such classes were formed, but I doubt if any numbered so many as five or six pupils, or lasted for two years. To Fraser's Magazine for 1835, one of these disciples contributed specimens of what he and his fellows took down from Coleridge's lips; and he informs us that, although no fees were stipulated, the disciples 'gave the teacher such recompense of reward as they were able to render.' 1

6

In a letter to Allsop of Dec. 26, 1822,2 Coleridge announces that the work on Logic is all but completed, and that, as Mr. Stutfield will give three days in the week for the next fortnight,' he has no doubt that, at the end of it, the book will be ready for the press.' By the time this work is 'printed off,' he will be ready with another volume of Logical Exercises, and all this without interrupting the greater work on Religion, of which the first half . . . was completed on Sunday last.' Perhaps I have printed too many such passages from Coleridge's letters, but I have suppressed an immeasurably greater number-and may plead that the life of a visionary cannot be told without the inclusion of a good many examples of the visions which most persistently haunted him.

In the Christmas week of 1822, Mrs. Coleridge and her daughter Sara arrived at the Grove on a visit which was prolonged until the end of the following February, after which the ladies went on to stay with their relatives at Ottery St. Mary. It is pleasant to read in a contemporary letter of Mrs. Coleridge that our visits to Highgate and Ottery have been productive of the greatest satisfaction to all parties.' 'All parties' included Henry Nelson Coleridge, who seems at once to have fallen in love with his cousin, whose delicate beauty and grace charmed all beholders. 'Yes,' wrote Lamb to Barton, 'I have seen Miss Coleridge, and wish I had just such a daughter. . . . God love her!' 3 The cousin's love was returned, and the girl's mother smiled on the attachment, but there could yet be no formal engagement. The cousins themselves, however, considered the matter as settled, and never wavered throughout the seven years which had to pass before marriage was practicable-the long delay being mainly caused by the delicate health of both.

Coleridge, though he seems to have hesitated a good deal before sanctioning the engagement, took very kindly to his nephew as a friend and companion. The first record of Table Talk between uncle and nephew is headed 'Dec. 29, 1822,' a date which coincides almost exactly with the arrival of the aunt and cousin. 'It was,' writes H. N. C., 'the very first evening I spent with him after my boyhood.' The renewed intercourse was destined to be cemented by mutual affection, and this led to the happy reconciliation of Coleridge with the other members of his family. On May Day of this year he dined at the house of John Taylor Coleridge, the brother of Henry Nelson, and, a little later, we read of his meeting their father, Colonel James, now the head of the family. Various records of this and succeeding years show that Coleridge went pretty frequently into society, charming alike with his divine talk the

1 January 1835, p. 50. The other article appeared in the following November.

2 Letters, etc., p. 204. See also Prefatory Memoir of Green in Spiritual Philosophy, i. xxxviii.

3 Feb. 17, 1823. On March 11 he writes again to Barton: 'The She - Coleridges have taken flight, to my regret. With Sara's ownmade acquisitions, her unaffectedness and nopretensions are beautiful. . . . Poor C., I wish he had a home to receive his daughter in; but

he is but a stranger or a visitor in this world.'

4 If the matter were quite open, I should incline to disapprove the intermarriage of first cousins; but the Church has decided otherwise on the authority of Augustine, and that seems enough on such a point' (Table Talk, June 10, 1824). Subsequently, confidence in these authorities was shaken, for on July 29, 1826, he requests Mr. and Mrs. Stuart to favour him with their opinion on the point (Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 299).

dignified guests of Beaumont and Sotheby, the professional and philosophic friends of Green, and the equally refined but more general company brought together by Mrs. Aders. The famous Highgate Thursday evening' was probably not a regular institution much, if at all, before 1824, but two or three years earlier the silver tongue had begun to attract an increasing stream of willing listeners, other than the professed disciples. Edward Irving was a sedulous and receptive visitor as early as 1822.

6

In a letter of July, Southey mentions that Coleridge talked of publishing a work on Logic, of collecting his poems, and of adapting Wallenstein for the stage-' Kean having taken a fancy to exhibit himself in it' but none of these projects came to anything, save the second, and that some five years later. The autumn of 1823 is remarkable for a revival of Coleridge's long dormant poetical faculty. The first draft of the exquisite Youth and Age is dated Sep. 10, 1823,' and seems to have been inspired by a day-dream of happy Quantock times.2 Unfortunately, the faculty seems to have gone to sleep again almost immediately, and all the hours which could be spared from talk, and Green, and the magnum opus were given to Archbishop Leighton. What had been at first intended as selections of Beauties 3 grew into that which became the most popular of all Coleridge's prose works—Aids to Reflection. In January 1824 Lamb reports that the book is a 'good part printed but sticks for a little more copy.' It 'stuck,' alas! for more than a year-why, it is impossible to conjecture, unless his interest in Leighton palled, for in the interval Coleridge must have written* the bulk of a volume or two of similar marginalia on the books he read in the delightful new room prepared for him by his kind hoststhe one pictured in the second volume of Table Talk. The cage was brightened, but the bird seems to have felt the pressure of the wires, for towards the end of March 1824, Coleridge took French leave, and established himself at Allsop's house in London. The Gillmans probably had no difficulty in discovering the whereabouts of the truant, and in ten days they happily recovered him,† never to lose him any more. Two months later we find him attending a 'dance and rout at Mr. Green's in Lincoln's Inn Fields.' 'Even in the dancing-room, notwithstanding the noise of the music, he was able to declaim very amusingly on his favourite topics' to the everwilling Robinson, who had joined the giddy throng and who stayed till three.' A week later the same diarist records: [Thursday] June 10th, Dined at Lamb's, and then walked with him to Highgate, self-invited. There we found a large party. Mr. Coleridge talked his best.'‡

In the previous month Irving had preached a missionary society sermon, which, when published, bore a dedication to Coleridge that greatly took the fancy of Lamb. ‘Irving is a humble disciple at the foot of Gamaliel S. T. C.' (he wrote to Leigh Hunt). 'Judge how his own sectarists must stare when I tell you he has dedicated a book to S. T. C., acknowledging to have learnt more of the nature of faith, Christianity, and Christian Church from him than from all the men he ever conversed with !'1

In May or June Aids to Reflection2 struggled into the light, but with a printed list of Corrections and Amendments' as long as that which graced the Sibylline Leaves, while the presentation copies had as many more added in manuscript. To Julius Hare it appeared to crown its author as the true sovereign of modern English thought'; while some younger men, as yet unknown to the author-Maurice and Sterling among others--felt that to this book they 'owed even their own selves.' 3

Theologians differing as widely as the Bishop (Howley) of London, and Blanco White joined in approving, but the reviewers were almost silent, and the sale was slow.* The author's natural disappointment was somewhat solaced by his nomination to one of the ten Royal Associateships of the newly-chartered 'Royal Society of Literature,' each of which carried an annuity of a hundred guineas from the King's Privy Purse. This appointment was probably obtained through the influence of John Hookham Frere, who for some years past had been one of Coleridge's kindest and most highly-valued friends. It would seem that each Associate had to go through the formality of delivering an essay before the Society, and accordingly Coleridge, on May 18, 1825, read a paper on the Prometheus of Eschylus. It was stated to be preparatory to a series of disquisitions,' which, however, did not follow.

6

About this time appeared Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age, with a flamboyant sketch of Coleridge for one of its most notable chapters. The high lights, as usual, are very high, and the shadows very black, but the middle tints, also as usual, are laid on with an unsteady hand-in this particular instance, perhaps, owing to some remorseful desire to be simply just and fair. The presence of an attempt in this direction is as apparent as its want of success, for though the essay bristles with barbed home-truths, they are not, as usual, poisoned. Coleridge is charged, of course, with political apostacy, but only to the extent of having 'turned on the pivot of a subtle casuis try to the unclean side'; he has not declined to the utter profligacy of becoming a poet-laureate or a stamp-distributer 5-only into 'torpid uneasy repose, tantalised by useless resources, haunted by vain imaginings, his lips idly moving, but his heart for ever still.' Coleridge took it all very complacently, expressing his own view of his past and present in the good-humoured doggerel which he called A Trifie and his editor of 1834, A Character.6

*S. T. C. to Stuart (Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 288). He adds that the comment on Aph. vi. p. 147 'contains the aim and object of the whole book'; and draws particular attention to the notes at pp. 204-207 and 218; to the last 12 lines of p. 252; and to the 'Conclusion.'

1 Ainger's ed. ii. 121. Lamb repeated this in letters to Barton and Wordsworth (b. ii. 127, 129).

2 Aids to Reflection in the formation of manly

XIV. HIGHGATE-LAST YEARS

The receipt of the annuity from the Privy Purse doubtless eased Coleridge's mind, and the minds of those about him, and I think that from this time he must have given up the struggle which, hitherto, and with varying energy and varying success, he had endeavoured in some fashion to keep up with the outer world. After the publication of Aids to Reflection, he seems to have assumed, and to have been permitted to keep for the rest of his life, the unique position which Carlyle so picturesquely describes: 'Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle, attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls engaged there.'1 Carlyle was himself one of the first of the brave souls who were attracted to the pool-led thither in June 1824 by his friend Irving, but unlike that friend, he came away sorrowing, having found no healing in its waters. The full-length portrait of Coleridge, elaborated with all the resources of an art in which Carlyle was supreme, in the Life of John Sterling, though placed there in a setting of 1828-30, was painted exclusively from studies made between June 1824 and March 1825. Here is the first rough sketch*: 'I have seen many curiosities; not the least of them I reckon Coleridge, the Kantian metaphysician and quondam Lake poet. Figure a fat, flabby, incurvated personage, at once short, rotund, and relaxed, with a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange brown, timid, yet earnest-looking eyes, a high tapering brow, a great bush of grey hair; and you have some faint idea of Coleridge. He is a kind, good soul, full of religion and affection, and poetry and animal magnetism. He shrinks from pain or labour in any of He never straightens his knee-joints.

...

its shapes. His very attitude bespeaks this. He stoops with his fat, ill-shapen shoulders, and in walking he does not tread, but shovel [shuffle ?] and slide. My father would call it "6 'skluiffing.' His eyes have a look of anxious impotence. There is no method in his talk; he wanders and what is more unpleasant, he preaches, or rather soliloquises. He cannot speak, he can only tal-k (so he names it). Hence I found him unprofitable, even tedious, but we parted very good friends, and I promised to go back. him a man of great and useless genius, a strange, not at all a great man.' Further intercourse led Carlyle to describe Coleridge as 'sunk inextricably in putrescent indolence'; and, enamoured of the pretty metaphor, he repeats and expands it in a letter of January 22, 1825: Coleridge is a mass of richest spices putrefied into a dunghill. I never hear him tawlk without feeling ready to worship him, and toss

him in a blanket.'†

*T. C. to his brother John, June 24, 1824 (Froude's T. Carlyle, 1795-1835, i. 222). In the Reminiscences (i. 231) Carlyle says: 'Early in 1825 was my last sight of "Coleridge." Another great Scotchman, also a friend of Irving, Dr. Chalmers, a man assuredly deficient neither in sympathy nor imagination, heard Coleridge talk for three hours without getting more than occasional glimpses of "what he would be at"' (Hanna's Life, iii. 160).

FROUDE, i. 292. One should try to enjoy all this full-flavoured language without taking it too seriously. Even in 1824-25 Carlyle confesses that the 'sad hag, Dyspepsia, had got him bitted

I reckon

and bridled, and was ever striving to make his waking living day a thing of ghastly nightmares' (Rem. i. 241). He called the then literary world of London 'this rascal rout, this dirty rabble, destitute. . . even of common honesty' (FROUDE, i. 264). How much he knew of it may be gauged, possibly, by the statement that 'the gin-shops and pawnbrokers bewail Hazlitt's absence-Hazlitt, who drank only tea! Besides, one must not forget that Carlyle was, by nature and practice, Coleridge's rival in monologue, and ill-suited for the part of 'passive bucket' assigned to him at Highgate.

1 Life of Sterling, chap. viii.

Intercourse with Lamb was kept up intermittently. In March 1826, one finds him preparing for a Thursday evening that he may not appear unclassic,' but a private undraped Wednesday in May was probably more to his taste. In the summer of this year Coleridge paid a visit to the cottage at Islington, meeting Thomas Hood and praising his Progress of Cant and some little drawings the silent young man had brought with him. An anonymous member of the party relates that when the evening was far spent Coleridge walked back alone to Highgate-a distance of three or four miles--and describes the affectionate leave-taking of the friends as if they had been boys,' and how Coleridge gave Mary a parting kiss.1 In March, Coleridge had thoughts of varying his employments by writing a pantomime, possibly to be founded on Decker's Old Fortunatus, as Lamb, who was consulted, offered to lend one of that dramatist's plays, if Coleridge thought he could filch something out of it.' 2

4

In picturesque apposition to this, one finds Coleridge at the same time informing Stuart 3 that his mind during the past two years, and particularly during the last, has been undergoing a change as regards personal religion. He finds himself thinking and reasoning on all religious subjects with a more cheerful sense of freedom, because he is secure of his faith in a personal God, a resurrection and a Redeemer, and further, and practically for the first time, 'confident in the efficacy of prayer. This strengthened feeling of assurance it may have been which caused him to be a little censorious of the delightfully vivacious Six Months in the West Indies, published by his nephew, H. N. Coleridge, in the winter of 1825-26. 'You are a little too hard on his morality,' wrote Lamb, though I confess he has more of Sterne about him than of Sternhold.'* The nephew had to be taken into favour again when, about the beginning of 1827, his sweetheart arrived on a second and longer visit to her father. An attempt was then being made to procure some sinecure place for Coleridge. Frere had obtained from the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, a promise, apparently, of the Paymastership of the Gentleman Pensioners-vacant by the death of William Gifford and the negotiations dragged on until the autumn, when the death of Canning, who had accepted the legacy of his predecessor's promise, put an end to Coleridge's hopes. 5 On February 24 he informs Stuart that Mr. Gillman, with Mr. Jameson, has undertaken to superintend an edition of all his poems, to be brought out by Pickering: that is to say, I have given all the poems, as far as this edition is concerned, to Mr. Gillman.'6 This was the edition in three volumes (it had been advertised to appear in four) which was published in 1828.7 Three hundred copies only were printed, and before October all had been sold, and another edition was prepared-to appear, after much revision, in 1829.8 The earliest glimpse

* C. L. to S. T. C. March 26, 1826 (Ainger's ed. ii. 144). I fear that Coleridge was making things hard for the lovers. Uncle and nephew appear to have held no Table Talk between June 10, 1824, and February 24, 1827. Of this long period H. N. C.'s absence only accounts for December 1824 to September 1825; and it was in July 1826 that Coleridge had his renewed doubts as to the propriety of marriage between first cousins. (See p. cxi. supra, foot-note '4.') There is another great gap in the Table Talk-August 30, 1827, to April 13, 1830. The marriage took place in September 1829 at Keswick.

1 Monthly Repository for 1835, pp. 162-169.

2 C. L. to S. T. C. March 22, 1826 (Ainger's ed. ii. 144).

3 April 19, 1826 (Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 294).

4 See Table Talk, June 1 1830, note; also Cottle's Rem. pp. 370, 382.

5 Letters from the Lake Poets, pp. 301-307, February and October 1827.

6 Ibid. p. 306. Jameson was a friend of Hartley, and the husband of Mrs. Jameson, the wellknown writer on Art.

7 See 'APPENDIX K, XII. p. 552

8 Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 319. also 'APPENDIX K,' XIII. p. 552.

See