(G. H. C.)
1Instar is a convenient term suggested by D. Sharp to indicate a stage in the life-history of an insect between two successive castings of the cuticle.
1Instar is a convenient term suggested by D. Sharp to indicate a stage in the life-history of an insect between two successive castings of the cuticle.
COLEPEPER, JOHN COLEPEPER(orCulpepper),1st Baron(d. 1660), English politician, was the only son of Sir John Colepeper of Wigsell, Sussex. He began his career inmilitary service abroad, and came first into public notice at home through his knowledge of country affairs, being summoned often before the council board to give evidence on such matters. He was knighted, and was elected member for Kent in the Long Parliament, when he took the popular side, speaking against monopolies on the 9th of November 1640, being entrusted with the impeachment of Sir Robert Berkeley on the 12th of February 1641, supporting Stafford’s attainder, and being appointed to the committee of defence on the 12th of August 1641. He separated, however, from the popular party on the Church question, owing to political rather than religious objections, fearing the effect of the revolutionary changes which were now contemplated. He opposed the London petition for the abolition of episcopacy, the project of religious union with the Scots, and the Root and Branch Bill, and on the 1st of September he moved a resolution in defence of the prayer-book. In the following session he opposed the militia bill and the Grand Remonstrance, and finally on the 2nd of January 1642 he joined the king’s party, taking office as chancellor of the exchequer. He highly disapproved of the attempt upon the five members, which was made without his knowledge, but advised the enterprise against Hull. On the 25th of August 1642 he appeared at the bar of the House of Commons to deliver the king’s final proposals for peace, and was afterwards present at Edgehill, where he took part in Prince Rupert’s charge and opposed the retreat of the king’s forces from the battlefield. In December he was made by Charles master of the rolls. He was a leading member of the Oxford Parliament, and was said, in opposition to the general opinion, to have counselled considerable concessions to secure peace. His influence in military affairs caused him to be much disliked by Prince Rupert and the army, and the general animosity against him was increased by his advancement to the peerage on the 21st of October 1644 by the title of Baron Colepeper of Thoresway in Lincolnshire.
He was despatched with Hyde in charge of the prince of Wales to the West in March 1645, and on the 2nd of March 1646, after Charles’s final defeat, embarked with the prince for Scilly, and thence to France. He strongly advocated the gaining over of the Scots by religious concessions, a policy supported by the queen and Mazarin, but opposed by Hyde and other leading royalists, and constantly urged this course upon the king, at the same time deprecating any yielding on the subject of the militia. He promoted the mission of Sir John Berkeley in 1647 to secure an understanding between Charles and the army. In 1648 he accompanied the prince in his unsuccessful naval expedition, and returned with him to the Hague, where violent altercations broke out among the royalist leaders, Colepeper going so far, on one occasion in the council, as to challenge Prince Rupert, and being himself severely assaulted in the streets by Sir Robert Walsh. He continued after the execution of the king to press the acceptance on Charles II. of the Scottish proposals. He was sent to Russia in 1650, where he obtained a loan of 20,000 roubles from the tsar, and, soon after his return, to Holland, to procure military assistance. By the treaty, agreed to between Cromwell and Mazarin, of August 1654, Colepeper was obliged to leave France, and he appears henceforth to have resided in Flanders. He accompanied Charles II. to the south of France in September 1659, at the time of the treaty of the Pyrenees. At the Restoration he returned to England, but only survived a few weeks, dying on the 11th of June 1660.
Several contemporary writers agree in testifying to Colepeper’s great debating powers and to his resources as an adviser, but complain of his want of stability and of his uncertain temper. Clarendon, with whom he was often on ill terms, speaks generally in his praise, and repels the charge of corruption levelled against him. That he was gifted with considerable political foresight is shown by a remarkable letter written on the 20th of September 1658 on the death of Cromwell, in which he foretells with uncommon sagacity the future developments in the political situation, advises the royalists to remain inactive till the right moment and profit by the division of their opponents, and distinguishes Monck as the one person willing and capable of effecting the Restoration (Clarendon State Papers, iii. 412). Colepeper was twice married, (1) to Philippa, daughter of Sir John Snelling, by whom he had one son, who died young, and a daughter, and (2) to Judith, daughter of Sir J. Colepeper of Hollingbourn, Kent, by whom he had seven children. Of these Thomas (d. 1719; governor of Virginia 1680-1683) was the successor in the title, which became extinct on the death of his younger brother Cheney in 1725.
(P. C. Y.)
COLERAINE, a seaport and market town of Co. Londonderry, Ireland, in the north parliamentary division, on the Bann, 4 m. from its mouth, and 61½ m. N.W. by N. from Dublin by the Northern Counties (Midland) railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 6958. The town stands upon both sides of the river, which is crossed by a handsome stone bridge, connecting the town and its suburb, Waterside or Killowen. The principal part is on the east bank, and consists of a central square called the Diamond, and several diverging streets. Among institutions may be mentioned the public schools founded in 1613 and maintained by the Honourable Irish Society, and the Academical Institution, maintained by the Irish Society and the London Clothworkers’ Company. The linen trade has long been extensively carried on in the town, from which, indeed, a fine description of cloth is known as “Coleraines.” Whisky-distilling, pork-curing, and the salmon and eel fisheries are prosecuted. The mouth of the river was formerly obstructed by a bar, but piers were constructed, and the harbours greatly improved by grants from the Irish Society of London and from a loan under the River Bann Navigation Act 1879. Coleraine ceased to return one member to the Imperial parliament in 1885; having previously returned two to the Irish parliament until the Union. It was incorporated by James I. It owed its importance mainly to the Irish Society, which was incorporated as the Company for the New Plantation of Ulster in 1613. Though fortified only by an earthen wall, it managed to hold out against the rebels in 1641. There are no remains of a former priory, monastery and castle. A rath or encampment of large size occupies Mount Sandel, 1 m. south-east.
COLERIDGE, HARTLEY(1796-1849), English man of letters, eldest son of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was born on the 19th of September 1796, near Bristol. His early years were passed under Southey’s care at Greta Hall, Keswick, and he was educated by the Rev. John Dawes at Ambleside. In 1815 he went to Oxford, as scholar of Merton College. His university career, however, was very unfortunate. He had inherited the weakness of purpose, as well as the splendid conversational powers, of his father, and lapsed into habits of intemperance. He was successful in gaining an Oriel fellowship, but at the close of the probationary year (1820) was judged to have forfeited it. The authorities could not be prevailed upon to reverse their decision; but they awarded to him a free gift of £300. Hartley Coleridge then spent two years in London, where he wrote short poems for theLondon Magazine. His next step was to become a partner in a school at Ambleside, but this scheme failed. In 1830 a Leeds publisher, Mr. F. E. Bingley, made a contract with him to write biographies of Yorkshire and Lancashire worthies. These were afterwards republished under the title ofBiographia Borealis(1833) andWorthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire(1836). Bingley also printed a volume of his poems in 1833, and Coleridge lived in his house until the contract came to an end through the bankruptcy of the publisher. From this time, except for two short periods in 1837 and 1838 when he acted as master at Sedbergh grammar school, he lived quietly at Grasmere and (1840-1849) Rydal, spending his time in study and wanderings about the countryside. His figure was as familiar as Wordsworth’s, and his gentleness and simplicity of manner won for him the friendship of the country-people. In 1839 appeared his edition of Massinger and Ford, with biographies of both dramatists. The closing decade of Coleridge’s life was wasted in what he himself calls “the woeful impotence of weak resolve.” He died on the 6th of January 1849. The prose style of Hartley Coleridge is marked by much finish and vivacity; but his literary reputation must chiefly rest on thesanity of his criticisms, and above all on hisPrometheus, an unfinished lyric drama, and on his sonnets. As a sonneteer he achieved real excellence, the form being exactly suited to his sensitive genius.Essays and Marginalia, andPoems, with a memoir by his brother Derwent, appeared in 1851.
COLERIDGE, JOHN DUKE COLERIDGE,1st Baron(1820-1894), lord chief justice of England, was the eldest son of Sir John Taylor Coleridge. He was born at Heath’s Court, Ottery St Mary, on the 3rd of December 1820. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, of which he was a scholar. He was called to the bar in 1846, and went the western circuit, rising steadily, through more than twenty years of hard work, till in 1865 he was returned as member for Exeter in the Liberal interest. The impression which he made on the heads of his party was so favourable that they determined, early in the session of 1867, to put him forward as the protagonist of their attack on the Conservative government. But that move seemed to many of their staunchest adherents unwise, and it was frustrated by the active opposition of a section, including Hastings Russell (later ninth duke of Bedford), his brother Arthur, member for Tavistock, Alexander Mitchell of Stow, A. W. Kinglake and Henry Seymour. They met to deliberate in the tea-room of the House, and were afterwards sometimes confounded with the tea-room party which was of subsequent formation and under the guidance of a different group. The protest was sufficient to prevent the contemplated attack being made, but the Liberals returned to power in good time with a large majority behind them in 1868. Coleridge was made, first solicitor-, and then attorney-general.
As early as 1863 a small body of Oxford men in parliament had opened fire against the legislation which kept their university bound by ecclesiastical swaddling clothes. They had made a good deal of progress in converting the House of Commons to their views before the general election of 1865. That election having brought Coleridge into parliament, he was hailed as a most valuable ally, whose great university distinction, brilliant success as an orator at the bar, and hereditary connexion with the High Church party, entitled him to take the lead in a movement which, although gathering strength, was yet very far from having achieved complete success. The clerically-minded section of the Conservative party could not but listen to the son of Sir John Coleridge, the godson of Keble, and the grand-nephew of the man who had been an indirect cause of the Anglican revival of 1833,—for John Stuart Mill was right when he said that the poet Coleridge and the philosopher Bentham were, so far as England was concerned, the leaders of the two chief movements of their times: “it was they who taught the teachers, and who were the two great seminal minds.”
Walking up one evening from the House of Commons to dine at the Athenaeum with Henry Bruce (afterwards Lord Aberdare) and another friend, Coleridge said: “There is a trial coming on which will be one of the most remarkablecauses célèbresthat has ever been heard of.” This was the Tichborne case, which led to proceedings in the criminal courts rising almost to the dignity of a political event. The Tichborne trial was the most conspicuous feature of Coleridge’s later years at the bar, and tasked his powers as an advocate to the uttermost, though he was assisted by the splendid abilities and industry of Charles (afterwards Lord) Bowen. In November 1873 Coleridge succeeded Sir W. Bovill as chief justice of the common pleas, and was immediately afterwards raised to the peerage as Baron Coleridge of Ottery St Mary. In 1880 he was made lord chief justice of England on the death of Sir Alexander Cockburn.
In jury cases his quickness in apprehending facts and his lucidity in arranging them were very remarkable indeed. He was not one of the most learned of lawyers, but he was a great deal more learned than many people believed him to be, and as an ecclesiastical lawyer had perhaps few or no superiors. His fault—a natural fault in one who had been so successful as an advocate—was that of being too apt to take one side. He allowed, also, certain political or personal prepossessions to colour the tone of his remarks from the bench. A game-preserving landlord had not to thank the gods when his case, however buttressed by generally accepted claims, came before Coleridge. Towards the end of his life his health failed, and he became somewhat indolent. On the whole, he was not so strong a man in his judicial capacity as Campbell or Cockburn; but it must be admitted that his scholarship, his refinement, his power of oratory, and his character raised the tone of the bench while he sat upon it, and that if it has been adorned by greater judicial abilities, it has hardly ever known a greater combination of varied merits. It is curious to observe that of all judges the man whom he put highest was one very unlike himself, the great master of the rolls, Sir William Grant. Coleridge died in harness on the 14th of June 1894.
Coleridge’s work, first as a barrister, and then as a judge, prevented his publishing as much as he otherwise would have done, but his addresses and papers would, if collected, fill a substantial volume and do much honour to his memory. One of the best, and one most eminently characteristic of the man, was his inaugural address to the Philosophical Institution at Edinburgh in 1870; another was a paper on Wordsworth (1873). He was an exceptionally good letter-writer. Of travel he had very little experience. He had hardly been to Paris; once, quite near the end of his career, he spent a few days in Holland, and came back a willing slave to the genius of Rembrandt; but his longest absence from England was a visit, which had something of a representative legal character, to the United States. It is strange that a man so steeped in Greek and Roman poetry, so deeply interested in the past, present and future of Christianity, never saw Rome, or Athens, or the Holy Land. A subsidiary cause, no doubt, was the fatal custom of neglecting modern languages at English schools. He felt himself at a disadvantage when he passed beyond English-speaking lands, and cordially disliked the situation. No notice of Coleridge should omit to make mention of his extraordinary store of anecdotes, which were nearly always connected with Eton, Oxford, the bar or the bench. His exquisite voice, considerable power of mimicry, and perfect method of narration added greatly to the charm. He once told, at the table of Dr Jowett, master of Balliol, anecdotes through the whole of dinner on Saturday evening, through the whole of breakfast, lunch and dinner the next day, through the whole journey on Monday morning from Oxford to Paddington, without ever once repeating himself. He was frequently to be seen at the Athenaeum, was a member both of Grillion’s and The Club, as well as of the Literary Society, of which he was president, and whose meetings he very rarely missed. Bishop Copleston is said to have divided the human race into three classes,—men, women and Coleridges. If he did so, he meant, no doubt, to imply that the family of whom the poet ofChristabelwas the chief example regarded themselves as a class to themselves, the objects of a special dispensation. John Duke Coleridge was sarcastic and critical, and at times over-sensitive. But his strongest characteristics were love of liberty and justice. By birth and connexions a Conservative, he was a Liberal by conviction, and loyal to his party and its great leader, Mr Gladstone.
Coleridge had three sons and a daughter by his first wife, Jane Fortescue, daughter of the Rev. George Seymour of Freshwater. She was an artist of real genius, and her portrait of Cardinal Newman was considered much better than the one by Millais. She died in February 1878; a short notice of her by Dean Church of St Paul’s was published in theGuardian, and was reprinted in her husband’s privately printed collection of poems. Coleridge remained for some years a widower, but married in 1885 Amy Augusta Jackson Lawford, who survived him. He was succeeded in the peerage by his eldest son, Bernard John Seymour (b. 1851), who went to the bar and became a K.C. in 1892. In 1907 he was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court. The two other sons were Stephen (b. 1854), a barrister, secretary to the Anti-Vivisection Society, and Gilbert James Duke (b. 1859).
HisLife and Correspondence, edited by E. H. Coleridge, was published in 1904; see further E. Manson,Builders of our Law(1904); and for the history of the Coleridge family see Lord Coleridge,The Story of a Devonshire House(1907).
HisLife and Correspondence, edited by E. H. Coleridge, was published in 1904; see further E. Manson,Builders of our Law(1904); and for the history of the Coleridge family see Lord Coleridge,The Story of a Devonshire House(1907).
(M. G. D.)
COLERIDGE, SIR JOHN TAYLOR(1790-1876), English judge, the second son of Captain James Coleridge and nephew of the poet S. T. Coleridge, was born at Tiverton, Devon, and was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he had a brilliant career. He graduated in 1812 and was soon after made a fellow of Exeter; in 1819 he was called to the bar at the Middle Temple and practised for some years on the western circuit. In 1824, on Gifford’s retirement, he assumed the editorship of theQuarterly Review, resigning it a year afterwards in favour of Lockhart. In 1825 he published his excellent edition ofBlackstone’s Commentaries, and in 1832 he was made a serjeant-at-law and recorder of Exeter. In 1835 he was appointed one of the judges of the king’s bench. In 1852 his university created him a D.C.L., and in 1858 he resigned his judgeship, and was made a member of the privy council. In 1869, although in extreme old age, he produced his pleasantMemoir of the Rev. John Keble, whose friend he had been since their college days, a third edition of which was issued within a year. He died on the 11th of February 1876 at Ottery St Mary, Devon, leaving two sons and a daughter; the eldest son, John Duke, 1st Baron Coleridge (q.v.), became lord chief justice of England; the second son, Henry James (1822-1893), left the Anglican for the Roman Catholic church in 1852, and became well-known as a Jesuit divine, editor ofThe Month, and author of numerous theological works. Sir John Taylor Coleridge’s brothers, James Duke and Henry Nelson (husband of Sara Coleridge), are referred to in other articles; his brother Francis George was the father of Arthur Duke Coleridge (b. 1830), clerk of assizes on the midland circuit and author ofEton in the Forties, whose daughter Mary E. Coleridge (1861-1907) became a well-known writer of fiction.
COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR(1772-1834), English poet and philosopher, was born on the 21st of October 1772, at his father’s vicarage of Ottery St Mary’s, Devonshire. His father, the Rev. John Coleridge (1719-1781), was a man of some mark. He was known for his great scholarship, simplicity of character, and affectionate interest in the pupils of the grammar school, of which he was appointed master a few months before becoming vicar of the parish (1760), reigning in both capacities till his death. He had married twice. The poet was the youngest child of his second wife, Anne Bowdon (d. 1809), a woman of great good sense, and anxiously ambitious for the success of her sons. On the death of his father, a presentation to Christ’s Hospital was procured for Coleridge by the judge, Sir Francis Buller, an old pupil of his father’s. He had already begun to give evidence of a powerful imagination, and he has described in a letter to his valued friend, Tom Poole, the pernicious effect which the admiration of an uncle and his circle of friends had upon him at this period. For eight years he continued at Christ’s Hospital. Of these school-days Charles Lamb has given delightful glimpses in theEssays of Elia. The headmaster, Bowyer (as he was called, though his name was Boyer), was a severe disciplinarian, but respected by his pupils. Middleton, afterwards known as a Greek scholar, and bishop of Calcutta, reported Coleridge to Bowyer as a boy who read Virgil for amusement, and from that time Bowyer began to notice him and encouraged his reading. Some compositions in English poetry, written at sixteen, and not without a touch of genius, give evidence of the influence which Bowles, whose poems were then in vogue, had over his mind at this time. Before he left school his constitutional delicacy of frame, increased by swimming the New River in his clothes, began to give him serious discomfort.
In February 1791 he was entered at Jesus College, Cambridge. A school-fellow who followed him to the university has described in glowing terms evenings in his rooms, “when Aeschylus, and Plato, and Thucydides were pushed aside, with a pile of lexicons and the like, to discuss the pamphlets of the day. Ever and anon a pamphlet issued from the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book before us;—Coleridge had read it in the morning, and in the evening he would repeat whole pages verbatim.” William Frend, a fellow of Jesus, accused of sedition and Unitarianism, was at this time tried and expelled from Cambridge. Coleridge had imbibed his sentiments, and joined the ranks of his partisans. He grew discontented with university life, and in 1793, pressed by debt, went to London. Perhaps he was also influenced by his passion for Mary Evans, the sister of one of his school-fellows. A poem in theMorning Chroniclebrought him a guinea, and when that was spent he enlisted in the 15th Dragoons under the name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. One of the officers of the dragoon regiment, finding a Latin sentence inscribed on a wall, discovered the condition of the very awkward recruit. Shortly afterwards an old school-fellow (G. L. Tuckett) heard of his whereabouts, and by the intervention of his brother, Captain James Coleridge, his discharge was procured. He returned for a short time to Cambridge, but quitted the university without a degree in 1794. In the same year he visited Oxford, and after a short tour in Wales went to Bristol, where he met Southey. The French Revolution had stirred the mind of Southey to its depths. Coleridge received with rapture his new friend’s scheme of Pantisocracy. On the banks of the Susquehanna was to be founded a brotherly community, where selfishness was to be extinguished, and the virtues were to reign supreme. No funds were forthcoming, and in 1795, to the chagrin of Coleridge, the scheme was dropped. In 1794The Fall of Robespierre, of which Coleridge wrote the first act and Southey the other two, appeared. At Bristol Coleridge formed the acquaintance of Joseph Cottle, the bookseller, who offered him thirty guineas for a volume of poems. In October of 1795 Coleridge married Sarah Fricker, and took up his residence at Clevedon on the Bristol Channel. A few weeks afterwards Southey married a sister of Mrs Coleridge, and on the same day quitted England for Portugal.
Coleridge began to lecture in Bristol on politics and religion. He embodied the first two lectures in his first prose publication,Conciones ad Populum(1795). The book contained much invective against Pitt, and in after life Coleridge declared that, with this exception, and a few pages involving philosophical tenets which he afterwards rejected, there was little or nothing he desired to retract. The first volume ofPoemswas published by Cottle early in 1796. Coleridge projected a periodical calledThe Watchman, and in 1796 undertook a journey, well described in theBiographic Literaria, to enlist subscribers.The Watchmanhad a brief life of two months, but at this time Coleridge began to think of becoming a Unitarian preacher, and abandoning literature for ever. Hazlitt has recorded his very favourable impression of a remarkable sermon delivered at Shrewsbury; but there are other accounts of Coleridge’s preaching not so enthusiastic. In the summer of 1795 he met for the first time the brother poet with whose name his own will be for ever associated. Wordsworth and his sister had established themselves at Racedown in the Dorsetshire hills, and here Coleridge visited them in 1797. There are few things in literary history more remarkable than this friendship. The gifted Dorothy Wordsworth described Coleridge as “thin and pale, the lower part of the face not good, wide mouth, thick lips, not very good teeth, longish, loose, half-curling, rough, black hair,”—but all was forgotten in the magic charm of his utterance. Wordsworth, who declared, “The only wonderful man I ever knew was Coleridge,” seems at once to have desired to see more of his new friend. He and his sister removed in July 1797 to Alfoxden, near Nether Stowey, to be in Coleridge’s neighbourhood, and in the most delightful and unrestrained intercourse the friends spent many happy days. It was the delight of each one to communicate to the other the productions of his mind, and the creative faculty of both poets was now at its best. One evening, at Watchett on the British Channel,The Ancient Marinerfirst took shape. Coleridge was anxious to embody a dream of a friend, and the suggestion of the shooting of the albatross came from Wordsworth, who gained the idea from Shelvocke’sVoyage(1726). A joint volume was planned. Wordsworth was to show the real poetry that lies hidden in commonplace subjects, while Coleridge was to treat supernatural subjects to illustratethe common emotions of humanity. From this sprang theLyrical Ballads, to which Coleridge contributedThe Ancient Mariner, theNightingaleand two scenes fromOsorio, and after much cogitation the book was published in 1798 at Bristol by Cottle, to whose reminiscences, often indulging too much in detail, we owe the account of this remarkable time. A second edition of theLyrical Balladsin 1800 included another poem by Coleridge—Love, to which subsequently the sub-title was given ofAn Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie. To the Stowey period belong also the tragedy ofOsorio(afterwards known asRemorse),Kubla Khanand the first part ofChristabel. In 1798 an annuity, granted him by the brothers Wedgwood, led Coleridge to abandon his reluctantly formed intention of becoming a Unitarian minister. For many years he had desired to see the continent, and in September 1798, in company with Wordsworth and his sister, he left England for Hamburg.Satyrane’s Letters(republished inBiog. Lit.1817) give an account of the tour.
A new period in Coleridge’s life now began. He soon left the Wordsworths to spend four months at Ratzeburg, whence he removed to Göttingen to attend lectures. A great intellectual movement had begun in Germany. Coleridge was soon in the full whirl of excitement. He learnt much from Blumenbach and Eichhorn, and took interest in all that was going on around him. During his stay of nine months in Germany, he made himself master of the language to such purpose that the translation ofWallenstein—his first piece of literary work after his return to England—was actually accomplished in six weeks. It was published in 1800, and, although it failed to make any impression on the general public, it became at once prized by Scott and others as it deserved. It is matter for regret that a request to Coleridge that he should undertake to translateFaustnever received serious attention from him. During these years Coleridge wrote many newspaper articles and some poems, among them “Fire, Famine and Slaughter,” for theMorning Post(January 8, 1798). He had vehemently opposed Pitt’s policy, but a change came over his way of thought, and he found himself separated from Fox on the question of a struggle with Napoleon. He had lost his admiration for the Revolutionists, as his “Ode to France” shows (Morning Post, April 16, 1798). Like many other Whigs, he felt that all questions of domestic policy must at a time of European peril be postponed. From this time, however, his value for the ordered liberty of constitutional government increased; and though never exactly to be found among the ranks of old-fashioned Constitutionalists, during the remainder of his life he kept steadily in view the principles which received their full exposition in his well-known work onChurch and State. In the year 1800 Coleridge left London for the Lakes. Here in that year he wrote the second part ofChristabel. In 1803 Southey became a joint lodger with Coleridge at Greta Hall, Keswick, of which in 1812 Southey became sole tenant and occupier.
In 1801 begins the period of Coleridge’s life during which, in spite of the evidence of work shown in his compositions, he sank more and more under the dominion of opium, in which he may have first indulged at Cambridge. Few things are so sad to read as the letters in which he details the consequences of his transgression. He was occasionally seen in London during the first years of the century, and wherever he appeared he was the delight of admiring circles. He toured in Scotland with the Wordsworths in 1803, visited Malta in 1804, when for ten months he acted as secretary to the governor, and stayed nearly eight months at Naples and Rome in 1805-1806. In Rome he received a hint that his articles in theMorning Posthad been brought to Napoleon’s notice, and he made the voyage from Leghorn in an American ship. On a visit to Somersetshire in 1807 he met De Quincey for the first time, and the younger man’s admiration was shown by a gift of £300, “from an unknown friend.” In 1809 he started a magazine calledThe Friend, which continued only for eight months. At the same time Coleridge began to contribute to theCourier. In 1808 he lectured at the Royal Institution, but with little success, and two years later he gave his lectures on Shakespeare and other poets. These lectures attracted great attention and were followed by two other series. In 1812 his income from the Wedgwoods was reduced, and he settled the remainder on his wife. His friends were generous in assisting him with money. Eventually Mackintosh obtained a grant of £100 a year for him in 1824 during the lifetime of George IV., as one of the royal associates of the Society of Literature, and at different times he received help principally from Stuart, the publisher, Poole, Sotheby, Sir George Beaumont, Byron and Wordsworth, while his children shared Southey’s home at Keswick. But between 1812 and 1817 Coleridge made a good deal by his work, and was able to send money to his wife in addition to the annuity she received. The tragedy ofRemorsewas produced at Drury Lane in 1813, and met with considerable success. Three years after this, having failed to conquer the opium habit, he determined to enter the family of Mr James Gillman, who lived at Highgate. The letter in which he discloses his misery to this kind and thoughtful man gives a real insight into his character. Under judicious treatment the hour of mastery at last arrived. The shore was reached, but the vessel had been miserably shattered in its passage through the rocks. For the rest of his life he hardly ever left his home at Highgate. During his residence there,Christabel, written many years before, and known to a favoured few, was first published in a volume withKubla Khanand thePains of Sleepin 1816. He read widely and wisely, in poetry, philosophy and divinity. In 1816 and the following year, he gave hisLay Sermonsto the world.Sibylline Leavesappeared in 1817; theBiographia Literariaand a revised edition ofThe Friendsoon followed. Seven years afterwards his most popular prose work—The Aids to Reflection—first appeared. His last publication, in 1830, was the work onChurch and State. It was not till 1840 that hisConfessions of an Inquiring Spirit, by far his most seminal work, was posthumously published. In 1833 he appeared at the meeting of the British Association at Cambridge, but he died in the following year (25th of July 1834), and was buried in the churchyard close to the house of Mr Gillman, where he had enjoyed every consolation which friendship and love could render. Coleridge died in the communion of the Church of England, of whose polity and teaching he had been for many years a loving admirer. An interesting letter to his god-child, written twelve days before his death, sums up his spiritual experience in a most touching form.
Of the extraordinary influence which he exercised in conversation it is impossible to speak fully here. Many of the most remarkable among the younger men of that period resorted to Highgate as to the shrine of an oracle, and although one or two disparaging judgments, such as that of Carlyle, have been recorded, there can be no doubt that since Samuel Johnson there had been no such power in England. His nephew, Henry Nelson Coleridge, gathered together some specimens of theTable Talkof the few last years. But remarkable as these are for the breadth of sympathy and extent of reading disclosed, they will hardly convey the impressions furnished in a dramatic form, as in Boswell’s great work. Four volumes ofLiterary Remainswere published after his death, and these, along with the chapters on the poetry of Wordsworth in theBiographia Literaria, may be said to exhibit the full range of Coleridge’s power as a critic of poetry. In this region he stands supreme. With regard to the preface, which contains Wordsworth’s theory, Coleridge has honestly expressed his dissent:—“With many parts of this preface, in the sense attributed to them, and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorize, I never concurred; but, on the contrary, objected to them as erroneous in principle, and contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other parts of the same preface, and to the author’s own practice in the greater number of the poems themselves.” This disclaimer of perfect agreement renders the remaining portion of what he says more valuable. Coleridge was in England the creator of that higher criticism which had already in Germany accomplished so much in the hands of Lessing and Goethe. It is enough to refer here to the fragmentary series of his Shakespeariancriticisms, containing evidence of the truest insight, and a marvellous appreciation of the judicial “sanity” which raises the greatest name in literature far above even the highest of the poets who approached him.
As a poet Coleridge’s own place is safe. His niche in the great gallery of English poets is secure. Of no one can it be more emphatically said that at his highest he was “of imagination all compact.” He does not possess the fiery pulse and humaneness of Burns, but the exquisite perfection of his metre and the subtle alliance of his thought and expression must always secure for him the warmest admiration of true lovers of poetic art. In his early poems may be found traces of the fierce struggle of his youth. The most remarkable is theMonody on the Death of Chattertonand theReligious Musings. In what may be called his second period, the ode entitledFrance, considered by Shelley the finest in the language, is most memorable. The whole soul of the poet is reflected in theOde to Dejection. The well-known lines—
“O Lady! we receive but what we give,And in our life alone does nature live;Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud,”
“O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live;
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud,”
with the passage which follows, contain more vividly, perhaps, than anything which Coleridge has written, the expression of the shaping and colouring function which he assigns, in theBiographia Literaria, to imagination.Christabeland theAncient Marinerhave so completely taken possession of the highest place, that it is needless to do more than allude to them. The supernatural has never received such treatment as in these two wonderful productions of his genius, and though the first of them remains a torso, it is the loveliest torso in the gallery of English literature. Although Coleridge had, for many years before his death, almost entirely forsaken poetry, the few fragments of work which remain, written in later years, show little trace of weakness, although they are wanting in the unearthly melody which imparts such a charm toKubla Khan,LoveandYouth and Age.
(G. D. B.; H. Ch.)
In the latter part of his life, and for the generation which followed, Coleridge was ranked by many young English churchmen of liberal views as the greatest religious thinker of their time. As Carlyle has told in hisLife of Sterling, the poet’s distinction, in the eyes of the younger churchmen with philosophic interests, lay in his having recovered and preserved his Christian faith after having passed through periods of rationalism and Unitarianism, and faced the full results of German criticism and philosophy. His opinions, however, were at all periods somewhat mutable, and it would be difficult to state them in any form that would hold good for the whole even of his later writings. He was, indeed, too receptive of thought impressions of all kinds to be a consistent systematizer. As a schoolboy, by his own account, he was for a time a Voltairean, on the strength of a perusal of thePhilosophical Dictionary. At college, as we have seen, he turned Unitarian. From that position he gradually moved towards pantheism, a way of thought to which he had shown remarkable leanings when, as a schoolboy, he discoursed of Neo-Platonism to Charles Lamb, or—if we may trust his recollection—translated the hymns of Synesius. Early in life, too, he met with the doctrines of Jacob Behmen, of whom, in theBiographia Literaria, he speaks with affection and gratitude as having given him vital philosophic guidance. Between pantheism and Unitarianism he seems to have balanced till his thirty-fifth year, always tending towards the former in virtue of the recoil from “anthropomorphism” which originally took him to Unitarianism. In 1796, when he named his first child David Hartley, but would not have him baptized, he held by the “Christian materialism” of the writer in question, whom in hisReligious Musingshe terms “wisest of mortal kind.”
When, again, he met Wordsworth in 1797, the two poets freely and sympathetically discussed Spinoza, for whom Coleridge always retained a deep admiration; and when in 1798 he gave up his Unitarian preaching, he named his second child Berkeley, signifying a new allegiance, but still without accepting Christian rites otherwise than passively. Shortly afterwards he went to Germany, where he began to study Kant, and was much captivated by Lessing. In theBiographiahe avows that the writings of Kant “more than any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding”; yet the gist of his estimate there is that Kant left his system undeveloped, as regards his idea of the Noumenon, for fear of orthodox persecution—a judgment hardly compatible with any assumption of Kant’s Christian orthodoxy, which was notoriously inadequate. But after his stay at Malta, Coleridge announced to his friends that he had given up his “Socinianism” (of which ever afterwards he spoke with asperity), professing a return to Christian faith, though still putting on it a mystical construction, as when he told Crabb Robinson that “Jesus Christ was a Platonic philosopher.” At this stage he was much in sympathy with the historico-rationalistic criticism of the Old Testament, as carried on in Germany; giving his assent, for instance, to the naturalistic doctrine of Schiller’sDie Sendung Moses. From about 1810 onwards, however, he openly professed Christian orthodoxy, while privately indicating views which cannot be so described. And even his published speculations were such as to draw from J. H. Newman a protest that they took “a liberty which no Christian can tolerate,” and carried him to “conclusions which were often heathen rather than Christian.” This would apply to some of his positions concerning the Logos and the Trinity. After giving up Unitarianism he claimed that from the first he had been a Trinitarian on Platonic lines; and some of his latest statements of the doctrine are certainly more pantheistic than Christian.
The explanation seems to be that while on Christian grounds he repeatedly denounced pantheism as being in all its forms equivalent to atheism, he was latterly much swayed by the thought of Schelling in the pantheistic direction which was natural to him. To these conflicting tendencies were probably due his self-contradictions on the problem of original sin and the conflicting claims of feeling and reason. It would seem that, in the extreme spiritual vicissitudes of his life, conscious alternately of personal weakness and of the largest speculative grasp, he at times threw himself entirely on the consolations of evangelical faith, and at others reconstructed the cosmos for himself in terms of Neo-Platonism and the philosophy of Schelling. So great were his variations even in his latter years, that he could speak to his friend Allsop in a highly latitudinarian sense, declaring that in Christianity “the miracles are supererogatory,” and that “the law of God and the great principles of the Christian religion would have been the same had Christ never assumed humanity.”
From Schelling, whom he praised as having developed Kant where Fichte failed to do so, he borrowed much and often, not only in the metaphysical sections of theBiographiabut in his aesthetic lectures, and further in the cosmic speculations of the posthumousTheory of Life. On the first score he makes but an equivocal acknowledgment, claiming to have thought on Schelling’s lines before reading him; but it has been shown by Hamilton and Ferrier that besides transcribing much from Schelling without avowal he silently appropriated the learning of Maass on philosophical history. In other directions he laid under tribute Herder and Lessing; yet all the while he cast severe imputations of plagiarism upon Hume and others. His own plagiarisms were doubtless facilitated by the physiological effects of opium.
Inasmuch as he finally followed in philosophy the mainly poetical or theosophic movement of Schelling, which satisfied neither the logical needs appealed to by Hegel nor the new demand for naturalistic induction, Coleridge, after arousing a great amount of philosophic interest in his own country in the second quarter of the century, has ceased to “make a school.” Thus his significance in intellectual history remains that of a great stimulator. He undoubtedly did much to deepen and liberalize Christian thought in England, his influence being specially marked in the school of F. D. Maurice, and in the lives of men like John Sterling. And even his many borrowings from the German were assimilated with a rare power of development,which bore fruit not only in a widening of the field of English philosophy but in the larger scientific thought of a later generation.
(J. M. Ro.)
Of Coleridge’s four children, two (Hartley and Sara) are separately noticed. His second child, Berkeley, died when a baby. The third, Derwent (1800-1883), a distinguished scholar and author, was master of Helston school, Cornwall (1825-1841), first principal of St Mark’s College, Chelsea (1841-1864), and rector of Hanwell (1864-1880); and his daughter Christabel (b. 1843) and son Ernest Hartley (b. 1846) both became well known in the world of letters, the former as a novelist, the latter as a biographer and critic.After Coleridge’s death several of his works were edited by his nephew, Henry Nelson Coleridge, the husband of Sara, the poet’s only daughter. In 1847 Sara Coleridge published theBiographia Literaria, enriched with annotations and biographical supplement from her own pen. Three volumes of political writings, entitledEssays on his Own Times, were also published by Sara Coleridge in 1850. The standard life of Coleridge is that by J. Dykes Campbell (1894); his letters were edited by E. H. Coleridge.
Of Coleridge’s four children, two (Hartley and Sara) are separately noticed. His second child, Berkeley, died when a baby. The third, Derwent (1800-1883), a distinguished scholar and author, was master of Helston school, Cornwall (1825-1841), first principal of St Mark’s College, Chelsea (1841-1864), and rector of Hanwell (1864-1880); and his daughter Christabel (b. 1843) and son Ernest Hartley (b. 1846) both became well known in the world of letters, the former as a novelist, the latter as a biographer and critic.
After Coleridge’s death several of his works were edited by his nephew, Henry Nelson Coleridge, the husband of Sara, the poet’s only daughter. In 1847 Sara Coleridge published theBiographia Literaria, enriched with annotations and biographical supplement from her own pen. Three volumes of political writings, entitledEssays on his Own Times, were also published by Sara Coleridge in 1850. The standard life of Coleridge is that by J. Dykes Campbell (1894); his letters were edited by E. H. Coleridge.
COLERIDGE, SARA(1802-1852), English author, the fourth child and only daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his wife Sarah Fricker of Bristol, was born on the 23rd of December 1802, at Greta Hall, Keswick. Here, after 1803, the Coleridges, Southey and his wife (Mrs Coleridge’s sister), and Mrs Lovell (another sister), widow of Robert Lovell, the Quaker poet, all lived together; but Coleridge was often away from home; and “Uncle Southey” was apater familias. The Wordsworths at Grasmere were their neighbours. Wordsworth, in his poem, theTriad, has left us a description, or “poetical glorification,” as Sara Coleridge calls it, of the three girls—his own daughter Dora, Edith Southey and Sara Coleridge, the “last of the three, though eldest born.” Greta Hall was Sara Coleridge’s home until her marriage; and the little Lake colony seems to have been her only school. Guided by Southey, and with his ample library at her command, she read by herself the chief Greek and Latin classics, and before she was five-and-twenty had learnt French, German, Italian and Spanish.
In 1822 Sara Coleridge publishedAccount of the Abipones, a translation in three large volumes of Dobrizhoffer, undertaken in connexion with Southey’sTale of Paraguay, which had been suggested to him by Dobrizhoffer’s volumes; and Southey alludes to his niece, the translator (canto iii. stanza 16), where he speaks of the pleasure the old missionary would have felt if
“.... he could in Merlin’s glass have seenBy whom his tomes to speak our tongue were taught.”
“.... he could in Merlin’s glass have seen
By whom his tomes to speak our tongue were taught.”
In less grandiloquent terms, Charles Lamb, writing about theTale of Paraguayto Southey in 1825, says, “How she Dobrizhoffered it all out, puzzles my slender Latinity to conjecture.” In 1825 her second work appeared, a translation from the medieval French of the “Loyal Serviteur,”The Right Joyous and Pleasant History of the Feats, Jests, and Prowesses of the Chevalier Bayard, the Good Knight without Fear and without Reproach: By the Loyal Servant.
In September 1829 at Crosthwaite church, Keswick, after an engagement of seven years’ duration, Sara Coleridge was married to her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge (1798-1843), younger son of Captain James Coleridge (1760-1836). He was then a chancery barrister in London. The first eight years of her married life were spent in a little cottage in Hampstead. There four of her children were born, of whom two survived. In 1834 Mrs Coleridge published herPretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children; with some Lessons in Latin in Easy Rhyme. These were originally written for the instruction of her own children, and became very popular. In 1837 the Coleridges removed to Chester Place, Regent’s Park; and in the same year appearedPhantasmion, a Fairy Tale, Sara Coleridge’s longest original work. The songs inPhantasmionwere much admired at the time by Leigh Hunt and other critics. Some of them, such as “Sylvan Stay” and “One Face Alone,” are extremely graceful and musical, and the whole fairy tale is noticeable for the beauty of the story and the richness of its language.
In 1843 Henry Coleridge died, leaving to his widow the unfinished task of editing her father’s works. To these she added some compositions of her own, among which are theEssay on Rationalism, with a special application to the Doctrine of BaptismalRegeneration, appended to Coleridge’sAids to Reflection, a Preface to theEssays on his Own Times, by S. T. Coleridge, and the Introduction to theBiographia Literaria. During the last few years of her life Sara Coleridge was a confirmed invalid. Shortly before she died she amused herself by writing a little autobiography for her daughter. This, which reaches only to her ninth year, was completed by her daughter, and published in 1873, together with some of her letters, under the titleMemoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge. The letters show a cultured and highly speculative mind. They contain many apt criticisms of known people and books, and are specially interesting for their allusions to Wordsworth and the Lake Poets. Sara Coleridge died in London on the 3rd of May 1852.
Her son, Herbert Coleridge (1830-1861), won a double first class in classics and mathematics at Oxford in 1852. He was secretary to a committee appointed by the Philological Society to consider the project of a standard English dictionary, a scheme of which theNew English Dictionary, published by the Clarendon Press, was the ultimate outcome. His personal researches into the subject were contained in hisGlossarial Index to the Printed English Literature of the Thirteenth Century(1859).
COLET, JOHN(1467?-1510), English divine and educationist, the eldest son of Sir Henry Colet (lord mayor of London 1486 and 1495), was born in London about 1467. He was educated at St Anthony’s school and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took the M.A. degree in 1490. He already held the non-resident rectory of Dennington, Suffolk, and the vicarage of St Dunstan’s, Stepney, and was now collated rector of Thurning, Hunts. In 1493 he went to Paris and thence to Italy, studying canon and civil law, patristics and the rudiments of Greek. During his residence abroad he became acquainted with Budaeus (Guillaume Budé) and Erasmus, and with the teaching of Savonarola. On his return to England in 1496 he took orders and settled at Oxford, where he lectured on the epistles of St Paul, replacing the old scholastic method of interpretation by an exegesis more in harmony with the new learning. His methods did much to influence Erasmus, who visited Oxford in 1498, and in after years Erasmus received an annuity from him. Since 1494 he had been prebendary of York, and canon of St Martin le Grand, London. In 1502 he became prebendary of Salisbury, in 1505 prebendary of St Paul’s, and immediately afterwards dean of the same cathedral, having previously taken the degree of doctor of divinity. Here he continued his practice of lecturing on the books of the Bible; and he soon afterwards established a perpetual divinity lecture, on three days in each week, in St Paul’s church. About the year 1508, having inherited his father’s large wealth, Colet formed his plan for the re-foundation of St Paul’s school, which he completed in 1512, and endowed with estates of an annual value of £122 and upwards. The celebrated grammarian William Lilly was the first master, and the company of mercers were (in 1510) appointed trustees, the first example of non-clerical management in education. The dean’s religious opinions were so much more liberal than those of the contemporary clergy (whose ignorance and corruption he denounced) that they deemed him little better than a heretic; but William Warham, the archbishop, refused to prosecute him. Similarly Henry VIII. held him in high esteem despite his sermons against the French wars. In 1514 he made the Canterbury pilgrimage, and in 1515 preached at Wolsey’s installation as cardinal. Colet died of the sweating sickness on the 16th of September 1519. He was buried on the south side of the choir of St Paul’s, where a stone was laid over his grave, with no other inscription than his name. Besides the preferments above mentioned, he was rector of the gild of Jesus at St Paul’s and chaplain to Henry VIII.
Colet, though never dreaming of a formal breach with the Roman Church, was a keen reformer, who disapproved of auricular confession, and of the celibacy of the clergy. Though no great scholar or writer, he was a powerful force in the England of his day, and helped materially to disintegrate the medieval conditions still obtaining, and to introduce the humanist movement. Among his works, which were first collectively published in1867-1876, areAbsolutissimus de octo orationis partium constructione libellus(Antwerp, 1530),Rudimenta Grammatices(London, 1539),Daily Devotions,Monition to a Godly Life,Epistolae ad Erasmum, and commentaries on different parts of the Bible.