Tyler, and the charges of apostacy' arising out of it. Of course Hazlitt took the fullest advantage of the opportunity, and his tirades directed against Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, contributed to Leigh Hunt's Examiner, may still be read in the collection of misnamed Political Essays published by Hone in 1819.

In June 1817, Ludwig Tieck was in London, and Coleridge renewed an acquaintance_begun at Rome eleven years before. The first occasion on which they met was at the house of Joseph Henry Green, then a rising young surgeon, who was as deeply interested in philosophy as in his own profession. Green had long been desirous of taking the waters of German philosophy at the fountain-head, and Tieck recommended a course with Professor Solger of Berlin, a scheme no doubt heartily encouraged by Coleridge, then a mere acquaintance of Green. It was immediately carried out, and on Green's return from Berlin, the intimacy with Coleridge began,1 an intimacy which proved the chief stimulus and the chief comfort of the last seventeen years of Coleridge's life.

In August, Southey came up to town. He saw Stuart, who complained of Coleridge's statements about him and his newspapers in the Biographia;2 and he also saw Coleridge. I shall go to Highgate to-morrow' (wrote Southey to his wife 3). 'I gather from his [Coleridge's] note which I received this morning that he looks towards Keswick as if he meant to live there. At present this cannot be for want of room-the Rickmans being our guests-if he meant to live with his family it must be upon a separate establishment. I shall neither speak harshly nor unkindly, but at my time of life, with my occupations [the thing is impossible]. This is a hateful visit and I wish it were over. He will begin as he did when last I saw him, about Animal Magnetism or some equally congruous subject, and go on from Dan to Beersheba in his endless loquacity.". And Southey, evidently quite soured by this time, goes on to say that Coleridge, if he gets an advance from the publishers of the Cyclopedia, will pay it away, and then abandon the whole thing. It is highly improbable that Coleridge had any intention of settling at Keswick again; but he may have said something vague either about a visit, or a settlement, with the view of sounding the disposition of the master of Greta Hall.

September was passed at Littlehampton, and there Coleridge made acquaintance with two men with whom he was afterwards on very friendly terms. One was a man of fortune with an uncommon taste for philosophical speculation, Charles Augustus Tulk,5 afterwards M.P. for Sudbury, and a devoted friend of Flaxman. The other was 'Dante' Cary, to whom Coleridge introduced himself while both were walking by the shore. He then first heard of Cary's translation of Dante,

1 Green's biographer, Sir John Simon, does not feel quite certain as to the date of the beginning of the intimacy, but his suggestion of 1817 is confirmed by an unprinted letter which I have seen.

When the book appeared I was extremely angry, and went to him at Mr. Gillman's, where I too warmly reproached him' (Stuart in Gent. Mag. June 1838, p. 578).

3 Streatham, August 13, 1817-an unprinted letter.

4 Coleridge was at the time deeply interested in this subject. In June he proposed to write a popular book on it, a proposal which he renewed (to Curtis) eighteen months later, when his old

teacher, Blumenbach, had recanted his disbelief in Animal Magnetism. He offered to contribute an historical treatise to the Encyc. Metrop. The letter, which is extremely interesting, is printed in Lippincott's Mag. for June 1874.

5 Coleridge supplied Tulk with an account of his system in a series of twenty-two long letters, which, bound together in a volume, were sold at Sotheby's auction rooms, June 13, 1882. The lot has since been broken up, but could probably be gathered together again, and might be found to be worth printing as a connected whole.

6 Memoirs of the Rev. H. F. Cary, 1848, ii. 18. Athenæum for Jan. 7, 1888; Art. 'Coleridge on Cary's Dante.'

which up to that time had been a commercial failure. Coleridge was greatly pleased with it, and promised to recommend it in the lectures which he contemplated delivering in the following winter. He did not fail of performance, and the consequences for Cary's book were the sale of a thousand copies, a new edition, and the position of an English classic.

Zapolya, which had been promised to Fenner for August, was delivered somewhat late, but in time for publication as 'A Christmas Tale,' and two thousand copies were sold. The essay on Method, which was promised for October, was delivered late in December. It was printed in January, and Coleridge received for it sixty guineas. He complained bitterly of the way in which the essay had been treated by the editors of the Encyclopædia-bedeviled, interpolated, and topsy-turvied and asked permission to reprint it in The Friend, then at press. The permission was granted on condition that it was acknowledged, with the rider, that the essay as written had not been approved by the committee.' This condition Coleridge could not accept, but in February 1818, being hard pressed for matter with which to fill up the third volume of The Friend, he seems to have taken the enemy in flank, by inserting the substance of the essay without mention of its source.1 The Friend was completed sadly behind time, for it had been put to press more than a year before, on the author's assurance that only the customary three weeks' were required to put the whole in order. On January 5th, 1818, Coleridge wrote to Morgan 2: From 10 in the morning till 4 in the afternoon, with one hour only for exercise, I shall fag from to-morrow at the third volume of The Friend. I hope to send off the whole by the 1st of February. [It was incomplete on Feb. 18.] As I cannot starve, and yet cannot with ease to my own feelings engage in any work that would interfere with my day's work till the MS. of the third volume of The Friend is out of my hands, I have been able to hit on [no] mode of reconciling the difficulties but by attempting a course of lectures, of which I very much wish to talk with you.'3

At the close of 1817, Wordsworth came up to London, and although he had been displeased with Coleridge's magnificent criticism in the Biographia, the two old friends had much intercourse, and before returning to his fastnesses, he wrote a most kindly letter to J. P. Collier 5 begging him to do what he could to further the success of Coleridge's projected course of lectures To Collier, Lamb also wrote on the same subject, describing Coleridge as 'in bad health and worse mind,' and needing encouragement. The recurrence to lecturing as a means of livelihood, which, as we have seen, had been planned as far back as September, took more definite shape in December, and the letter to Morgan shows that it had become a matter of prime necessity. It was then, probably, that the prospectus 7 was issued. How unwillingly and with how

1 'Coleridge seems to have valued highly certain essays in The Friend in which he professed to have reconciled Plato with Bacon' (Prof. Hort in Cambridge Essays for 1856 (p. 334), Art. 'Coleridge'). To this passage is appended the following footnote: 'In iii. 1c8-216, but especially essays viii. and ix. pp. 157-175 [of The Friend, ed. 1844]. The same matter in nearly the same words occurs in his treatise on Method prefixed to the Encycl. Metropolitana."

2 Letter in Brit. Museum, MSS. Addit. 25612. Printed incompletely and inaccurately in BRANDL, p. 357.

3 Coleridge goes on to threaten his enemies with a 'vigorous and harmonious' satire, to be called 'Puff and Slander.'

I recollect hearing Hazlitt say that W. would not forgive a single censure, mingled with however a great mass of eulogy.' H. C. Robinson, loq. (Dec. 4, 1817); quoted in Knight's Life of W. W. ii. 288.

5 Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton [1811]. PREFACE, p. lv.

6 Decr. 10, 1817. Ainger's Letters, ii. 8.

7 Printed in Gillman's Life; in Lit. Rem. vol. i.; in Ashe's collection, and elsewhere.

keen a sense of humiliation, may be gathered from his letter to Mudford, then assistant editor of the Courier-Woe is me! that at 46 I am under the necessity of appearing as a lecturer, and obliged to regard every hour given to the PERMANENT, whether as poet or philosopher, an hour stolen from others as well as from my own maintenance.'1 The prospectus promises fourteen lectures on Shakespeare and on Poetical Literature, native and foreign. From Crabb Robinson's Diaries we learn that the first lecture was delivered 2 on its appointed date, Jan 27, 1818, and that, up to the tenth, due dates (Tuesdays and Fridays) had been observed. After the tenth, Robinson went on circuit, not to return until March 26, by which date the course must have been finished.

Hazlitt was lecturing on Poetry at the same time, sometimes on the same evenings, at the Surrey Institution, a competition which cannot have contributed to the success of either course. On the evidence of Allsop-that the lectures were constantly thronged by the most attentive and intelligent auditory I have ever seen' it has been believed that the course was very successful pecuniarily, but neither Robinson's nor Coleridge's account fully bears this out. The audiences fluctuated, and, even more, the quality of the lectures. Robinson was far from being satisfied with most of Coleridge's appearances, feeling that as a rule he was repeating himself— which is not very surprising seeing that he had lectured on the same subjects so often before, and that the preparation was made either amid the distractions of finishing The Friend, or (more probably) not at all.3

With or without reason, Coleridge failed to send a ticket for these lectures to Lamb, but there was no cessation of intercourse, and when Lamb brought out his collected Works' in June 1818,4 the volumes were dedicated to Coleridge in a letter conceived in terms equally reverent and affectionate. After a passage recalling the smoky suppers at the Salutation and Cat,' Lamb proceeds: The world has given you many a shrewd nip and gird since that time, but either my eyes are grown dimmer, or my old friend is still the same who stood before me three-and-twenty years ago-his hair a little confessing the hand of time, but still shrouding the same capacious brain,-- his heart not altered, scarcely where it "alteration finds."" The old feeling had suffered no change, but opportunities of free companionship were awanting. In October, Lamb wrote to Southey 5: I do not see S. T. C. so often as I could wish. He never comes to me, and though his host and hostess are very friendly, it puts me out of my way to see one person at another person's house. It was the same when he resided at Morgan's.' A new friendship was about to begin, and to brighten Coleridge's life. Thomas Allsop had introduced himself to Coleridge after the first lecture at Flower-de-luce Court. By September, the young man was sending presents of

1 Canterbury Magazine for September 1834,

p. 125.

2 At a hall in Flower-de-luce Court, in Fetter Lane.

3 The record is scanty. A few preparatory notes, mostly marginalia, on a copy of Warburton's Shakespeare, with a few jottings taken down by friends, were piously collected in Lit. Rem. (i. 61-241) under the heading Course of Lectures, 1818. A slight addition was made by the publication in Notes and Queries (1870, series iv. vol. v. 335, 336) of some memoranda

made by a Mr. H. H. Carwardine; and I have reprinted from Leigh Hunt's Tatler some notes of the ninth and fourteenth lectures (Athenæum, March 1889).

4 I suppose the new edition of The Friend had been published before this, but have failed to discover the exact date. 'THE FRIEND: A Series of Essays, in Three Volumes (etc.) By S. T. Coleridge. A new edition. London: Printed for Rest Fenner, Paternoster Row, 1818.'

5 October 26, 1818. Ainger's Letters, ii. 16.

game, which were repaid by an invitation to 'The Grove,' and before the end of the year Coleridge addressed to Allsop the first of a series of confidential letters. It is dated Dec. 2. 1818.1 In this, Coleridge's wounded feelings towards Wordsworth (unnamed) are expressed characteristically. He has never admitted 'faults in a work of genius to those who denied .. its beauties.' If (he says) he has appeared in one instance to deviate from this rule, 'first, it was not till the fame of the writer (which I had been for fourteen years successively toiling like a second Ali to build up) 2 had been established; and secondly and chiefly with the purpose . . . of rescuing the necessary task from malignant defamers, and in order to set forth the excellencies, and the trifling proportion which the defects bore to the excellencies. But this, my dear sir, is a mistake to which affectionate natures are too liable . . ,-the mistaking those who are desirous and well pleased to be loved by you, for those who love you.' He doubts if the open abuse of himself in the Edinburgh is worse than the cold compliments and warm regrets' of the Quarterly, but his own one regret is the old one, that pressing need of bread and cheese diverts him from the completion of the Great Work.' If only he could have a tolerably numerous audience to his first, or first and second lectures on the History of Philosophy, he should entertain a strong hope of success, for the course will be more entertaining than any he has yet delivered. On Nov. 26, Coleridge had sent to Allsop a prospectus of two sets of lectures to be delivered at the Crown and Anchor tavern, in the Strand, one of fourteen on the History of Philosophy, the other on six select plays of Shakespeare -Tempest, Richard II. (and other dramatic Histories), Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Lear. The two sets were to be delivered concurrently-the former on Mondays, the latter on Thursdays-intermitting the Christmas week-beginning with Monday, Dec. 7.3 The commencement, however, was postponed for a week, the first philosophical lecture taking place on Dec. 14, and the first Shakespeare one on the 17th. Besides the prospectus, there was issued 'An Historical and Chronological Guide to this [Phil.] Course, price Sixpence,' and it is no doubt a portion of this lost pamphlet which Allsop has printed at page 187. A ticket was presented to Lamb, who writes on Dec. 244: Thank you kindly for your ticket, though

1 Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge (2 vols. Moxon, 1836). My references are to the third edition, with a Preface by the Editor, 'Thomas Allsop, late of Nutfield, in the County of Surrey, and formerly of the Stock Exchange, and Royal Exchange Buildings.' Farrah, 1864 (p. 3). This book is the main authority for the details of Coleridge's life, 1820-1826.

2 Mr. Wordsworth, for whose fame I have felt and fought with an ardour that amounted to self-oblivion, and to which I owe mainly the rancour of the Edinburgh clan, and (far more injurious) the coldness. . . of the Quarterly Review, has affirmed in print that a German critic first taught us to think correctly concerning Shakespeare' (S. T. C. to Mudford, 1818; Canterbury Mag. Sep. 1834, p. 126). If Coleridge here referred to the passage in the 'Essay, supplementary to the Preface' to Words

worth's Poems, 1815 (i. 352), this deduction is unwarranted.

3 Allsop prints the body of the prospectus of the Philosophical Course (p. 240); but makes no mention of the other. Mr. E. H. Coleridge has kindly permitted me to see his unique complete copy of the original. There are other references (pp. 85, 187, 205) to these lectures in Allsop's book, but they have been overlooked by all Coleridge's editors and biographers, who uniformly write of the Flower-de-luce Court Series (Jan.-March 1818) as the last. No adequate record of either course is known to exist-the few fragments I have been able to discover in the journals of the day will be found gathered together in the Athenæum for Dec. 26, 1891, and Jan. 2, 1892; Art. 'Some Lectures delivered by Coleridge in the winter of 1818-19.'

4 Ainger's Letters, ii. 16.

the mournful prognostic which accompanies it certainly renders its permanent pretensions less marketable; but I trust to hear many a course yet. . . . . . We are sorry it never lies in your way to come to us, but, dear Mahomet, we will come to you . . . on 3rd January 1819. Shall we be able to catch a skirt 1 of the old out-goer?'

If all the lectures promised in the prospectus were given, the delivery must have been carried into the beginning of April, for there was a break of a week, on account of indisposition. From Coleridge's letter to Mudford (Canterbury Magazine), we learn that the lectures attracted but scanty audiences. "When I tell you that yesterevening's receipts were somewhat better than many of the preceding; and that these did not equal one-half of the costs of the room, and of the stage and hackney coach (the advertisements in the Times and Morning Chronicle, and the printer's prospectus bill, not included). . . . Again, the Romeo and Juliet pleased even beyond my anticipation but alas! scanty are my audiences! But poverty and I have been such old cronies, that I ought not to be angry with her for sticking close to my skirts.' 2 About the same time Coleridge wrote, also to Mudford: Alas! dear sir, these lectures are my only resource. I have worked hard, very hard, for the last years of my life, but from Literature I cannot get even bread.' From the letter to Britton mentioned in the preceding footnote, we gather that Coleridge had been asked to re-deliver, at the Russell Institution, the course of lectures given at the Surrey Institution. Coleridge replies that he possesses no MS. or record, even in his memory, of these or any other lectures he has delivered. 'I should greatly prefer' (he writes 3) your committee making their own choice of the subjects from English, Italian, or German Literature; and even of the Fine Arts, as far as the philosophy of the same is alone concerned.' He goes on to say that he feels himself, from experience, so utterly unfit to discuss pecuniary matters, that if the committee will mention the sum it would be disposed to give, he will consult a friend and instantly decide. Whether anything came of these negotiations, I am not aware. Robinson makes no mention of hearing lectures at the Russell Institution, but this is not even negative evidence, for he makes no mention of the Crown and Anchor' series.

XIII. HIGHGATE

In March 1819, Coleridge had an interview with Blackwood, who had the hardihood to call at Highgate to solicit contributions to his Magazine. Surely Coleridge's poverty and not his will consented even to receive the owner of a periodical which had eighteen months before so grossly outraged him. To Mudford, Coleridge wrote: It seems not impossible that we may form some connection, on condition. that the Magazine is to be conducted,-first, pure from private slander and public malignity; second, on principles the direct opposite to those which have been hitherto supported by the Edinburgh Review, moral, political, and religious.' Perhaps Coleridge waited a little to see whether his conditions would be fulfilled, for nothing

1 'When lo! far onwards waving on the wind I saw the skirts of the DEPARTING YEAR!' --Original editions of the Ode, 11. 7, 8.

2 Romeo and Juliet was not among the six plays announced, but in Coleridge's letter to Britton (Feb. 28, 1819), a portion of which is

printed in the Lit. Rem. ii. 2, mention is made of a lecture on R. and J. at the 'Crown and Anchor.'

3 In the portion omitted from the Lit. Rem. See the entire letter, which is very interesting, in the Literary Gazette for 1834, p. 628.