my nineteenth year, when I quitted school for Jesus, Cambridge, was the era of poetry and love.' In 1822 he said in a letter to Allsop1: And oh! from sixteen to nineteen what hours of paradise had Allen and I in escorting the Miss Evanses home on a Saturday, who were then at a milliner's, . . . and we used to carry thither, on a summer morning, the pillage of the flower-gardens within six miles of town with sonnet or love-rhyme wrapped round the nosegay.'

·

The latter reminiscence reflects more accurately than the former the earlier relations between Coleridge and the Evans sisters. Of the letters he wrote to the family from Cambridge-which doubtless were numerous-five have been preserved, the latest being dated Feb. 10, 1793.' They are all strictly family letters,3 such as a son and brother would write, and are addressed indifferently to Mrs. Evans, Anne, and Mary. The only exception noticeable is that it is to Mary he addresses all his rhymes. But there have been preserved also two letters addressed to Mary towards the end of 1794, in one of which Coleridge first declares himself her lover, a passion which he says he has for four years endeavoured to smother.' These letters will receive notice in their proper place-here it is enough to show that in all probability Coleridge was fancy-free until the end of 1790. As Mrs. Evans was as a mother or an aunt, so were her daughters as his sisters or cousins. Unless we are to believe implicitly the date and occasion of Genevieve, it is clear that Poetry' (or, at all events, verse) preceded 'Love' in Coleridge's development, for the contributions to Boyer's album 5 begin with 1787; and the dates attached to these are the only ones which can be depended on. But it was not until the end of 1789 that the poetical faculty in Coleridge was quickened. The school exercises were regarded by him strictly as such, and at this particular period poetry had become 'insipid,' and everything but metaphysics distasteful. From this preposterous pursuit' he was auspiciously withdrawn,' first by 'an accidental introduction to an amiable family' (Evanses); next, and chiefly,' by another accidental introduction-to the poetry of Bowles. I had just entered on my seventeenth year [October 1789] when the Sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented to me.' 8 The donor was his friend Middleton, who had left Christ's Hospital for Cambridge a year before. These mild sonnets stirred Coleridge. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal with which I laboured to make proselytes. . . . As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made within less than a year and a half more than forty transcriptions' as presents for friends. One cannot help regretting that the inspiration did not come more directly from Cowper or Burns, or from both; but I confess my inability to join in the expression of amused wonder which has so often greeted Coleridge's acknowledgments of his obligation to Bowles. Had he first met with Cowper, or with Burns, doubtless Coleridge would have been less strongly impressed by Bowles-certainly less strongly impressed by his novelty

1 Letters, etc., 1864, p. 170.

6

2 Now in the Fonthill Collection. See 'Note 31,' p. 565.

3 He seems to have been called 'Brother Coly' by the Evanses.

4 A Wish, the two poems which follow it, and the Complaint of Ninathóma, pp. 19, 20.

5 The book into which the headmaster of Christ's caused his boys to transcribe their best

exercises. See 'Note 3,' p. 561.

6 Biog. Lit. 1817, i. 16.

7 Probably the second edition, which contained twenty-one sonnets. The first was anonymous Fourteen Sonnets, Elegiac and Descriptive, written during a Tour. Bath, MDCCLXXXIX. Quarto.

8 Biog. Lit. i. 13.

or originality; perhaps (but only perhaps) less influenced by his work as a whole. As a matter of fact, however, it happened that the first breath of Nature, unsophisticated by the classical tradition, came to Coleridge from Bowles's sonnets; and he recognised it at once. Nor was he alone in this. Four years after, the same sonnets captivated Wordsworth. He first met with them as he was starting on a walk, and kept his brother waiting on Westminster Bridge until, seated in one of its recesses, he had read through the little quarto. Of course, much that Coleridge and Wordsworth saw in Bowles's sonnets cannot now be seen; but surely, even to eyes looking across the century, they exhibit qualities, both positive and comparative, which explain sufficiently the influence they exercised.

In

How this influence affected Coleridge is set forth in the opening chapters of the Biographia, and is best illustrated by the youthful poems of 1790 and following years, which can now be read in something which approximates to chronological order. one of the earliest, the Monody on Chatterton (1790), he passed beyond his master, but the new influence pervades others of the same year. The old leaven was not purged all at once, and throughout there is discernible more of the besetting weakness of the new, as represented by the model, and less of the individuality it helped to emancipate, than we could have wished or expected.

II. CAMBRIDGE

On the 12th January 1791 the Committee of Almoners of Christ's Hospital appointed Coleridge to an Exhibition at Jesus College, Cambridge, on the books of which he was entered as a sizar on the 5th February. His 'discharge' from the school is dated September 7th, 1791, and he went into residence at Jesus in the following month. He became a pensioner on November 5, and matriculated on March 26, 1792. The Official List of [C.H.] University Exhibitioners' states that Coleridge was sent to Jesus College, Cambridge, as the prospect of his preferment to the Church would be very favourable if he were preferred to that College.' His Exhibition from the Hospital (besides the usual allowance of £40) was fixed at £40 per annum for the first four years, and £30 for each of the three remaining years of the then usual period of C.H. Exhibition tenure. Mr. Leslie Stephen states, on official authority, that Coleridge obtained one of the Rustat scholarships belonging to Jesus which are confined to the sons of clergymen. He received something from this source in his first term, and about £25 for each of the years 1792-94. He became also a Foundation scholar on 5th June 1794.'

There is no certainty that Coleridge's London school-life was ever broken by holiday visits to his old home. A letter to his mother of 1785 suggests a bare possibility that he went to Ottery in 1784; if we are to accept the family date of 1789 given to Life (p. 7), and that of 1790 to Inside the Coach and Devonshire Roads (p. 10), he must have spent some of the holidays of these years at Ottery. But these family dates seem little to be depended on. There is, however, no reasonable doubt that Coleridge went home in 1791, between school and college, or that Happiness was written at Ottery in that year. In some cancelled lines of that doleful poem he drew an unflattering portrait of himself, confessing to a heavy eye' and a 'fat vacuity of face.' 2

1 Dictionary of National Biography; Art. 'S. T. Coleridge.'

2 See Note 29,' p. 564.

On entering, he found Middleton at

He

Of his University career we know little. Pembroke College, and to this old school patron and protector' he probably owed the stimulus which made him an industrious student for the first year or two. certainly began well, for in his first year (1792) he gained the Browne Gold Medal for a Sapphic Ode on the Slave Trade;1 and in the winter of the same year he was selected by Porson as one of a short leet' of four (out of seventeen or eighteen) to compete for the Craven Scholarship. This was gained by Samuel Butler, afterwards headmaster of Shrewsbury and Bishop of Lichfield; but as Coleridge's failure has been reported to have depressed his spirits and injuriously affected his future, it may be mentioned that this view receives no confirmation from his letter to Mrs. Evans, written immediately after the award.

Unfortunately Middleton took his degree and left Cambridge in 1792,2 and there seems to have been no one to take his place as a steadying influence. In a letter to the Evanses of February 14, 1792, Coleridge speaks of a wine-party he attended, at which three or four freshmen were most deplorably drunk.' On the way home two of them fell into the gutter, and one who was being assisted 'generously stuttered out' a request that his friend might be saved as he (the speaker) 'could swim.' Another, written a year later, describes himself as 'general' of a party of six undergraduates who 'sallied forth to the apothecary's house with the fixed determination to thrash him for having performed so speedy a cure' on Newton, their mathematical tutor, who had been half-drowned in a duck-pond a week before. The same letter announces that he is taking lessons on the violin in self-defence against fiddling and fluting neighbours. It also contains this passage-'Have you read Mr. Fox's letter to the Westminster Electors? It is quite the political Go at Cambridge, and has converted many souls to the Foxite Faith.' Coleridge himself had already been converted to a political faith far in advance of Fox. C. V. le Grice 3 describes Coleridge's rooms at this time as crowded by friends who came to hear their host declaim, and repeat whole passages verbatim' from the political pamphlets which then swarmed from the press. The rooms were also a centre for the sympathisers with William Frend, a Fellow of Jesus, who in May 1793 was tried in the ViceChancellor's Court for having too freely expressed liberal views in politics, and Unitarian opinions in religion. Coleridge made himself dangerously conspicuous at the trial. In October of that year Christopher Wordsworth entered at Trinity (of which he was afterwards Master), and speedily became acquainted with Coleridge.4 In November they joined with some other undergraduates in forming a Literary Society. On the 5th the two discussed a review in the current Monthly of the poems of Christopher's brother William, when Coleridge spoke of the esteem in which my brother was holden by a Society at Exeter. . . . Coleridge talked Greek, Max. Tyrius, he told us, and spouted out of Bowles.' On the 7th he repeated his Lines on an Autumnal Evening (p. 24) and had them criticised. On the 13th the Society met for the first time at Wordsworth's rooms. " Time before supper was spent in hearing Coleridge repeat some original poetry (he having neglected to write his essay, which is therefore to be produced next week).'

But there is no record of that essay having ever been read, and it is probable that

1 See 'APPENDIX B,' p. 476, and 'Note 248,' P. 653.

2 Failing to obtain a coveted Fellowship, which was withheld on account of his 'republicanism.' 3 Gentleman's Magazine, Dec. 1834. He had come up, a year after Coleridge, with a C.H.

Exhibition to Trinity.

4 SeeNote 41,' p. 567.

5 See an allusion to such a Society in Biog. Lit. i. 19.

6 As the youthful Samuel Johnson had astonished his friends with Macrobius.

course.

before the Society's next meeting Coleridge had left Cambridge. Of the immediate causes of his flight nothing positive is known. Gillman attributes it to debts incurred for the furnishing of his college rooms; Coleridge himself to his debts generally, denying passionately that (as had been believed by his family) they had been incurred disreputably; Cottle 3 quotes Coleridge as having told him he ran away in a fit of disgust arising from Mary Evans's rejection of his addresses. It is not improbable that debts and disappointed love combined to drive him out of his Debts, however contracted, were evidently weighing on him at the time. The naïf appeal To Fortune seems to point to an attempt to retrieve his position by means of a lottery ticket. In one of his accounts of the adventure Coleridge speaks of having spent only a couple of days in London, in another he gives himself a week. The latter is probably the correct version, for he may have come up to await the lottery drawing, and, having drawn a blank, he apparently could not face a return to Cambridge. On the 2nd December 1793 he enlisted under the name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbach, in the 15th, or King's Regiment of Light Dragoons. Two days later he was inspected, attested, and sworn at Reading, the headquarters of the regiment. His Majesty's military needs must have been urgent at this time, for Comberbach was one of the few Englishmen of any degree who could truthfully confess to having had all his life a violent antipathy to soldiers and horses. Of course, the dragoonship was a sorry farce. He could not stick on his horse; he could not even clean it, or the accoutrements. But he could charm his comrades into taking these latter duties off his hands by writing their love-letters, telling them stories, and nursing them when they were sick. In a little more than two months Coleridge, feeling that he had had enough of it, revealed his whereabouts to certain of his old cronies who were still at Christ's, and they in turn confided the intelligence to another-Tuckett, by name-who had gone up to Cambridge. About the same time the dragoon summoned courage to write to his favourite brother George, and, after some confidential correspondence with him, a properly humble and dutiful letter was concocted, and addressed, on February 20, 1794, by Samuel to the head of the family, his brother Captain James Coleridge. His discharge was procured, but not until the 10th of April. The many romantic stories afloat as to the circumstances of Coleridge's release have little, if any, foundation. Miss Mitford's Captain Ogle may have rendered some kindly assistance, but the caged bird himself took the initiative, and the business of uncaging him, no doubt a troublesome one, was carried through by his brothers.

6

No time was lost by the prodigal son in returning to his Alma Mater-for according to Jesus College Register it was on the 12th April that he was admonished by the Master in the presence of the Fellows. No further notice of the escapade seems to have been taken by the College authorities, nor any report made to those at Christ's Hospital, so that Coleridge got off very cheaply. Before the middle of June, and in company with J. Hucks (who afterwards became a Fellow of Catherine Hall), Coleridge went to Oxford on a visit, which was prolonged to three weeks, to his old schoolfellow Allen, who had gone up two years before to University College with a C.H. Exhibition. One of Allen's friends was Robert Southey

of Balliol, who thus wrote to Grosvenor Bedford on June 12th: Allen is with us

1 Life, p. 42.

2 lb. p. 64.

3 Early Recoll. ii. 54; and Rem. p. 279. 4 Page 27; see also 'Note 42,' p. 567. This probably was the poem Stuart tells us Coleridge

sold about this time to the Morning Chronicle for a guinea.

5 Gillman's Life, pp. 57 and 64.

6 See the letter (or part of it), in Brandl's Life

of Coleridge, p. 65, where it was first printed.

daily, and his friend from Cambridge, Coleridge, whose poems you will oblige me by subscribing to, either at Hookham's or Edwards's. He is of most uncommon merit,-of the strongest genius, the clearest judgment, the best heart. My friend he already is, and must hereafter be yours.'1 It was then that Pantisocracy was hatched. Southey gave his account of the matter to Cottle in a letter dated March 5th, 1836: 'In the summer of 1794 S. T. Coleridge and Hucks came to Oxford on their way into Wales for a pedestrian tour. Then Allen introduced them to me, and the scheme was talked of, but not by any means determined on. It was talked into shape by Burnett and myself, when, upon the commencement of the long vacation, we separated from them, they making for Gloucester, he and I proceeding on foot to Bath. After some weeks S. T. C., returning from his tour, came to Bristol on his way and slept there. Then it was that we resolved upon going to America, and S. T. C. and I walked into Somersetshire to see Burnett, and on that journey it was that he first saw Poole.* He made his engagement with Miss [Sarah] Fricker on our return from this journey at my mother's house in Bath, not a little to my astonishment, because he had talked of being deeply in love with a certain Mary Evans. I had previously been engaged to my poor Edith [Fricker]. . . . He remained at Bristol till the close of the vacation-several weeks. During that time it was that we talked of America. The funds were to be what each could raise-S. T. C. by the Specimens of the Modern Latin Poets,2 for which he had printed proposals, and obtained a respectable list of Cambridge subscribers before I knew him; I, by Joan of Arc, and what else I might publish. I had no . . . other expectation. We hoped to find companions with money.'

3

As far as regards himself, individually, Southey's rapid sketch needs little filling in. He omits to record the joint composition of The Fall of Robespierre, the history of which will be found in Note 228,' p. 646; and to describe Pantisocracy.' The most complete account of the scheme is to be found in a letter written by Thomas Poole a few weeks after it had been explained to him by Southey and Coleridge Twelve gentlemen of good education and liberal principles are to embark with twelve ladies in April next,' fixing themselves in some delightful part of the new back settlements' of America. The labour of each man, for two or three hours a day, it was imagined, would suffice to support the colony. The produce was

4

--

* See the account of this visit in Thomas Poole and his Friends, by Mrs. H. Sandford, 1888, i. chap. vi. To Poole, 'Coldridge' appeared to 'possess splendid abilities.' 'He speaks with much elegance and energy, and with uncommon facility, but he . . . feels the justice of Providence in the want of those inferior abilities which are necessary to the rational discharge of the common duties of life. His aberrations from prudence, to use his own expression, have been great; but he now promises to be as sober and rational as his most sober friends could wish. In religion, he is a Unitarian, if not a Deist; in politicks a Democrat, to the utmost extent of the word.'. Southey appeared 'more violent in his principles than even Coldridge himself. In religion... I fear he wavers between Deism and Atheism.' Poole's nephew John, who was present, wrote in his Diary for the 18th August:

3 The letter is printed in Cottle's Reminiscences, pp. 402-407, but very inaccurately. I quote from the original now in the Fonthill collection. Cottle has falsified the second sentence of the above extract, printing it thus: Allen introduced them to me, and the scheme of Pantisocracy was introduced by them; talked of, by no means determined on.' (The italics are Cottle's.) There are many other garblings, but this is the most important.

T. Poole and his Friends, i. 96-99.