Posted March 31, 1809.
My dear Friend,—I have been severely indisposed, knocked up indeed, with a complaint of a contagious nature called the Mumps;[56] preceded by most distressing low spirits, or rather absence of all spirits; and accompanied with deafness and stupefying perpetual echo in the ear. But it is going off. Little John Wordsworth was attacked with it last year when I was in London, and from the stupor with which it suffuses the eyes and look, it was cruelly mistaken for water on the brain. It has been brought here a second time by some miners, and is a disease with little danger and no remedy.
I attributed your silence to its right cause, and I assure you when I was at Penrith and Kendal it was very pleasant to me to hear how universally the conduct of the “Courier” was extolled; indeed, you have behaved most nobly, and it is impossible but that you must have had a great weight in the displacing of that prime grievance of grievances. Among many reflections that kept crowding on my mind during the trial,[57] this was perhaps the chief—What if, after a long, long reign, some titled sycophant should whisper to Majesty, “By what means do your Ministers manage the Legislature?” “By the distribution of patronage, according to the influence of individuals who claim it.” “Do this yourself, or by your own family, and you become independent of parties, and your Ministers are your servants. The Army under a favourite son, the Church with a wife, etc., etc.” Good heavens! the very essence of the Constitution is unmoulded, and the venerable motto of our liberty, “The king can do no wrong,” becomes nonsense and blasphemy. As soon as ever my mind is a little at ease, I will put together the fragments I have written on this subject, and if Wordsworth have not anticipated me, add to it some thoughts on the effect of the military principle. We owe something to Whitbread for his quenching at the first smell a possible fire. How is it possible that a man apparently so honest can talk and think as he does respecting France, peace, and Buonaparte?...
On Thursday Wordsworth, Southey, and myself, with the printer and publisher, go to Appleby to sign and seal, which paper, etc., will of course be immediately dispatched to London. I doubt not but that the £60 will be now paid at the “Courier” office in a few days; and as soon as you will let me know whether the stamped paper is to be paid for necessarily in ready money, or with what credit, I shall instantly write to some of my friends to advance me what is absolutely necessary. I can only say I am ready and eager to commence, and that I earnestly hope to see “The Friend” advertised shortly for the first of May. As to the Paper, how and from whom, and what and in what quantity, I must again leave to your judgment, and recommend to your affection for me. I have reason to believe that I shall commence with 500 names.
I write from Keswick. Mrs. Southey was delivered yester-morning of a girl.[58] I forgot to say, that I have been obliged to purchase, and have paid for, a font of types of small pica, the same with the London Prospectus, from Wilsons of Glasgow. I was assured they would cost only from £25 to £28, instead of which, £38 odd.
God bless you and
S. T. Coleridge.
Grasmere, Kendal, June 13, 1809.
Dear Stuart,—I left Penrith Monday noon, and, prevented by the heavy rain from crossing Grisedale Tarn (near the summit of Helvellyn, and our most perilous and difficult Alpine Pass), the same day I slept at Luff’s, and crossed it yester-morning, and arrived here by breakfast time. I was sadly grieved at Wordsworth’s account of your late sorrows and troubles....
I cannot adequately express how much I am concerned lest anything I wrote in my last letter (though God knows under the influence of no one feeling which you would not wish me to have) should chance to have given you any additional unpleasantness, however small. Would that I had worthier means than words and professions of proving to you what my heart is....
I rise every morning at five, and work three hours before breakfast, either in letter-writing or serious composition....
I take for granted that more than the poor £60 has been expended in the paper I have received. But I have written to Mr. Clarkson to see what can be done; for it would be a sad thing to give it all up now I am going on so well merely for want of means to provide the first twenty weeks paper. My present stock will not quite suffice for three numbers. I printed 620 of No. 1, and 650 of No. 2, and so many more are called for that I shall be forced to reprint both as soon as I hear from Clarkson. The proof sheet of No. 3 goes back to-day, and with it the copy of No. 4, so that henceforth we shall be secure of regularity; indeed it was not all my fault before, but the printer’s inexperience and the multitude of errors, though from a very decent copy, which took him a full day and more in correcting. I had altered my plan for the Introductory Essays after my arrival at Penrith, which cost me exceeding trouble; but the numbers to come are in a very superior style of polish and easy intelligibility. The only thing at present which I am under the necessity of applying to you for respects Clement. It may be his interest to sell “The Friend” at his shop, and a certain number will always be sent; but I am quite in the dark as to what profits he expects. Surely not book-profits for a newspaper that can circulate by the post? And it is certainly neither my interest, nor that of the regular purchasers of “The Friend,” to have it bought at a shop, instead of receiving it as a franked letter. All I want to know is his terms, for I have quite a horror of booksellers, whose mode of carrying on trade in London is absolute rapacity....
On this ruinous plan poor Southey has been toiling for years, with an industry honourable to human nature, and must starve upon it were it not for the more profitable employment of reviewing; a task unworthy of him, or even of a man with not one half of his honour and honesty.
I have just read Wordsworth’s pamphlet, and more than fear that your friendly expectations of its sale and influence have been too sanguine. Had I not known the author I would willingly have travelled from St. Michael’s Mount to Johnny Groat’s House on a pilgrimage to see and reverence him. But from the public I am apprehensive, first, that it will be impossible to rekindle an exhausted interest respecting the Cintra Convention, and therefore that the long porch may prevent readers from entering the Temple. Secondly, that, partly from Wordsworth’s own style, which represents the chain of his thoughts and the movements of his heart, admirably for me and a few others, but I fear does not possess the more profitable excellence of translating these down into that style which might easily convey them to the understandings of common readers, and partly from Mr. De Quincey’s strange and most mistaken system of punctuation—(The periods are often alarmingly long, perforce of their construction, but De Quincey’s punctuation has made several of them immeasurable, and perplexed half the rest. Never was a stranger whim than the notion that , ; : and . could be made logical symbols, expressing all the diversities of logical connection)—but, lastly, I fear that readers, even of judgement, may complain of a want of shade and background; that it is all foreground, all in hot tints; that the first note is pitched at the height of the instrument, and never suffered to sink; that such depth of feeling is so incorporated with depth of thought, that the attention is kept throughout at its utmost strain and stretch; and—but this for my own feeling. I could not help feeling that a considerable part is almost a self-robbery from some great philosophical poem, of which it would form an appropriate part, and be fitlier attuned to the high dogmatic eloquence, the oracular [tone] of impassioned blank verse. In short, cold readers, conceited of their supposed judgement, on the score of their possessing nothing else, and for that reason only, taking for granted that they must have judgement, will abuse the book as positive, violent, and “in a mad passion;” and readers of sense and feeling will have no other dread, than that the Work (if it should die) would die of a plethora of the highest qualities of combined philosophic and poetic genius. The Apple Pie they may say is made all of Quinces. I much admired our young friend’s note on Sir John Moore and his despatch;[59] it was excellently arranged and urged. I have had no opportunity, as yet, to speak a word to Wordsworth himself about it; I wrote to you as usual in full confidence.
I shall not be a little anxious to have your opinion of my third number. Lord Lonsdale blames me for excluding party politics and the events of the day from my plan. I exclude both the one and the other, only as far as they are merely party, i. e. personal and temporal interests, or merely events of To-day, that are defunct in the To-morrow. I flatter myself that I have been the first, who will have given a calm, disinterested account of our Constitution as it really is and how it is so, and that I have, more radically than has been done before, shown the unstable and boggy grounds on which all systematic reformers hitherto have stood. But be assured that I shall give up this opinion with joy, and consider a truer view of the question a more than recompense for the necessity of retracting what I have written.
God bless you! Do, pray, let me hear from you, though only three lines.
S. T. Coleridge.
October 9, 1809.
My dear Poole,—I received yours late last night, and sincerely thank you for the contents. The whole shall be arranged as you have recommended. Yet if I know my own wishes, I would far rather you had refused me, and said you should have an opportunity in a few days of explaining your motives in person, for oh, the autumn is divine here. You never beheld, I will answer for it, such combinations of exquisite beauty with sufficient grandeur of elevation, even in Switzerland. Besides, I sorely want to talk with you on many points.
All the defects you have mentioned I am perfectly aware of, and am anxiously endeavouring to avoid. There is too often an entortillage in the sentences and even in the thought (which nothing can justify), and, always almost, a stately piling up of story on story in one architectural period, which is not suited to a periodical essay or to essays at all (Lord Bacon, whose style mine more nearly resembles than any other, in his greater works, thought Seneca a better model for his Essays), but least of all suited to the present illogical age, which has, in imitation of the French, rejected all the cements of language, so that a popular book is now a mere bag of marbles, that is, aphorisms and epigrams on one subject. But be assured that the numbers will improve; indeed, I hope that if the dire stoppage have not prevented it, you will have seen proof of improvement already in the seventh and eighth numbers,—still more in the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth numbers. Strange! but the “Three Graves” is the only thing I have yet heard generally praised and inquired after!! Remember how many different guests I have at my Round Table. I groan beneath the Errata, but I am thirty miles cross-post from my printer and publisher, and Southey, who has been my corrector, has been strangely oscitant, or, which I believe is sometimes the case, has not understood the sentences, and thought they might have a meaning for me though they had not for him. There was one direful one,[60] No. 5, p. 80, lines 3 and 4. Read,—“its functions being to take up the passive affections of the senses into distinct thoughts and judgements, according to its own essential forms, formæ formantes in the language of Lord Bacon in contradistinction to the formæ formatæ.”
My greatest difficulty will be to avoid that grievous defect of running one number into another, I not being present at the printing. To really cut down or stretch out every subject to the Procrustes-Bed of sixteen pages is not possible without a sacrifice of my whole plan, but most often I will divide them polypus-wise, so that the first half should get itself a new tail of its own, and the latter a new head, and always take care to leave off at a paragraph. With my best endeavours I am baffled in respect of making one Essay fill one number. The tenth number is, W. thinks, the most interesting, “On the Errors of both Parties,” or “Extremes Meet;” and, do what I would, it stretched to seven or eight pages more; but I have endeavoured to take your advice in toto, and shall announce to the public that, with the exception of my volume of Political Essays and State Memorials, and some technical works of Logic and Grammar, I shall consider “The Friend” as both the reservoir and the living fountain of all my mind, that is, of both my powers and my attainments, and shall therefore publish all my poems in “The Friend,” as occasion rises. I shall begin with the “Fears in Solitude,” and the “Ode on France,” which will fill up the remainder of No. 11; so that my next Essay on vulgar Errors concerning Taxation, in which I have alluded to a conversation with you, will just fill No. 12 by itself.
I have been much affected by your efforts respecting poor Blake. Cannot you with propriety give me that narrative? But, above all, if you have no particular objection, no very particular and insurmountable reason against it, do, do let me have that divine narrative of John Walford,[61] which of itself stamps you a poet of the first class in the pathetic, and the painting of poetry so very rarely combined.
As to politics, I am sad at the very best. Two cabinet ministers duelling on Cabinet measures like drunken Irishmen. O heaven, Poole! this is wringing the dregs in order to drink the last drops of degradation. Such base insensibility to the awfulness of their situation and the majesty of the country! As soon as I can get them transcribed, I will send you some most interesting letters from the ablest soldier I ever met with (extra aide-de-camp to Sir J. Moore, and shot through the body at Flushing, but still alive); they will serve as a key to more than one woe-trumpet in the Apocalypse of national calamity. But the truth is, that to combine a government every way fitted as ours is for quiet, justice, freedom, and commercial activity at home, with the conditions of raising up that individual greatness, and of securing in every department the very man for the very place, which are requisite for maintaining the safety of our Empire and the Majesty of our power abroad, is a state-riddle which yet remains to be solved. I have thought myself as well employed as a private citizen can be, in drawing off well-intentioned patriots from the wrong scent and pointing out what the true evils are and why, and the exceeding difficulty of removing them without hazarding worse.... I was asked for a motto for a market clock. I uttered the following literally, without a moment’s premeditation:—
What now, O man! thou dost or mean’st to do
Will help to give thee peace, or make thee rue,
When hovering o’er the Dot this hand shall tell
The moment that secures thee Heaven or Hell.[62]
May God bless you! My kindest remembrances to Mr. Chubb, and to Ward. Pray remember me when you write to your sister and Mr. King. Oh, but Poole! do stretch a point and come. If the F. rises to a 1,000 I will frank you. Do come; never will you have layed out money better.
December, 1809.
My dear Southey,—I suspect you have misunderstood me, and applied to the Maltese Regiment what I said of the Corsican Rangers. Both are bad enough, but of the former I know little, of course, as I was away from Malta before the regiment had left the island. But in the Essays (2 or 3) which I am now writing on Sir A. Ball, I shall mention it as an exemplification among many others of his foresight. It was a job, I have no doubt, merely to get General Valette a lucrative regiment; but G. V. is dead, and it was not such a job as that of the Corsican Rangers, which can be made appear glaring. The long and short of the story is, that the men were four fifths married, would have fought as well as the best, at home and behind their own walls, but could not be expected to fight abroad, where they had no interest. Besides, it was cruel, shameful to take 1,500 men as soldiers for any part of our enormous Empire, out of a population, man, woman, and child, not at that time more than 100,000. There were two Maltese Militia Regiments officered by their own Maltese nobility—these against the entreaties and tears of the men and officers (I myself saw them weeping), against the remonstrances and memorial (written by myself) of Sir A. B., were melted into one large one, officered by English officers, and a general affront given to the island, because General Valette had great friends at the War Office, Duke of York, etc.! This is the whole, but do not either expose yourself or me to judicial inquiries. It is one thing to know a thing, and another to be able to prove it in a law court. This remark applies to the damnable treatment of the prisoners of war at Malta.
I should have thought your facts, with which I am familiar, a confirmation of Miss Schöning.[63] Be that as it may, take my word for it, that in substance the story is as certain as that Dr. Dodd was hung. To mention one proof only, Von Hess,[64] the celebrated historian of Hamburg, and, since Lessing, the best German prosist, went himself to Nuremberg, examined into the facts officially and personally, and it was on him that I relied, though if you knew the government of Nuremberg, you would see that the first account could not have been published as it was, if it had not been too notorious even for concealment to be hoped for. After I left Germany, Von Hess had a public controversy that threatened to become a Diet concern with the magistrates of Nuremberg, for some other bitter charges against them. I have their defence of themselves, but they do not even attempt to deny the fact of Harlin and Schöning. But, indeed, Southey! it is almost as bad as if I could have mistaken e converso Patch’s trial for a novel.
Your remark on the voice is most just, but that was my purpose. Not only so, but the whole passage was inserted, and intertruded after the rest was written, reluctante amanuensi meâ, in order to unrealize it even at the expense of disnaturalizing it. Lady B. therefore pleased me by saying, “never was the golden tint of the poet more judiciously employed,” etc. For this reason, too, I introduced the simile of the leaf, etc., etc. I not only thought the “voice” part out of place, but in bad taste per se.
May God bless you all.
S. T. Coleridge.
Grasmere, Kendal, January 28, 1810.
My dear Friend,—My “mantraps and spring guns in this garden” have hitherto existed only in the painted board, in terrorem. Of course, I have received and thank you for both your letters. What Wordsworth may do I do not know, but I think it highly probable that I shall settle in or near London. Of the fate of “The Friend” I remain in the same ignorance nearly as at the publication of the 20th November. It would make you sick were I to waste my paper by detailing the numerous instances of meanness in the mode of payment and discontinuance, especially among the Quakers. So just was the answer I once made in the presence of some “Friends” to the query: What is genuine Quakerism? Answer, The antithesis of the present Quakers. I have received this evening together with yours, one as a specimen. (N. B. Three days after the publication of the 21st Number, and sixteen days after the publication of the “Supernumerary” [number of “The Friend,” January 11, 1810], a bill upon a postmaster, an order of discontinuance, and information that any others that may come will not be paid for, as if I had been gifted with prophecy. And this precious epistle directed, “To Thomas Coleridge, of Grazemar”! And yet this Mr. —— would think himself libelled, if he were called a dishonest man.)... We will take for granted that “The Friend” can be continued. On this supposition I have lately studied “The Spectator,” and with increasing pleasure and admiration. Yet it must be evident to you that there is a class of thoughts and feelings, and these, too, the most important, even practically, which it would be impossible to convey in the manner of Addison, and which, if Addison had possessed, he would not have been Addison. Read, for instance, Milton’s prose tracts, and only try to conceive them translated into the style of “The Spectator,” or the finest part of Wordsworth’s pamphlet. It would be less absurd to wish that the serious Odes of Horace had been written in the same style as his Satires and Epistles. Consider, too, the very different objects of “The Friend,” and of “The Spectator,” and above all do not forget, that these are AWEFUL TIMES! that the love of reading as a refined pleasure, weaning the mind from GROSSER enjoyments, which it was one of “The Spectator’s” chief objects to awaken, has by that work, and those that followed (Connoisseur, World, Mirror, etc.), but still more, by Newspapers, Magazines, and Novels, been carried into excess: and “The Spectator” itself has innocently contributed to the general taste for unconnected writing, just as if “Reading made easy” should act to give men an aversion to words of more than two syllables, instead of drawing them through those words into the power of reading books in general. In the present age, whatever flatters the mind in its ignorance of its ignorance, tends to aggravate that ignorance, and, I apprehend, does on the whole do more harm than good. Have you read the debate on the Address? What a melancholy picture of the intellectual feebleness of the country! So much on the one side of the question. On the other (1) I will, preparatory to writing on any chosen subject, consider whether it can be treated popularly, and with that lightness and variety of illustration which form the charms of “The Spectator.” If it can, I will do my best. If not, next, whether yet there may not be furnished by the results of such an Essay thoughts and truths that may be so treated, and form a second Essay. (2) I shall always, besides this, have at least one number in four of rational entertainment, such as “Satyrane’s Letters,” as instructive as I can, but yet making entertainment the chief object in my own mind. But, lastly, in the Supplement of “The Friend” I shall endeavour to include whatever of higher and more abstruse meditation may be needed as the foundations of all the work after it; and the difference between those who will read and master that Supplement, and those who decline the toil, will be simply this, that what to the former will be demonstrated conclusions, the latter must start from as from postulates, and (to all whose minds have not been sophisticated by a half-philosophy) axioms. For no two things, that are yet different, can be in closer harmony than the deductions of a profound philosophy, and the dictates of plain common sense. Whatever tenets are obscure in the one, and requiring the greatest powers of abstraction to reconcile, are the same which are held in manifest contradiction by the common sense, and yet held and firmly believed, without sacrificing A to —A, or —A to A.... After this work I shall endeavour to pitch my note to the idea of a common, well-educated, thoughtful man, of ordinary talents; and the exceptions to this rule shall not form more than one fifth of the work. If with all this it will not do, well! And well it will be, in its noblest sense: for I shall have done my best. Of parentheses I may be too fond, and will be on my guard in this respect. But I am certain that no work of impassioned and eloquent reasoning ever did or could subsist without them. They are the drama of reason, and present the thought growing, instead of a mere Hortus siccus. The aversion to them is one of the numberless symptoms of a feeble Frenchified Public. One other observation: I have reason to hope for contributions from strangers. Some from you I rely on, and these will give a variety which is highly desirable—so much so, that it would weigh with me even to the admission of many things from unknown correspondents, though but little above mediocrity, if they were proportionately short, and on subjects which I should not myself treat....
May God bless you, and your affectionate
S. T. Coleridge.
CHAPTER XI
A JOURNALIST, A LECTURER, A PLAYWRIGHT
1810-1813
Spring, 1810.
My dear Love,—I understand that Mr. De Quincey is going to Keswick to-morrow; though between ourselves he is as great a to-morrower to the full as your poor husband, and without his excuses of anxiety from latent disease and external pressure.
Now as Lieutenant Southey is with you, I fear that you could not find a bed for me if I came in on Monday or Tuesday. I not only am desirous to be with you and Sara for a while, but it would be of great importance to me to be within a post of Penrith for the next fortnight or three weeks. How long Mr. De Quincey may stay I cannot guess. He (Miss Wordsworth says) talks of a week, but Lloyd of a month! However, put yourself to no violence of inconvenience, only be sure to write to me (N. B.—to me) by the carrier to-morrow.
I am middling, but the state of my spirit of itself requires a change of scene. Catherine W. [the Wordsworths’ little daughter] has not recovered the use of her arm, etc., but is evidently recovering it, and in all other respects in better health than before,—indeed, so much better as to confirm my former opinion that nature was weak in her, and can more easily supply vital power for two thirds of her nervous system than for the whole.
May God bless you, my dear! and
S. T. Coleridge.
Hartley looks and behaves all that the fondest parent could wish. He is really handsome; at least as handsome as a face so original and intellectual can be. And Derwent is “a nice little fellow,” and no lack-wit either. I read to Hartley out of the German a series of very masterly arguments concerning the startling gross improbabilities of Esther (fourteen improbabilities are stated). It really surprised me, the acuteness and steadiness of judgment with which he answered more than half, weakened many, and at last determined that two only were not to be got over. I then read for myself and afterwards to him Eichhorn’s solution of the fourteen, and the coincidences were surprising. Indeed, Eichhorn, after a lame attempt, was obliged to give up the two which H. had declared as desperate.
December 21, “1810.”
My dear Friends,—I am at present at Brown’s Coffee House, Mitre Court, Fleet Street. My objects are to settle something by which I can secure a certain sum weekly, sufficient for lodging, maintenance, and physician’s fees, and in the mean time to look out for a suitable place near Gray’s Inn. My immediate plan is not to trouble myself further about any introduction to Abernethy, but to write a plain, honest, and full account of my state, its history, causes, and occasions, and to send it to him with two or three pounds enclosed, and asking him to take me under his further care. If I have raised the money for the enclosure, this I shall do to-morrow. For, indeed, it is not only useless but unkind and ungrateful to you and all who love me, to trifle on any longer, depressing your spirits, and, spite of myself, gradually alienating your esteem and chilling your affection toward me. As soon as I have heard from Abernethy, I will walk over to you, and spend a few days before I enter into my lodging, and on my dread ordeal—as some kind-hearted Catholics have taught, that the soul is carried slowly along close by the walls of Paradise on its way to Purgatory, and permitted to breathe in some snatches of blissful airs, in order to strengthen its endurance during its fiery trial by the foretaste of what awaits it at the conclusion and final gaol-delivery.
I pray you, therefore, send me immediately all my books and papers with such of my linen as may be clean, in my box, by the errand cart, directed—“Mr. Coleridge, Brown’s Coffee House, Mitre Court, Fleet Street.” A couple of nails and a rope will sufficiently secure the box.
Dear, dear Mary! Dearest Charlotte! I entreat you to believe me, that if at any time my manner toward you has appeared unlike myself, this has arisen wholly either from a sense of self-dissatisfaction or from apprehension of having given you offence; for at no time and on no occasion did I ever see or imagine anything in your behaviour which did not awaken the purest and most affectionate esteem, and (if I do not grossly deceive myself) the sincerest gratitude. Indeed, indeed, my affection is both deep and strong toward you, and such too that I am proud of it.
“And looking towards the Heaven that bends above you,
Full oft I bless the lot that made me love you!”
Again and again and for ever may God bless you, and love you.
S. T. Coleridge.
J. J. Morgan, Esq., No. 7, Portland Place, Hammersmith.
March 15, 1811.
My dear Godwin,—I receive twice the pleasure from my recovery that it would have otherwise afforded, as it enables me to accept your kind invitation, which in this instance I might with perfect propriety and manliness thank you for, as an honour done to me. To sit at the same table with Grattan, who would not think it a memorable honour, a red letter day in the almanac of his life? No one certainly who is in any degree worthy of it. Rather than not be in the same room, I could be well content to wait at the table at which I was not permitted to sit, and this not merely for Grattan’s undoubted great talents, and still less from any entire accordance with his political opinions, but because his great talents are the tools and vehicles of his genius, and all his speeches are attested by that constant accompaniment of true genius, a certain moral bearing, a moral dignity. His love of liberty has no snatch of the mob in it.
Assure Mrs. Godwin of my anxious wishes respecting her health. The scholar Salernitanus[65] says:—
“Si tibi deficiant medici, medici tibi fiant
Hæc tria: mens hilaris, requies, moderata diæta.”
The regulated diet she already has, and now she must contrive to call in the two other doctors. God bless you.
S. T. Coleridge.
Tuesday, June 4, 1811.
Dear Stuart,—I brought your umbrella in with me yester-morning, but, having forgotten it at leaving Portland Place, sent the coachman back for it, who brought what appeared to me not the same. On returning, however, with it, I could find no other, and it is certainly as good or better, but looks to me as if it were not equally new, and as if it had far more silk in it. I will, however, leave it at Brompton, and if by any inexplicable circumstance it should not prove the same, you must be content with the substitute. The family at Portland Place caught at my doubts as to the identity of it. I had hoped to have seen you this morning, it being a leisurely time in respect of fresh tidings, to have submitted to you two Essays,[66] one on the Catholic Question, and the other on Parliamentary Reform, addressed as a letter (from a correspondent) to the noblemen and members of Parliament who had associated for this purpose. The former does not exceed two columns; the latter is somewhat longer. But after the middle of this month it is probable that the Paper will be more open to a series of Articles on less momentary, though still contemporary, interests. Mr. Street seems highly pleased with what I have written this morning on the battle[67] of the 16th (May), though I apprehend the whole cannot be inserted. I am as I ought to be, most cautious and shy in recommending anything; otherwise, I should have requested Mr. Street to give insertion to the paragraphs respecting Holland, and the nature of Buonaparte’s resources, ending with the necessity of ever re-fuelling the moral feelings of the people, as to the monstrosity of the giant fiend that menaces them; [with an] allusion to Judge Grose’s opinion[68] on Drakard[69] before the occasion had passed away from the public memory. So, too, if the Duke’s return is to be discussed at all, the Article should be published before Lord Milton’s motion.[70] For though in a complex and widely controverted question, where hundreds rush into the field of combat, it is wise to defer it till the Debates in Parliament have shown what the arguments are on which most stress is laid by men in common, as in the Bullion Dispute; yet, generally, it is a great honour to the London papers, that for one argument they borrow from the parliamentary speakers, the latter borrow two from them, at all events are anticipated by them. But the true prudential rule is, to defer only when any effect of freshness or novelty is impracticable; but in most other cases to consider freshness of effect as the point which belongs to a Newspaper and distinguishes it from a library book; the former being the Zenith, and the latter the Nadir, with a number of intermediate degrees, occupied by pamphlets, magazines, reviews, satirical and occasional poems, etc., etc. Besides, in a daily newspaper, with advertisements proportioned to its sale, what is deferred must, four times in five, be extinguished. A newspaper is a market for flowers and vegetables, rather than a granary or conservatory; and the drawer of its editor, a common burial ground, not a catacomb for embalmed mummies, in which the defunct are preserved to serve in after times as medicines for the living. To turn from the Paper to myself, as candidate for the place of auxiliary to it. I drew, with Mr. Street’s consent and order, ten pounds, which I shall repay during the week as soon as I can see Mr. Monkhouse of Budge Row, who has collected that sum for me. This, therefore, I put wholly aside, and indeed expect to replace it with Mr. Green to-morrow morning. Besides this I have had five pounds from Mr. Green,[71] chiefly for the purposes of coach hire. All at once I could not venture to walk in the heat and other accidents of weather from Hammersmith to the Office; but hereafter I intend, if I continue here, to return on foot, which will reduce my coach hire for the week from eighteen shillings to nine shillings. But to walk in, I know, would take off all the blossom and fresh fruits of my spirits. I trust that I need not say, how pleasant it would be to me, if it were in my power to consider everything I could do for the “Courier,” as a mere return for the pecuniary, as well as other obligations I am under to you; in short as working off old scores. But you know how I am situated; and that by the daily labour of the brain I must acquire the daily demands of the other parts of the body. And it now becomes necessary that I should form some settled system for my support in London, and of course know what my weekly or monthly means may be. Respecting the “Courier,” I consider you not merely as a private friend, but as the Co-proprietor of a large concern, in which it is your duty to regulate yourself with relation to the interests of that concern, and of your partner in it; and so take for granted, and, indeed, wish no other, than that you and he should weigh whether or no I can be of any material use to a Paper already so flourishing, and an Evening Paper. For, all mock humility out of the question (and when I write to you, every other sort of insincerity), I see that such services as I might be able to afford, would be more important to a rising than to a risen Paper; to a morning, perhaps, more than to an evening one. You will however decide, after the experience hitherto afforded, and modifying it by the temporary circumstances of debates, press of foreign news, etc.; how far I can be of actual use by my attendance, in order to help in the things of the day, as are the paragraphs, which I have for the most part hitherto been called [upon] to contribute; and, by my efforts, to sustain the literary character of the Paper, by large articles, on open days, and [at] more leisure times.
My dear Stuart! knowing the foolish mental cowardice with which I slink off from all pecuniary subjects, and the particular weight I must feel from the sense of existing obligations to you, you will be convinced that my only motive is the desire of settling with others such a plan for myself, as may, by setting my mind at rest, enable me to realize whatever powers I possess, to as much satisfaction to those who employ them, and to my own sense of duty, as possible. If Mr. Street should think that the “Courier” does not require any auxiliary, I shall then rely on your kindness, for putting me in the way of some other paper, the principles of which are sufficiently in accordance with my own; for while cabbage stalks rot on dung hills, 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. God bless you and
S. T. Coleridge.
J. J. Morgan’s, Esq., 7, Portland Place, Hammersmith,
Saturday morning, December 7, 1811.
Dear Sir George,—On Wednesday night I slept in town in order to have a mask[72] taken, from which, or rather with which, Allston means to model a bust of me. I did not, therefore, receive your letter and the enclosed till Thursday night, eleven o’clock, on my return from the lecture; and early on Friday morning, I was roused from my first sleep by an agony of toothache, which continued almost without intermission the whole day, and has left my head and the whole of my trunk, “not a man but a bruise.”[73] What can I say more, my dear Sir George, than that I deeply feel the proof of your continued friendship, and pray from my inmost soul that more perseverance in efforts of duty may render me more worthy of your kindness than I at present am? Ingratitude, like all crimes that are at the same time vices—bad as malady, and worse as symptom—is of so detestable a nature that an honest man will mourn in silence under real injuries, [rather] than hazard the very suspicion of it, and will be slow to avail himself of Lord Bacon’s remark[74] (much as he may admire its profundity),—“Crimen ingrati animi, quod magnis ingeniis haud raro objicitur, sæpius nil aliud est quam perspicacia quædam in causam beneficii collati.” Yet that man has assuredly tenfold reason to be grateful who can be so, both head and heart, who, at once served and honoured, knows himself more delighted by the motive that influenced his friend than by the benefit received by himself; were it only perhaps for this cause—that the consciousness of always repaying the former in kind takes away all regret that he is incapable of returning the latter.
Mr. Dawe, Royal Associate, who plastered my face for me, says that he never saw so excellent a mask, and so unaffected by any expression of pain or uneasiness. On Tuesday, at the farthest, a cast will be finished, which I was vain enough to desire to be packed up and sent to Dunmow. With it you will find a chalk drawing of my face,[75] which I think far more like than any former attempt, excepting Allston’s full-length portrait of me,[76] which, with all his casts, etc., two or three valuable works of the Venetian school, and his Jason—almost finished, and on which he had employed eighteen months without intermission—are lying at Leghorn, with no chance of procuring them. There will likewise be an epistolary essay for Lady Beaumont on the subject of religion in reference to my own faith; it was too long to send by the post.
Dawe is engaged on a picture (the figures about four feet) from my poem of Love.