102 THE THREE SORTS OF FRIENDS [First printed in Fraser's Magazine for January 1835. Art. Coleridgeiana.'] THOUGH friendships differ endless in degree, The sorts, methinks, may be reduced to three. Acquaintance many, and Conquaintance few; But for Inquaintance I know only twoThe friend I've mourned with, and the maid I woo! MY DEAR GILLMAN -The ground and matériel of this division of one's friends into ac, con and inquaintance, was given by Hartley Coleridge when he was scarcely five years old [1801]. On some one asking him if Anny Sealey (a little girl he went to school with) was an acquaintance of his, he replied, very fervently pressing his right hand on his heart, No, she is an inquaintance!' 'Well! 'tis a father's tale'; and the recollection soothes your old friend and inquaintance, S. T. COLERIDGE. 103 I [S. T. C.] find the following lines among my papers, in my own writing, but whether an unfinished fragment, or a contribution to some friend's production, I know not : WHAT boots to tell how o'er his grave O Woman! nurse of hopes and fears, Thy soul in blameless mirth possessing; Most lovely in affliction's tears, More lovely still than tears suppressing. Allsop's Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, 1836, ii. 75. 104 CHARITY IN THOUGHT To praise men as good, and to take them for such, Is a grace which no soul can mete out to a tittle ; Of which he who has not a little too much, Will by Charity's gauge surely have much too little. 105 PROFUSE KINDNESS Νήπιοι οὐκ ἴσασιν ὅσῳ πλέον ἥμισυ πάντος, WHAT a spring-tide of Love to dear friends in a shoal! Half of it to one were worth double the whole ! This and the preceding first printed in the Poctical, etc., Works, 1834. 106 AND this is your peculiar art, I know; Others may do like actions, but not so. The Agents alter Things, and that which flows Powerful from these, comes weaker far from those. MS. 107 EACH crime that once estranges from the virtues Doth make the memory of their features daily More dim and vague, till each coarse counterfeit Can have the passport to our confidence Sign'd by ourselves. And fitly are they punish'd Who prize and seek the honest man but as A safer lock to guard dishonest treasures. Remains, i. 281. ADAPTATIONS [Coleridge rarely quoted, even his own verses, correctly. Sometimes this arose from mere carelessness, but more often, I think, he acted deliberately. Sometimes he altered the sense of his original, but he never perverted it to the injury of the writer's reputation either for matter or form. Often he See Athenæum, Aug. 20, 1892; Art. expanded and illuminated the passage he manipulated. 'Coleridge's Quotations.'-ED.] [LORD BROOKE] INCONSISTENCY 'IT is a most unseemly and unpleasant thing to see a man's life full of ups and downs, one step like a Christian, and another like a worldling; it cannot choose but pain himself, and mar the edification of others.'-[LEIGHTON.] The same sentiment, only with a special application to the maxims and measures of our Cabinet and Statesmen, had been finely expressed by a sage Poet of the preceding Generation, in lines which no Generation will find inapplicable or superannuated. God and the World we worship both together, Draw not our Laws to Him, but His [The lines (with one variant, 'still' for 'both' in the first line) had been printed by Coleridge, as Motto to the Lay Sermon, addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes, in 1817; and have often been quoted as of his own composition. I thought them Daniel's, but failing to find them in his works, I put A correa query in Notes and Queries. spondent (8th Ser. ii. p. 18) gave the reference to Lord Brooke's Works, in Grosart's Fuller's Worthies Series, ii. 127. [A Treatise of Warres, St. lxvi.] 'God and the world they worship still together; Draw not their lawes to Him, but His to theirs ; Untrue to both, so prosperous in neither; Amid their own desires still raising feares; Unwise, as all distracted powers be; Strangers to God, fooles to humanitie. Too good for great things and too great for good."] [DONNE] THE recluse hermit ofttimes more doth know Of the world's inmost wheels, than worldlings can. As man is of the world, the heart of man Is an epitome of God's great book But the last Judgement (this his Jury's plan) Of creatures, and men need no further Left to the natural sense of Work-day O BLESSED Letters ! that combine in one All ages past, and make one live with all: By you do we confer with who are gone, And the dead-living unto council call! Truth lies entrapp'd where Cunning finds By you the unborn shall have communion no bar : Since no proportion can there be betwixt Our actions which in endless motions are, And ordinances which are always fixt. Ten thousand Laws more cannot reach so far, But Malice goes beyond, or lives commixt So close with Goodness, that it ever will Corrupt, disguise, or counterfeit it still. And therefore would our glorious Alfred, who Join'd with the King's, the good man's Majesty, Not leave Law's labyrinth without a clue Gave to deep Skill its just authority,- Of what we feel and what doth us befall. Since writings are the veins, the arteries, And undecaying life-strings of those hearts, That still shall pant and still shall exercise Their mightiest powers when nature none imparts, The strong constitution of their praise Wear out the infection of distemper'd days. DANIEL'S Musophilus. Motto to Chapter I. of 'The Landing Place' in The Friend, 1818, i. 215. [The first passage is from Daniel's Epistle to Sir Thomas Egerton; the second and third from his Musophilus; but Coleridge has so altered, transposed, and rewritten all three that they are more |