And Remorse is everywhere distinguished from virtuous penitence. To excite a sanative remorse Alvar returns, the Passion is put in motion at Ordonio’s first entrance by the appearance of Isidore’s wife, etc.; it is carried still higher by the narration of Isidore, Act ii. sc. 1; higher still by the interview with the supposed wizard; and to its acme by the Incantation Scene and Picture. Now, then, we are to see its effects and to exemplify the second part of the motto, “but if proud and gloomy, It is a poison tree,” etc. Ordonio, too proud to look steadily into himself, catches a false scent, plans the murder of Isidore and the poisoning of the Sorcerer, perpetrates the one, and, attempting the other, is driven by Remorse and the discovery of Alvar to a temporary distraction; and, finally, falling a victim to the only crime that had been realized, by the hand of Alhadra, breathes his last in a pang of pride: “O couldst thou forget me!” As from a circumference to a centre, every ray in the tragedy converges to Ordonio. Spite of wretched acting, the passage told wonderfully in which, as in a struggle between two unequal Panathlists or wrestlers, the weaker had for a moment got uppermost, and Ordonio, with unfeigned love, and genuine repentance, says, “I will kneel to thee, my Brother! Forgive me, Alvar!” till the Pride, like the bottom-swell on our lake, gusts up again in “Curse me with forgiveness!” The second good quality is, I think, the variety of metres according as the speeches are merely transitive, or narrative, or passionate, or (as in the Incantation) deliberate and formal poetry. It is true they are all, or almost all, Iambic blank verse, but under that form there are five or six perfectly distinct metres. As to the outcry that the “Remorse” is not pathetic (meaning such pathos as convulses in “Isabella” or “The Gamester”) the answer is easy. True! the poet never meant that it should be. It is as pathetic as the “Hamlet” or the “Julius Cæsar.” He woo’d the feelings of the audience, as my wretched epilogue said:—

As to my thefts from the “Wallenstein,” they came on compulsion from the necessity of haste, and do not lie on my conscience, being partly thefts from myself, and because I gave Schiller twenty for one I have taken, and in the mean time I hope they will lie snug. “The obscurest Haunt of all our mountains,”[102] I did not recognize as Wordsworth till after the play was all printed. I must write again to-morrow on other subjects.

The House was crowded again last night, and the Manager told me that they lost £200 by suspending it on [the] Saturday night that Jack Bannister came out.

(No signature.)

CXCV. TO THOMAS POOLE.

February 13, 1813.

Dear Poole,—Love so deep and so domesticated with the whole being, as mine was to you, can never cease to be. To quote the best and sweetest lines I ever wrote:[103]—

Stung as I have been with your unkindness to me, in my sore adversity, yet the receipt of your two heart-engendered lines was sweeter than an unexpected strain of sweetest music, or, in humbler phrase, it was the only pleasurable sensation which the success of the “Remorse” has given me. I have read of, or perhaps only imagined, a punishment in Arabia, in which the culprit was so bricked up as to be unable to turn his eyes to the right or the left, while in front was placed a high heap of barren sand glittering under the vertical sun. Some slight analogue of this, I have myself suffered from the mere unusualness of having my attention forcibly directed to a subject which permitted neither sequence of imagery, or series of reasoning. No grocer’s apprentice, after his first month’s permitted riot, was ever sicker of figs and raisins than I of hearing about the “Remorse.” The endless rat-a-tat-tat at our black-and-blue-bruised door, and my three master-fiends, proof sheets, letters (for I have a raging epistolophobia), and worse than these—invitations to large dinners, which I cannot refuse without offence and imputation of pride, or accept without disturbance of temper the day before, and a sick, aching stomach for two days after, so that my spirits quite sink under it.

From what I myself saw, and from what an intelligent friend, more solicitous about it than myself, has told me, the “Remorse” has succeeded in spite of bad scenes, execrable acting, and newspaper calumny. In my compliments to the actors, I endeavoured (such is the lot of this world, in which our best qualities tilt against each other, ex. gr., our good nature against our veracity) to make a lie edge round the truth as nearly as possible. Poor Rae (why poor? for Ordonio has almost made his fortune) did the best in his power, and is a good man ... a moral and affectionate husband and father. But nature has denied him person and all volume and depth of voice; so that the blundering coxcomb Elliston, by mere dint of voice and self-conceit, out-dazzled him. It has been a good thing for the theatre. They will get £8,000 or £10,000, and I shall get more than all my literary labours put together; nay, thrice as much, subtracting my heavy losses in the “Watchman” and “Friend,”—£400 including the copyright.

You will have heard that, previous to the acceptance of “Remorse,” Mr. Jos. Wedgwood had withdrawn from his share of the annuity![104] Well, yes, it is well!—for I can now be sure that I loved him, revered him, and was grateful to him from no selfish feeling. For equally (and may these words be my final condemnation at the last awful day, if I speak not the whole truth), equally do I at this moment love him, and with the same reverential gratitude! To Mr. Thomas Wedgwood I felt, doubtless, love; but it was mingled with fear, and constant apprehension of his too exquisite taste in morals. But Josiah! Oh, I ever did, and ever shall, love him, as a being so beautifully balanced in mind and heart deserves to be!

’Tis well, too, because it has given me the strongest impulse, the most imperious motive I have experienced, to prove to him that his past munificence has not been wasted!

You perhaps may likewise have heard (in the Whispering Gallery of the World) of the year-long difference between me and Wordsworth (compared with the sufferings of which all the former afflictions of my life were less than flea-bites), occasioned (in great part) by the wicked folly of the arch-fool Montagu.

A reconciliation has taken place, but the feeling, which I had previous to that moment, when the (three-fourth) calumny burst, like a thunderstorm from a blue sky, on my soul, after fifteen years of such religious, almost superstitious idolatry and self-sacrifice. Oh, no! no! that, I fear, never can return. All outward actions, all inward wishes, all thoughts and admirations will be the same—are the same, but—aye, there remains an immedicable But. Had W. said (what he acknowledges to have said) to you, I should have thought it unkind, and have had a right to say, “Why, why am I, whose whole being has been like a glass beehive before you for five years, why do I hear this from a third person for the first time?” But to such ... as Montagu! just when W. himself had forewarned me! Oh! it cut me to the heart’s core.

S. T. Coleridge.

CHAPTER XII
A MELANCHOLY EXILE
1813-1815

CHAPTER XII
A MELANCHOLY EXILE
1813-1815

CXCVI. TO DANIEL STUART.

September 25, 1813.

Dear Stuart,—I forgot to ask you by what address a letter would best reach you! Whether Kilburn House, Kilburn? I shall therefore send it, or leave it at the “Courier” office. I found Southey so chevaux-de-frized and pallisadoed by preëngagements that I could not reach at him till Sunday sennight, that is, Sunday, October 3, when, if convenient, we should be happy to wait on you. Southey will be in town till Monday evening, and you have his brother’s address, should you wish to write to him (Dr. Southey,[105] 28, Little Queen Anne Street, Cavendish Square).

A curious paragraph in the “Morning Chronicle” of this morning, asserting with its usual comfortable anti-patriotism the determination of the Emperor of Austria to persevere in the terms[106] offered to his son-in-law, in his frenzy of power, even though he should be beaten to the dust. Methinks there ought to be good authority before a journalist dares prophesy folly and knavery in union of our Imperial Ally. An excellent article ought to be written on this subject. In the same paper there is what I should have called a masterly essay on the causes of the downfall of the Comic Drama, if I was not perplexed by the distinct recollection of having conversed the greater part of it at Lamb’s. I wish you would read it, and tell me what you think; for I seem to remember a conversation with you in which you asserted the very contrary; that comic genius was the thing wanting, and not comic subjects—that the watering places, or rather the characters presented at them, had never been adequately managed, etc.

Might I request you to present my best respects to Mrs. Stuart as those of an old acquaintance of yours, and, as far as I am myself conscious of, at all times with hearty affection, your sincere friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. There are some half dozen more books of mine left at the “Courier” office, Ben Jonson and sundry German volumes. As I am compelled to sell my library,[107] you would oblige me by ordering the porter to take them to 19, London Street, Fitzroy Square; whom I will remunerate for his trouble. I should not take this liberty, but that I had in vain written to Mr. Street, requesting the same favour, which in his hurry of business I do not wonder that he forgot.

CXCVII. TO JOSEPH COTTLE.[108]

April 26, 1814.

You have poured oil in the raw and festering wound of an old friend’s conscience, Cottle! but it is oil of vitriol! I but barely glanced at the middle of the first page of your letter, and have seen no more of it—not from resentment (God forbid!), but from the state of my bodily and mental sufferings, that scarcely permitted human fortitude to let in a new visitor of affliction.

The object of my present reply is to state the case just as it is. First, that for ten years the anguish of my spirit has been indescribable, the sense of my danger staring, but the consciousness of my GUILT worse, far worse than all. I have prayed, with drops of agony on my brow, trembling not only before the justice of my Maker, but even before the mercy of my Redeemer. “I gave thee so many talents, what hast thou done with them?” Secondly, overwhelmed as I am with a sense of my direful infirmity, I have never attempted to disguise or conceal the cause. On the contrary, not only to friends have I stated the whole case with tears and the very bitterness of shame, but in two instances I have warned young men, mere acquaintances, who had spoken of having taken laudanum, of the direful consequences, by an awful exposition of the tremendous effects on myself.

Thirdly, though before God I cannot lift up my eyelids, and only do not despair of His mercy, because to despair would be adding crime to crime, yet to my fellow-men I may say that I was seduced into the ACCURSED habit ignorantly. I had been almost bed-ridden for many months with swellings in my knees. In a medical journal, I unhappily met with an account of a cure performed in a similar case (or what appeared to me so), by rubbing in of laudanum, at the same time taking a given dose internally. It acted like a charm, like a miracle! I recovered the use of my limbs, of my appetite, of my spirits, and this continued for near a fortnight. At length the unusual stimulus subsided, the complaint returned, the supposed remedy was recurred to—but I cannot go through the dreary history.

Suffice it to say, that effects were produced which acted on me by terror and cowardice, of pain and sudden death, not (so help me God!) by any temptation of pleasure, or expectation, or desire of exciting pleasurable sensations. On the very contrary, Mrs. Morgan and her sister will bear witness, so far as to say, that the longer I abstained the higher my spirits were, the keener my enjoyment—till the moment, the direful moment, arrived when my pulse began to fluctuate, my heart to palpitate, and such a dreadful falling abroad, as it were, of my whole frame, such intolerable restlessness, and incipient bewilderment, that in the last of my several attempts to abandon the dire poison, I exclaimed in agony, which I now repeat in seriousness and solemnity, “I am too poor to hazard this.” Had I but a few hundred pounds, but £200—half to send to Mrs. Coleridge, and half to place myself in a private madhouse, where I could procure nothing but what a physician thought proper, and where a medical attendant could be constantly with me for two or three months (in less than that time life or death would be determined), then there might be hope. Now there is none!! O God! how willingly would I place myself under Dr. Fox, in his establishment; for my case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement, an utter impotence of the volition, and not of the intellectual faculties. You bid me rouse myself: go bid a man paralytic in both arms, to rub them briskly together, and that will cure him. “Alas!” he would reply, “that I cannot move my arms is my complaint and my misery.”

May God bless you, and your affectionate, but most afflicted,

S. T. Coleridge.

CXCVIII. TO THE SAME.

Friday, May 27, 1814.

My dear Cottle,—Gladness be with you, for your convalescence, and equally so, at the hope which has sustained and tranquillised you through your imminent peril. Far otherwise is, and hath been, my state; yet I too am grateful; yet I cannot rejoice. I feel, with an intensity unfathomable by words, my utter nothingness, impotence, and worthlessness, in and for myself. I have learned what a sin is, against an infinite imperishable being, such as is the soul of man!

I have had more than a glimpse of what is meant by death and outer darkness, and the worm that dieth not—and that all the hell of the reprobate is no more inconsistent with the love of God, than the blindness of one who has occasioned loathsome and guilty diseases, to eat out his eyes, is inconsistent with the light of the sun. But the consolations, at least, the sensible sweetness of hope, I do not possess. On the contrary, the temptation which I have constantly to fight up against is a fear, that if annihilation and the possibility of heaven were offered to my choice, I should choose the former.

This is, perhaps, in part, a constitutional idiosyncrasy, for when a mere boy I wrote these lines:—

And in my early manhood, in lines descriptive of a gloomy solitude, I disguised my own sensations in the following words:—

My main comfort, therefore, consists in what the divines call the faith of adherence, and no spiritual effort appears to benefit me so much as the one earnest, importunate, and often for hours, momently repeated prayers: “I believe! Lord, help my unbelief! Give me faith, but as a mustard seed, and I shall remove this mountain! Faith! faith! faith! I believe. Oh, give me faith! Oh, for my Redeemer’s sake, give me faith in my Redeemer.”

In all this I justify God, for I was accustomed to oppose the preaching of the terrors of the gospel, and to represent it as debasing virtue by the admixture of slavish selfishness.

I now see that what is spiritual can only be spiritually apprehended. Comprehended it cannot.

Mr. Eden gave you a too flattering account of me. It is true, I am restored as much beyond my expectations almost as my deserts; but I am exceedingly weak. I need for myself solace and refocillation of animal spirits, instead of being in a condition of offering it to others. Yet as soon as I may see you, I will call upon you.

S. T. Coleridge.

CXCIX. TO CHARLES MATHEWS.

2, Queen’s Square, Bristol, May 30, 1814.

Dear Sir,—Unusual as this liberty may be, yet as it is a friendly one, you will pardon it, especially from one who has had already some connection with the stage, and may have more. But I was so highly gratified with my feast of this night, that I feel a sort of restless impulse to tell you what I felt and thought.

Imprimis, I grieved that you had such miserable materials to deal with as Colman’s Solomon Grundy,[111] a character which in and of itself (Mathews and his Variations ad libitum put out of the question) contains no one element of genuine comedy, no, nor even of fun or drollery. The play is assuredly the very sediment, the dregs of a noble cask of wine; for such was, yes, in many instances was and has been, and in many more might have been, Colman’s dramatic genius.

A genius Colman is by nature. What he is not, or has not been, is all of his own making. In my humble opinion, he possessed the elements of dramatic power in a far higher degree than Sheridan: or which of the two, think you, should pronounce with the deeper sigh of self-reproach, “Fuimus Troes! and what might we not have been?”

But I leave this to proceed to the really astonishing effect of your duplicate of Cook in Sir Archy McSarcasm.[112] To say that in some of your higher notes your voice was rather thinner, rather less substance and thick body than poor Cook’s, would be merely to say that A. B. is not exactly A. A. But, on the whole, it was almost illusion, and so very excellent, that if I were intimate with you, I should get angry and abuse you for not forming for yourself some original and important character. The man who could so impersonate Sir Archy McSarcasm might do anything in profound Comedy (that is, that which gives us the passions of men and their endless modifications and influences on thought, gestures, etc., modified in their turn by circumstances of rank, relations, nationality, etc., instead of mere transitory manners; in short, the inmost man represented on the superficies, instead of the superficies merely representing itself). But you will forgive a stranger for a suggestion? I cannot but think that it would answer for your still increasing fame if you were either previously to, or as an occasional diversification of Sir Archy, to study and give that one most incomparable monologue of Sir Pertinax McSycophant,[113] where he gives his son the history of his rise and progress in the world. Being in its essence a soliloquy with all the advantages of a dialogue, it would be a most happy introduction to Sir Archy McSarcasm, which, I doubt not, will call forth with good reason the Covent Garden Manager’s thanks to you next season.

I once had the presumption to address this advice to an actor on the London stage: “Think, in order that you may be able to observe! Observe, in order that you may have materials to think upon! And thirdly, keep awake ever the habit of instantly embodying and realising the results of the two; but always think!”

A great actor, comic or tragic, is not to be a mere copy, a fac simile, or but an imitation, of Nature. Now an imitation differs from a copy in this, that it of necessity implies and demands difference, whereas a copy aims at identity. What a marble peach on a mantelpiece, that you take up deluded and put down with pettish disgust, is, compared with a fruit-piece of Vanhuyser’s, even such is a mere copy of nature compared with a true histrionic imitation. A good actor is Pygmalion’s Statue, a work of exquisite art, animated and gifted with motion; but still art, still a species of poetry.

Not the least advantage which an actor gains by having secured a high reputation is this, that those who sincerely admire him may dare tell him the truth at times, and thus, if he have sensible friends, secure his progressive improvement; in other words, keep him thinking. For without thinking, nothing consummate can be effected.

Accept this, dear sir, as it is meant, a small testimony of the high gratification I have received from you and of the respectful and sincere kind wishes with which I am

Your obedient
S. T. Coleridge.

—— Mathews, Esq., to be left at the Bristol Theatre.

CC. TO JOSIAH WADE.

Bristol, June 26, 1814.

Dear Sir,—For I am unworthy to call any good man friend—much less you, whose hospitality and love I have abused; accept, however, my intreaties for your forgiveness, and for your prayers.

Conceive a poor miserable wretch, who for many years has been attempting to beat off pain, by a constant recurrence to the vice that reproduces it. Conceive a spirit in hell, employed in tracing out for others the road to that heaven, from which his crimes exclude him! In short, conceive whatever is most wretched, helpless, and hopeless, and you will form as tolerable a notion of my state, as it is possible for a good man to have.

I used to think the text in St. James that “he who offended in one point, offends in all,” very harsh; but I now feel the awful, the tremendous truth of it. In the one crime of OPIUM, what crime have I not made myself guilty of!—Ingratitude to my Maker! and to my benefactors—injustice! and unnatural cruelty to my poor children!—self-contempt for my repeated promise—breach, nay, too often, actual falsehood!

After my death, I earnestly entreat, that a full and unqualified narration of my wretchedness, and of its guilty cause, may be made public, that at least some little good may be effected by the direful example.

May God Almighty bless you, and have mercy on your still affectionate, and in his heart, grateful

S. T. Coleridge.

CCI. TO JOHN MURRAY.

Josiah Wade’s, Esq., 2, Queen’s Square, Bristol,
August 23, 1814.

Dear Sir,—I have heard, from my friend Mr. Charles Lamb, writing by desire of Mr. Robinson, that you wish to have the justly-celebrated “Faust”[114] of Goethe translated, and that some one or other of my partial friends have induced you to consider me as the man most likely to execute the work adequately, those excepted, of course, whose higher power (established by the solid and satisfactory ordeal of the wide and rapid sale of their works) it might seem profanation to employ in any other manner than in the development of their own intellectual organisation. I return my thanks to the recommender, whoever he be, and no less to you for your flattering faith in the recommendation; and thinking, as I do, that among many volumes of praiseworthy German poems, the “Louisa” of Voss, and the “Faust” of Goethe, are the two, if not the only ones, that are emphatically original in their conception, and characteristic of a new and peculiar sort of thinking and imagining, I should not be averse from exerting my best efforts in an attempt to import whatever is importable of either or of both into our own language.

But let me not be suspected of a presumption of which I am not consciously guilty, if I say that I feel two difficulties: one arising from long disuse of versification, added to what I know, better than the most hostile critic could inform me, of my comparative weakness; and the other, that any work in Poetry strikes me with more than common awe, as proposed for realization by myself, because from long habits of meditation on language, as the symbolical medium of the connection of Thought with Thought, and of Thought as affected and modified by Passion and Emotion, I should spend days in avoiding what I deemed faults, though with the full fore-knowledge that their admission would not have offended perhaps three of all my readers, and might be deemed Beauties by 300—if so many there were; and this not out of any respect for the Public (i. e. the persons who might happen to purchase and look over the Book), but from a hobby-horsical, superstitious regard to my own feelings and sense of duty. Language is the Sacred Fire in this Temple of Humanity, and the Muses are its especial and vestal Priestesses. Though I cannot prevent the vile drugs and counterfeit Frankincense, which render its flame at once pitchy, glowing, and unsteady, I would yet be no voluntary accomplice in the Sacrilege. With the commencement of a Public, commences the degradation of the Good and the Beautiful—both fade and retire before the accidentally Agreeable. “Othello” becomes a hollow lip-worship; and the “Castle Spectre” or any more peccant thing of Froth, Noise, and Impermanence, that may have overbillowed it on the restless sea of curiosity, is the true Prayer of the Praise and Admiration.

I thought it right to state to you these opinions of mine, that you might know that I think the Translation of the “Faust” a task demanding (from me, I mean) no ordinary efforts—and why? This—that it is painful, very painful, and even odious to me, to attempt anything of a literary nature, with any motive of pecuniary advantage; but that I bow to the all-wise Providence, which has made me a poor man, and therefore compelled me by other duties inspiring feelings, to bring even my Intellect to the Market. And the finale is this. I should like to attempt the Translation. If you will mention your terms, at once and irrevocably (for I am an idiot at bargaining, and shrink from the very thought), I will return an answer by the next Post, whether in my present circumstances, I can or cannot undertake it. If I do, I will do it immediately; but I must have all Goethe’s works, which I cannot procure in Bristol; for to give the “Faust” without a preliminary critical Essay would be worse than nothing, as far as regards the Public. If you were to ask me as a friend whether I think it would suit the General Taste, I should reply that I cannot calculate on caprice and accident (for instance, some fashionable man or review happening to take it up favourably), but that otherwise my fears would be stronger than my hopes. Men of genius will admire it, of necessity. Those must, who think deepest and most imaginatively. Then “Louisa” would delight all of good hearts.

I remain, dear sir, with every respect,

S. T. Coleridge.

CCII. TO DANIEL STUART.

Mr. Smith’s, Ashley, Box, near Bath,
September 12, 1814.

My dear Sir,—I wrote some time ago to Mr. Smith, earnestly requesting your address, and entreating him to inform you of the dreadful state in which I was, when your kind letter must have arrived, during your stay at Bath.... But let me not complain. I ought to be and I trust I am, grateful for what I am, having escaped with my intellectual powers, if less elastic, yet not less vigorous, and with ampler and far more solid materials to exert them on. We know nothing even of ourselves, till we know ourselves to be as nothing (a solemn truth, spite of point and antithesis, in which the thought has chanced to word itself)! From this word of truth which the sore discipline of a sick bed has compacted into an indwelling reality, from this article, formerly, of speculative belief, but which [circumstances] have actualised into practical faith, I have learned to counteract calumny by self-reproach, and not only to rejoice (as indeed from natural disposition, from the very constitution of my heart, I should have done at all periods of my life) at the temporal prosperity, and increased and increasing reputation of my old fellow-labourers in philosophical, political, and poetical literature, but to bear their neglect, and even their detraction, as if I had done nothing at all, when it would have asked no very violent strain of recollection for one or two of them to have considered, whether some part of their most successful somethings were not among the nothings of my intellectual no-doings. But all strange things are less strange than the sense of intellectual obligations. Seldom do I ever see a Review, yet almost as often as that seldomness permits have I smiled at finding myself attacked in strains of thought which would never have occurred to the writer, had he not directly or indirectly learned them from myself. This is among the salutary effects, even of the dawn of actual religion on the mind, that we begin to reflect on our duties to God and to ourselves as permanent beings, and not to flatter ourselves by a superficial auditing of our negative duties to our neighbours, or mere acts in transitu to the transitory. I have too sad an account to settle between myself that is and has been, and myself that can not cease to be, to allow me a single complaint that, for all my labours in behalf of truth against the Jacobin party, then against military despotism abroad, against weakness and despondency and faction and factious goodiness at home, I have never received from those in power even a verbal acknowledgment; though by mere reference to dates, it might be proved that no small number of fine speeches in the House of Commons, and elsewhere, originated, directly or indirectly, in my Essays and conversations.[115] I dare assert, that the science of reasoning and judging concerning the productions of literature, the characters and measures of public men, and the events of nations, by a systematic subsumption of them, under Principles, deduced from the nature of MAN, and that of prophesying concerning the future (in contradiction to the hopes or fears of the majority) by a careful cross-examination of some period, the most analogous in past history, as learnt from contemporary authorities, and the proportioning of the ultimate event to the likenesses as modified or counteracted by the differences, was as good as unknown in the public prints, before the year 1795-96. Earl Darnley, on the appearance of my letters in the “Courier” concerning the Spaniards,[116] bluntly asked me, whether I had lost my senses, and quoted Lord Grenville at me. If you should happen to cast your eye over my character of Pitt,[117] my two letters to Fox, my Essays on the French Empire under Buonaparte, compared with the Roman, under the first Emperors; that on the probability of the restoration of the Bourbons, and those on Ireland, and Catholic Emancipation (which last unfortunately remain for the greater part in manuscript, Mr. Street not relishing them), and should add to them my Essays in “The Friend” on Taxation, and the supposed effects of war on our commercial prosperity; those on international law in defence of our siege of Copenhagen; and if you had before you the long letter which I wrote to Sir G. Beaumont in 1806,[118] concerning the inevitableness of a war with America, and the specific dangers of that war, if not provided against by specific pre-arrangements; with a list of their Frigates, so called, with their size, number, and weight of metal, the characters of their commanders, and the proportion suspected of British seamen.—I have luckily a copy of it, a rare accident with me.—I dare amuse myself, I say, with the belief, that by far the better half of all these, would read to you now, AS HISTORY. And what have I got for all this? What for my first daring to blow the trumpet of sound philosophy against the Lancastrian faction? The answer is not complex. Unthanked, and left worse than defenceless, by the friends of the Government and the Establishment, to be undermined or outraged by all the malice, hatred, and calumny of its enemies; and to think and toil, with a patent for all the abuse, and a transfer to others of all the honours. In the “Quarterly” Review of the “Remorse” (delayed till it could by no possibility be of the least service to me, and the compliments in which are as senseless and silly as the censures; every fault ascribed to it, being either no improbability at all, or from the very essence and end of the drama no DRAMATIC improbability, without noticing any one of the REAL faults, and there are many glaring, and one or two DEADLY sins in the tragedy)—in this Review, I am abused, and insolently reproved as a man, with reference to my supposed private habits, for NOT PUBLISHING. Would to heaven I never had! To this very moment I am embarrassed and tormented, in consequence of the non-payment of the subscribers to “The Friend.” But I could rebut the charge; and not merely say, but prove, that there is not a man in England, whose thoughts, images, words, and erudition have been published in larger quantities than mine; though I must admit, not by, or for, myself. Believe me, if I felt any pain from these things, I should not make this exposé; for it is constitutional with me, to shrink from all talk or communication of what gnaws within me. And, if I felt any real anger, I should not do what I fully intend to do, publish two long satires, in Drydenic verse, entitled “Puff and Slander.”[119] But I seem to myself to have endured the hootings and peltings, and “Go up bald head” (2 Kings, ch. ii. vs. 23, 24) quite long enough; and shall therefore send forth my two she-bears, to tear in pieces the most obnoxious of these ragged CHILDREN in intellect; and to scare the rest of these mischievous little mud-larks back to their crevice-nests, and lurking holes. While those who know me best, spite of my many infirmities, love me best, I am determined, henceforward, to treat my unprovoked enemies in the spirit of the Tiberian adage, Oderint modo timeant.

And now, having for the very first time in my whole life opened out my whole feelings and thoughts concerning my past fates and fortunes, I will draw anew on your patience, by a detail of my present operations. My medical friend is so well satisfied of my convalescence, and that nothing now remains, but to superinduce positive health on a system from which disease and its removable causes have been driven out, that he has not merely consented to, but advised my leaving Bristol, for some rural retirement. I could indeed pursue nothing uninterruptedly in that city. Accordingly, I am now joint tenant with Mr. Morgan, of a sweet little cottage, at Ashley, half a mile from Box, on the Bath road. I breakfast every morning before nine; work till one, and walk or read till three. Thence, till tea-time, chat or read some lounge book, or correct what I have written. From six to eight work again; from eight till bed-time, play whist, or the little mock billiard called bagatelle, and then sup, and go to bed. My morning hours, as the longest and most important division, I keep sacred to my most important Work,[120] which is printing at Bristol; two of my friends having taken upon themselves the risk. It is so long since I have conversed with you, that I cannot say, whether the subject will, or will not be interesting to you. The title is “Christianity, the one true Philosophy; or, Five Treatises on the Logos, or Communicative Intelligence, natural, human, and divine.” To which is prefixed a prefatory Essay, on the laws and limits of toleration and liberality, illustrated by fragments of AUTO-biography. The first Treatise—Logos Propaidenticos, or the Science of systematic thinking in ordinary life. The second—Logos Architectonicus, or an attempt to apply the constructive or Mathematical process to Metaphysics and Natural Theology. The third—Ὁ Λόγος ὁ θεάνθρωπος (the divine logos incarnate)—a full commentary on the Gospel of St. John, in development of St. Paul’s doctrine of preaching Christ alone, and Him crucified. The fourth—on Spinoza and Spinozism, with a life of B. Spinoza. This entitled Logos Agonistes. The fifth and last, Logos Alogos (i. e., Logos Illogicus), or on modern Unitarianism, its causes and effects. The whole will be comprised in two portly octavos, and the second treatise will be the only one which will, and from the nature of the subject must, be unintelligible to the great majority even of well educated readers. The purpose of the whole is a philosophical defence of the Articles of the Church, as far as they respect doctrine, as points of faith. If originality be any merit, this Work will have that, at all events, from the first page to the last.

The evenings I have employed in composing a series of Essays on the principles of Genial Criticism concerning the fine Arts, especially those of Statuary and Painting;[121] and of these four in title, but six or more in size, have been published in “Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal;” a strange plan for such a publication; but my motive was originally to serve poor Allston, who is now exhibiting his pictures at Bristol. Oh! dear sir! do pray if you have the power or opportunity use your influence with “The Sun,” not to continue that accursed system of calumny and detraction against Allston. The articles, by whomever written, were a disgrace to human nature, and, to my positive knowledge, argued only less ignorance than malignity. Mr. Allston has been cruelly used. Good God! what did I not hear Sir George Beaumont say, with my own ears! Nay, he wrote to me after repeated examination of Allston’s great picture, declaring himself a complete convert to all my opinions of Allston’s paramount genius as a historical painter. What did I not hear Mr. West say? After a full hour’s examination of the picture, he pointed out one thing he thought out of harmony (and which against my earnest desire Allston altered and had reason to repent sorely) and then said, “I have shot my bolt. It is as near perfection as a picture can be!”...

But to return to my Essays. I shall publish no more in Bristol. What they could do, they have done. But I have carefully corrected and polished those already published, and shall carry them on to sixteen or twenty, containing animated descriptions of all the best pictures of the great masters in England, with characteristics of the great masters from Giotto to Correggio. The first three Essays were of necessity more austere; for till it could be determined what beauty was; whether it was beauty merely because it pleased, or pleased because it was beauty, it would have been as absurd to talk of general principles of taste, as of tastes. Now will this series, purified from all accidental, local, or personal references, tint or serve the “Courier” in the present dearth? I have no hesitation in declaring them the best compositions I have ever written, I could regularly supply two Essays a week, and one political Essay. Be so good as to speak to Mr. Street.[122] I could send him up eight or ten at once.

Make my best respects to Mrs. Stuart. I shall be very anxious to hear from you.

Your affectionate and grateful friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

CCIII. TO THE SAME.

“October 30, 1814.”

Dear Stuart,—After I had finished the third letter,[123] I thought it the best I had ever written; but, on re-perusal, I perfectly agree with you. It is misty, and like most misty compositions, laborious,—what the Italians call FATICOSO. I except the two last paragraphs (“In this guise my Lord,” to—“aversabitur”). These I still like. Yet what I wanted to say is very important, because it strikes at the ROOT of all LEGISLATIVE Jacobinism. The view which our laws take of robbery, and even murder, not as GUILT of which God alone is presumed to be the Judge, but as CRIMES depriving the King of one of his subjects, rendering dangerous and abating the value of the King’s Highways, etc., may suggest some notion of my meaning. Jack, Tom, and Harry have no existence in the eye of the law, except as included in some form or other of the PERMANENT PROPERTY of the realm. Just as, on the other hand, Religion has nothing to do with Ranks, Estates, or Offices; but exerts itself wholly on what is PERSONAL, viz., our souls, consciences, and the MORALITY of our actions, as opposed to mere legality. Ranks, Estates, Offices, etc., were made for persons! exclaims Major Cartwright[124] and his partizans. Yes, I reply, as far as the DIVINE administration is concerned, but human jurisprudence, wisely aware of its own weakness, and sensible how incommensurate its powers are with so vast an object as the well-being of individuals, as individuals, reverses the position, and knows nothing of persons, other than as properties, officiaries, subjects. The preambles of our old statutes concerning aliens (as foreign merchants) and Jews, are all so many illustrations of my principle; the strongest instance of opposition to which, and therefore characteristic of the present age, was the attempt to legislate for animals by Lord Erskine;[125] that is, not merely interfering with persons as persons; or with what are called by moralists the imperfect duties (a very obscure phrase for obligations of conscience, not capable of being realized (perfecta) by legal penalties), but extending PERSONALITY to things.

In saying this, I mean only to designate the general spirit of human law. Every principle, on its application to practice, must be limited and modified by circumstances; our reason by our common sense. Still, however, the PRINCIPLE is most important, as aim, rule, and guide. Guided by this spirit, our ancestors repealed the Puritan Law, by which adultery was to be punished with death, and brought it back to a civil damage. So, too, actions for seduction. Not that the Judge or Legislator did not feel the guilt of such crimes, but that the Law knows nothing about guilt. So, in the Exchequer, common debts are sued for on the plea that the creditor is less able to pay our Lord the King, etc., etc. Now, contrast with this, the preamble to the first French Constitution, and I think my meaning will become more intelligible; that the pretence of considering persons not states, happiness not property, always has ended, and always will end, in making a new STATE, or corporation, infinitely more oppressive than the former; and in which the real freedom of persons is as much less, as the things interfered with are more numerous, and more minute. Compare the duties, exacted from a United Irishman by the Confederacy, with those required of him by the law of the land. This, I think, not ill expressed, in the two last periods of the fourth paragraph. “Thus in order to sacrifice ... confederation.”

Of course I immediately recognised your hand in the Article concerning the “Edinburgh Review,” and much pleased I was with it; and equally so in finding, from your letter, that we had so completely coincided in our feelings, concerning that wicked Lord Nelson Article.[126] If there be one thing on earth that can outrage an honest man’s feelings, it is the assumption of austere morality for the purposes of personal slander. And the gross ingratitude of the attack! In the name of God what have we to do with Lord Nelson’s mistresses, or domestic quarrels? Sir A. Ball, himself exemplary in this respect, told me of his own personal knowledge Lady Nelson was enough to drive any man wild.... She had no sympathy with his acute sensibilities, and his alienation was effected, though not shown, before he knew Lady Hamilton, by being heart starved, still more than by being teased and tormented by her sullenness. Observe that Sir A. Ball detested Lady Hamilton. To the same enthusiastic sensibilities which made a fool of him with regard to his Emma, his country owed the victories of the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar, and the heroic spirit of all the officers reared under him.

When I was at Bowood there was a plan suggested between Bowles and myself, to engage among the cleverest literary characters of our knowledge, six or eight, each of whom was to engage to take some one subject of those into which the “Edinburgh Review” might be aptly divided; as Science, Classical Knowledge, Style, Taste, Philosophy, Political Economy, Morals, Religion, and Patriotism; to state the number of Essays he could write and the time at which he would deliver each; and so go through the whole of the “Review”:—to be published in the first instance in the “Courier” during the Recess of Parliament. We thought of Southey, Wordsworth, Crowe, Crabbe, Wollaston; and Bowles thought he could answer for several single Articles from persons of the highest rank in the Church and our two Universities. Such a plan, adequately executed, seven or eight years ago, would have gone near to blow up this Magazine of Mischief.

As to Ridgeway[127] and the Essays, I have not only no objection to my name being given, but I should prefer it. I have just as much right to call myself dramatically an Irish Protestant, when writing in the character of one, as Swift had to call himself a draper.[128] I have waded through as mischievous a Work, as two huge quartos, very dull, can be, by a Mr. Edward Wakefield, called an Account of Ireland. Of all scribblers these agricultural quarto-mongers are the vilest. I thought of making the affairs of Ireland, in toto, chiefly however with reference to the Catholic Question, a new series, and of republishing in the Appendix to the eight letters to Mr. Justice Fletcher, Lord Clare’s (then Chancellor Fitzgibbon’s) admirable speech, worthy of Demosthenes, of which a copy was brought me over from Dublin by Rickman, and given to Lamb. It was never printed in England, nor is it to be procured. I never met with a person who had heard of it. Except that one main point is omitted (and it is remarkable that the poet Edmund Spenser in his Dialogue on Ireland[129] is the only writer who has urged this point), viz., the forcing upon savages the laws of a comparatively civilised people, instead of adopting measures gradually to render them susceptible of those laws, this speech might be deservedly called the philosophy of the past and present history of Ireland. It makes me smile to observe, how all the mediocre men exult in a Ministry that have been so successful without any overpowering talent of eloquence, etc. It is true that a series of gigantic events like those of the last eighteen months, will lift up any cock-boat to the skies upon their billows; but no less true that, sooner or later, parliamentary talent will be found absolutely requisite for an English Ministry.

With sincere regard and esteem, your obliged

S. T. Coleridge.

CCIV. TO JOHN KENYON.[130]

Mr. B. Morgan’s, Bath, November 3 [1814].

My dear Sir,—At Binn’s, Cheap Street, I found Jeremy Taylor’s “Dissuasive from Popery,” in the largest and only complete edition of his Polemical Tracts. Mr. Binns had no objection to the paragraphs being transcribed any morning or evening at his house, and I put in a piece of paper with the words at which the transcript should begin and with which end—p. 450, l. 5, to p. 451, l. 31, I believe. But indeed I am ashamed, rather I feel awkward and uncomfortable at obtruding on you so long a task, much longer than I had imagined. I don’t like to use any words that might give you unpleasure, but I cannot help fearing that, like a child spoilt by your and Mrs. Kenyon’s great indulgence, I may have been betrayed into presuming on it more than I ought. Indeed, my dear sir! I do feel very keenly how exceeding kind you and Mrs. K. have been to me. It makes this scrawl of mine look dim in a way that was less uncommon with me formerly than it has been for the last eight or ten years.

But to return, or turn off, to the good old Bishop. It would be worth your while to read Taylor’s “Letter on Original Sin,” and what follows. I compare it to an old statue of Janus, with one of the faces, that which looks towards his opponents, the controversial phiz in highest preservation,—the force of a mighty one, all power, all life,—the face of a God rushing on to battle, and, in the same moment, enjoying at once both contest and triumph; the other, that which should have been the countenance that looks toward his followers, that with which he substitutes his own opinion, all weather eaten, dim, useless, a Ghost in marble, such as you may have seen represented in many of Piranesi’s astounding engravings from Rome and the Campus Martius. Jer. Taylor’s discursive intellect dazzle-darkened his intuition. The principle of becoming all things to all men, if by any means he might save any, with him as with Burke, thickened the protecting epidermis of the tact-nerve of truth into something like a callus. But take him all in all, such a miraculous combination of erudition, broad, deep, and omnigenous; of logic subtle as well as acute, and as robust as agile; of psychological insight, so fine yet so secure! of public prudence and practical sageness that one ray of creative Faith would have lit up and transfigured into wisdom, and of genuine imagination, with its streaming face unifying all at one moment like that of the setting sun when through an interspace of blue sky no larger than itself, it emerges from the cloud to sink behind the mountain, but a face seen only at starts, when some breeze from the higher air scatters, for a moment, the cloud of butterfly fancies, which flutter around him like a morning-garment of ten thousand colours—(now how shall I get out of this sentence? the tail is too big to be taken up into the coiler’s mouth)—well, as I was saying, I believe such a complete man hardly shall we meet again.

May God bless you and yours!

Your obliged
S. T. Coleridge.

P. S. My address after Tuesday will be (God permitting) Mr. Page’s, Surgeon, Calne.

J. Kenyon, Esq., 9, Argyle Street.

CCV. TO LADY BEAUMONT.

April 3, 1815.

Dear Madam,—Should your Ladyship still have among your papers those lines of mine to Mr. Wordsworth after his recitation of the poem on the growth of his own spirit,[131] which you honoured by wishing to take a copy, you would oblige me by enclosing them for me, addressed—“Mr. Coleridge, Calne, Wilts.” Of “The Excursion,” excluding the tale of the ruined cottage, which I have ever thought the finest poem in our language, comparing it with any of the same or similar length, I can truly say that one half the number of its beauties would make all the beauties of all his contemporary poets collectively mount to the balance:—but yet—the fault may be in my own mind—I do not think, I did not feel, it equal to the work on the growth of his own spirit. As proofs meet me in every part of “The Excursion” that the poet’s genius has not flagged, I have sometimes fancied that, having by the conjoint operation of his own experiences, feelings, and reason, himself convinced himself of truths, which the generality of persons have either taken for granted from their infancy, or, at least, adopted in early life, he has attached all their own depth and weight to doctrines and words, which come almost as truisms or commonplaces to others. From this state of mind, in which I was comparing Wordsworth with himself, I was roused by the infamous “Edinburgh” review of the poem. If ever guilt lay on a writer’s head, and if malignity, slander, hypocrisy, and self-contradictory baseness can constitute guilt, I dare openly, and openly (please God!) I will, impeach the writer of that article of it. These are awful times—a dream of dreams! To be a prophet is, and ever has been, an unthankful office. At the Illumination for the Peace I furnished a design for a friend’s transparency—a vulture, with the head of Napoleon, chained to a rock, and Britannia bending down, with one hand stretching out the wing of the vulture, and with the other clipping it with shears, on the one blade of which was written Nelson, on the other Wellington. The motto—