising also a second part of Pitt and Buonaparte, which Mr. S. supposes he was constantly dunning for, the Character of Pitt, published in The M. P. early in 1800, having made a great sensation; proposing a letter to Sir F. Burdett on solitary imprisonment, and that all these should be published in pamphlets, after they had been divided into pieces, and published in The M. P., he doubting whether they were of value for a newspaper. Some of these essays appear to have been sent; it is not specified which or how many.

“Early in 1807,” Mr. S. says, “I was confined by a violent fever. Several weeks I was delirious, and to my astonishment, when I recovered, Pitt was out of place, and Horne Tooke in Parliament. I did not resume the conduct of the Paper till the spring. The Paper suffered loss.”

The next letter, dated May, 1801, Keswick, speaks of ill health, and “the habits of irresolution which are its worst consequences,” forbidding him to rely on himself. Mr. S. had solicited him to write, and offered terms, and it appears that he did form a new engagement for the Paper about that time. In a letter of Sept. 1801, he says, “I am not so blinded by authorship as to believe that what I have done is at all adequate to the money I have received.” Mr. Stuart then produces a letter with the postmark Bridgewater, of Jan. 19, 1802.[33] These letters show, he says, that in July and October 1800, in May 1801, on the 30th of September 1801, Coleridge was at Keswick, that in January 1802, he was at Stowey, that he could not therefore have materially contributed to the success of The Morning Post. “In this last year,” says Mr. Stuart, “his Letters to Judge Fletcher, and on Mr. Fox, at Paris, were published.” The former were not published till 1814. The six letters appeared in The Courier on Sept. 20th, 29th, Oct. 21st, Nov. 2nd, Dec. 3rd, 6th, 9th and 10th. The latter appeared on the 4th and 9th of Nov. 1802. Mr. Stuart speaks of it as a mistake in those who have supposed that the coolness of Fox to Sir James Mackintosh was occasioned by his ascribing this “violent philippic,” as Lamb called it, to him (Sir James). “On those to Judge Fletcher,” he says, “and many other such essays, as being rather fit for pamphlets than newspapers, I did not set much value.” On this subject hear Coleridge himself in a letter[34] dated June 4th, 1811, when he was engaged with Mr. Street.

Letter 150. To Daniel Stuart

After speaking again of the former paper, he says, “I could give many more reasons for its rise than those I gave in my former letter, and among others I would include Coleridge’s occasional writings, though to them I would not set down more than one hundredth part of the cause of success, much as I esteemed his writings and much as I would have given for a regular daily assistance by him. But he never wrote a thing I requested, and, I think I may add, he never wrote a thing I expected. In proof of this he promised me at my earnest and endless request, the character of Buonaparte, which he himself, at first of his own mere motion, had promised; he promised it letter after letter, year after year, for ten years (last for The Courier), yet never wrote it. Could Coleridge and I place ourselves thirty-eight years back, and he be so far a man of business as to write three or four hours a day, there is nothing I would not pay for his assistance. I would take him into partnership,” (which, I think, my Father would have declined,) “and I would enable him to make a large fortune. To write the leading paragraph of a newspaper I would prefer him to Mackintosh, Burke, or any man I ever heard of. His observations not only were confirmed by good sense, but displayed extensive knowledge, deep thought and well-grounded foresight; they were so brilliantly ornamented, so classically delightful. They were the writings of a Scholar, a Gentleman and a Statesman, without personal sarcasm or illiberality of any kind. But when Coleridge wrote in his study without being pressed, he wandered and lost himself. He should always have had the printer’s devil at his elbow with ‘Sir, the printers want copy.’

“So far then with regard to The Morning Post, which I finally left in August, 1803. Throughout the last year, during my most rapid success, Coleridge did not, I believe, write a line for me. Seven months afterwards I find Coleridge at Portsmouth, on his way to Malta.” Mr. Stuart proceeds to state that Mr. C. returned to England in the summer of 1806, that in 1807 he was engaged with his Play at Drury Lane Theatre, early in 1808 gave his lectures at the Royal Institution, at the end of that year began his plan of The Friend, which took him up till towards the end of 1809—in 1811 proposed to write for The Courier on a salary. Mr. Stuart mentions that the Essays on the Spaniards were sent in the end of 1809 by Mr. Coleridge, as some return for sums he had expended on his account, not on his (Mr. Stuart’s) solicitation. He says that Mr. C. wrote in The Courier for his own convenience, his other literary projects having failed, and that he wrote for it against the will of Mr. Street, the Editor, who, in accepting his services, only yielded to his (Mr. S.’s) suggestion. “The Courier,” he says, “required no assistance. It was, and had long been, the evening paper of the highest circulation.” In another letter, dated 7th September 1835, he speaks thus: “The Courier indeed sold 8000 daily for some years, but when Street and I purchased it at a good price in June, 1799, it sold nearly 2000, and had the reputation of selling more. It was the apostasy of The Sun in 1803, Street’s good management, its early intelligence, and the importance of public events, that raised The Courier.” In the same letter he says, “Could Coleridge have written the leading paragraph daily his services would have been invaluable, but an occasional essay or two could produce little effect. It was early and ample accounts of domestic occurrences, as Trials, Executions, etc. etc., exclusively early Irish news; the earliest French news; full Parliamentary Debates; Corn Riots in 1800; Procession proclaiming Peace; the attack on the King by Hatfield at the Theatre; the arrest of Arthur O’Connor, respecting which I was examined at the Privy Council: it was the earliest and fullest accounts of such things as these, while the other papers were negligent, that raised The Morning Post from 350, when I took it in August, 1795, to 4500, when I sold it in August, 1803, and then no other daily morning paper sold above 3000. It was unremitting attention and success in giving the best and earliest accounts of occurrences that made The Morning Post, and not the writings of any one, though good writing is always an important feature. I have known the Paper served more by a minute, picturesque, lively account of the ascension of a balloon than ever it was by any piece of writing. There is a great difference among newspapers in this respect. Most of the Sunday Papers, calling themselves Newspapers, have no news, only political essays, which are read by the working-classes, and which in those papers produce astonishing success.” In other letters he says: “The reputation of the writings of any man, the mere reputation of them, would not serve, or in the very slightest degree serve, any daily newspaper.” “Mackintosh’s reputation as a political writer was then much higher than that of Coleridge, and he was my brother-in-law, known to have written for the Paper, especially during one year (1795–6), and to be on good terms with me, yet I must confess that even to the reputation of his writing for the Paper I never ascribed any part of its success.”

It does not appear from Mr. Stuart how many essays in all Mr. Coleridge contributed to The Morning Post and The Courier. Mr. C. himself mentions several in the tenth chapter of the Biographia Literaria. All these have been copied, and will be republished hereafter.[35] I happen to possess also his contributions to The Courier in 1811. They are numerous, though not daily; which I have now no means of ascertaining. The Critique on Bertram first appeared in that Paper, I believe in 1816. Mr. Stuart admits that some of the poems published by Mr. C. in The Morning Post before his going to Germany made a “great impression:” that on Mr. C.’s proposing “personally on the spot and by daily exertion to assist him in the conduct of the Paper,” he “grasped at the engagement,” and “no doubt solicited” him “in the most earnest manner to enter upon it;” that his “writings produced a greater effect in The Morning Post than any others.” In his letter of September 19, 1835, Mr. S. says “The most remarkable things Coleridge published in The Morning Post were The Devil’s Thoughts and the Character of Pitt. Each of these made a sensation, which any writings unconnected with the news of the day rarely did.” Elsewhere he says, “Several hundred sheets extra were sold by them, and the paper was in demand for days and weeks afterwards. Coleridge promised a pair of portraits, Pitt and Buonaparte. I could not walk a hundred yards in the streets but I was stopped by inquiries, ‘When shall we have Buonaparte?’ One of the most eager of these inquirers was Dr. Moore, author of Zeluco.” In the letter mentioned just above he says “At one time Coleridge engaged to write daily for The Courier on the news of the day, and he did attend very regularly and wrote; but as it was in the spring, when the Paper was overwhelmed with debates and advertisements (and Street always preferring news, and a short notice of it in a leading paragraph to any writing however brilliant,) little or nothing that he wrote was inserted from want of room. Of this he repeatedly complained to me, saying that he would not continue to receive a salary without rendering services. I answered, ‘Wait till Parliament is up; we shall then have ample room, and shall be obliged to you for all you can give us.’ When Parliament rose Coleridge disappeared, or at least discontinued his services.”

The time here spoken of was in June, 1811. In April he had proposed to Mr. Stuart a particular plan of writing for The Courier, and on May 5, he writes to that gentleman, that he had stated and particularized this proposal to Mr. Street, and “found a full and in all appearance a warm assent.” Mr. Street, he says, “expressed himself highly pleased both at the thought of my assistance in general, and with the specific plan of assistance. There was no doubt, he said, that it would be of great service to the Paper.”

Mr. Stuart has been offended by Mr. Coleridge’s saying that he “employed the prime and manhood of his intellect in these labours,” namely for the Papers; that they “added nothing to his fortune or reputation;” that the “industry of the week supplied the necessities of the week.” This he has considered as a reproach to himself, and an unjust one. It was not—Mr. Stuart himself saw that it was not—so intended; Mr. Coleridge’s only object was to show that he had not altogether suffered his talents to “rust away without any efficient exertion for his own good or that of his fellow-creatures;” that he had laboured more than would appear from the number and size of the books he had produced, and in whatever he wrote had aimed not merely to supply his own temporal wants, but to benefit his readers by bringing high principles in view. “For, while cabbage-stalks rot on dunghills,” says he, in a letter[36] to the late Editor of The Morning Post, “I will never write what, or for what, I do not think right. All that prudence can justify is not to write what at certain times one may yet think.” But Mr. Stuart thought that the Public would draw inferences from Mr. C.’s language injurious to himself, though it was not meant of him; and hence he gave the details which I have thought it right to bring forward. I have no doubt that Mr. Coleridge had an exaggerated impression of the amount of his labours for The Morning Post and The Courier, and that when he said that he had raised the sale of the former from a low number to 7000 daily, he mistook the sale of the latter, which, Mr. Stuart admits, may have been 7000 per day in 1811, when he wrote for it constantly, with that of The Morning Post, which never sold above 4500. Mr. Stuart says truly “Coleridge had a defective memory, from want of interest in common things;” and of this he brings forward a strong instance. I think my Father’s example and experience go to prove that Newspaper reading must ever be more or less injurious to the public mind; high and careful writing for the daily journal will never answer: who could furnish noble views and a refined moral commentary on public events and occurrences every day of the week, or even every other day, and obtain a proportionate recompense? On the other hand, a coarse or low sort of writing on the important subjects, with which the journal deals, must do mischief. No one will deny that the character of Mr. C.’s articles was such as he has described; he would naturally be more alive to marks of the impression made by what he wrote in particular than any one else, even the Editor; and men are apt to judge of their labours by intensity as much as by quantity. He perhaps expended more thought on some of those essays, of which Mr. Street and even Mr. Stuart thought lightly, than would have served to furnish a large amount of ordinary serviceable matter. Mr. Stuart observes, “He never had a prime and manhood of intellect in the sense in which he speaks of it in the Lit. Biography. He had indeed the great mind, the great powers, but he could not use them for the press with regularity and vigour.[37] He was always ill.” This may have been true; yet it was during what ought to have been the best years of his life that he wrote for the Papers, and doubtless what he did produce helped to exhaust his scanty stock of bodily power, and to prevent him from writing as many books as he might have done, had circumstances permitted him to use his pen, not for procuring “the necessities of the week,” but in the manner most congenial to his own mind, and ultimately most useful to the public. “Such things as The Morning Post and money,” says Mr. S., in The Gentleman’s Magazine, “never settled upon his mind.” I believe that such things unsettled his mind, and made him, as the lampooner said, with a somewhat different allusion, “Like to a man on double business bound, who both neglects.” This was a trouble to himself and all connected with him. Le ciel nous vend toujours les biens qu’il nous prodigue, may be applied to my poor Father emphatically.

In regard to the remuneration he received, I do not bring forward the particulars given by Mr. Stuart of his liberal dealing with Mr. Coleridge, simply because the rehearsal of them would be tedious, and could answer no end. Such details may be superseded by the general declaration, that I believe my Father to have received from Mr. Stuart far more than the market value of his contributions to the Papers which that gentleman was concerned in. Mr. Stuart says that he “paid at the time as highly as such writings were paid for,” and to Mr. Coleridge’s satisfaction, which my Father’s own letters certainly testify; and concludes the account of sums advanced by him to Mr. C., when he was not writing for the paper, by saying that he had “at least £700 of him beside many acts of kindness.” A considerable part of this was spent on stamps and paper for The Friend; two hundred of it was given after the publication of the Biographia Literaria.

Mr. Coleridge expressed his esteem for Mr. Stuart and sense of his kindness very strongly in letters to himself, but not more strongly than to others. He speaks of him in a letter written about the beginning of 1809, addressed to a gentleman of the Quaker persuasion at Leeds, as “a man of the most consummate knowledge of the world, managed by a thorough strong and sound judgment, and rendered innocuous by a good heart”—as a “most wise, disinterested, kind, and constant friend.” In a letter to my Mother, written on his return from Malta, he says, “Stuart is a friend, and a friend indeed.”

I have thought it right to bring forward these particulars,—(I and those equally concerned with myself)—not only out of a regard to truth and openness, that the language of this work respecting The Morning Post and The Courier may not be interpreted in any way contrary to fact, which, I think, it need not be; but also in gratitude to a man who was serviceable and friendly to my Father during many years of his life; who appreciated his merits as a prose writer when they were not generally known and acknowledged; and by whose aid his principal prose work, The Friend, was brought before the public. I do not complain in the least of his stating the facts of my Father’s newspaper writings; in the manner in which this was done—as was pointed out at the time—there was something to complain of. Let me add that I consider his representation of my Father’s feelings on certain occasions altogether incredible, and deeply regret these pieces of bad construing, dictated by resentment, in one who was once so truly his friend.

My Father certainly does not assert, as Mr. Stuart represents him as having asserted in the Literary Biography, that he “made the fortunes of The Morning Post and The Courier, and was inadequately paid.” He speaks of his writings as having been in furtherance of Government. I have no doubt he thought that they were serviceable to Government and to his country, and that while they brought upon him the enmity of the anti-ministerial and Buonapartean party, and every possible hindrance to his literary career which the most hostile and contemptuous criticism of a leading journal could effect, they were unrewarded in any other quarter. There was truth in one half of Hazlitt’s sarcasm, “his politics turned—but not to account.” “From Government, or the friends of Government!” says Mr. Stuart, “Why, Coleridge was attacking Pitt and Lord Grenville in 1800, who were at the head of the Government. In 1801, when the Addingtons came into power, he wrote little or nothing in The Morning Post; in the autumn of 1802 he wrote one or two able essays against Buonaparte in relation to the Peace of Amiens, and he published in that paper, at that time, a letter or two to Judge Fletcher.” This last sentence is a double mistake, as I have already shown. “At that time the newspaper press generally condemned the conduct of Buonaparte in the severest manner: and no part of it more severely than The Morning Post by my own writings. Cobbett attacked Fox, etc., but The Morning Post was the most distinguished on this subject, and the increase of its circulation was great. The qualified opposition to Government was not given to Pitt’s ministry, but to Addington’s. To Pitt The Morning Post was always, in my time, decidedly opposed. I supported Addington against Buonaparte, during the Peace of Amiens, with all my power, and in the summer of 1803 Mr. Estcourt came to me with a message of thanks from the prime minister, Mr. A. offering anything I wished. I declined the offer. It was not till the summer of 1804, a year after I had finally left The Morning Post that, in The Courier, I supported Pitt against Buonaparte, on the same grounds I had supported Mr. Addington, Pitt having become again prime minister, to protect Lord Melville against the fifth clause. Coleridge confuses things. The qualified support of the ministry, he alludes to, applies wholly to The Courier.” I do not see the material discrepancy between this statement and my Father’s, when he says that The Morning Post was “anti-ministerial, indeed, but with far greater earnestness and zeal, both anti-jacobin and anti-gallican,” and that it proved a far more useful ally to the Government in its most important objects, in consequence of its being generally considered moderately anti-ministerial, than if it had been the avowed eulogist of Mr. Pitt; “that the rapid increase in the sale of The Morning Post is a pledge that genuine impartiality with a respectable portion of literary talent will secure the success of a newspaper without ministerial patronage,” and that from “the commencement of the Addington administration” whatever he himself had written “in The Morning Post or Courier was in defence of Government.” In the preceding paragraph he argues that neither Mr. Percival nor “the present administration” pursued the plans of Mr. Pitt.

In what degree my Father’s writings contributed to the reputation and success of The Morning Post cannot at this distance of time be precisely settled. It must indeed be difficult to say what occasions success in such enterprises, if Mr. Stuart’s own brother could attribute that of The Morning Post to Sir James Mackintosh, “though with less reason even than if he had ascribed it to Coleridge.” The long story told to show that booksellers were not aware of Mr. C.’s having produced any effect on the paper, and when they set up a rival journal, never cared to obtain his services, but eagerly secured those of Mr. Stuart’s assistant, George Lane, does not quite decide the question; for booksellers, though, as Mr. Stuart says, “knowing men” in such matters, are not omniscient even in what concerns their own business. If the anti-gallican policy of The Morning Post “increased its circulation,” I cannot but think that the influence of my Father’s writings,[38] though not numerous, and indirectly of his intercourse with the Editor,—who rates his conversational powers as highly as it is usual to rate them—in directing the tone and determining the principles of the paper, must have served it materially. I believe him to have been the anti-gallican spirit that governed The Morning Post, though he may not have performed as much of the letter as he fancied.

I shall conclude this subject with quoting part of a letter of my Father’s on the subject of The Courier, to which Mr. Stuart, to whom it was addressed, declares himself to have replied, that “as long as he actively interfered, the Paper was conducted on the independent principles alluded to by Coleridge,” but that, for reasons which he states, he found it best, from the year 1811, to “leave Street entirely to his own course;” and “so it gradually slid into a mere ministerial journal—an instrument of the Treasury:” “acquired a high character for being the organ of Government, and obtained a great circulation; but became odious to the mob—excited by the falsehoods of the weekly journals.”

Letter 151. To Stuart[39]