[1]FromTait's Magazinefor February 1835.—M.[2]I.e.Lord Westport. Sec vol. i. pp. 161-2et seq.—M.[3]This paragraph is omitted in the American reprint of theTaitpaper, probably because it repeats information given already. See the chapter entitled "The Priory, Chester," in Vol. I, and especially the concluding pages of that chapter. As, however, the paragraph contains some new particulars, and explains what follows, I have retained it, the rather because it ought to be the rule not to tamper with De Quincey's text on any such occasion.—M.[4]FromTait's Magazinefor June 1835.[5]Among the students in Christ Church at this time was Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, afterwards so well known as a fellow-resident with De Quincey in Edinburgh. He was De Quincey's senior by four years, and had entered Christ Church in 1798. Among his acquaintances and fellow-students were Lord Gower, afterwards Duke of Sutherland, Lord Newtown, Elijah Impey (son of the famous Indian judge of that name), and others of high name and rank. In theMemoirs and Correspondence of Kirkpatrick Sharpe(published 1888) there are descriptions of the society of the college, with sketches of Dean Cyril Jackson, &c., from Sharpe's cynical pen.—M.[6]It was Worcester College; and we shall use the full name, instead of the blank W., in the sequel.—M.[7]Oxford may confessedly claim a duration of that extent; and the pretensions of Cambridge, in that respect, if less aspiring, are, however, as I believe, less accurately determined.[8]It may be necessary to inform some readers that the wordnoble, by which so large a system of imposition and fraud, as to the composition of foreign society, has long been practised upon the credulity of the British, corresponds to our wordgentlemanly(or, rather, to the vulgar wordgenteel, if that word were ever used legally, orextra gradum), not merely upon the argument of itsvirtualand operative value in the general estimate of men (that is, upon the argument that a count, baron, &c., does not,quasuch, command any deeper feeling of respect or homage than a British esquire), but also upon the fact, that, originally, in all English registers, as, for instance, in the Oxford matriculation registers, all the upper gentry (knights, esquires, &c.) are technically designated by the wordnobiles.—See Chamberlayne, &c.[9]The subject is amusingly illustrated by an anecdote of Goethe, recorded by himself in his autobiography. Some physiognomist, or phrenologist, had found out, in Goethe's structure of head, the sure promise of a great orator. "Strange infatuation of nature!" observes Goethe, on this assurance, "to endow me so richly and liberally for that particular destination which only the institutions of my country render impossible. Music for the deaf! Eloquence without an audience!"[10]Whilst I am writing, a debate of the present Parliament, reported on Saturday, March 7, 1835, presents us with a determinate repetition of the error which I have been exposing; and, again, as in the last Parliament, this error is notinert, but is used for a hostile (apparently a malicious) purpose; nay, which is remarkable, it is thesolebasis upon which the following argument reposes. Lord Radnor again assumes that the students of Oxford are "boys"; he is again supported in this misrepresentation by Lord Brougham; and again the misrepresentation is applied to a purpose of assault upon the English Universities, but especially upon Oxford. And the nature of the assault does not allow any latitude in construing the wordboys, nor any room for evasion as respects the total charge, except what goes the length of a total retraction. The charge is, that, in a requisition made at the very threshold of academic life, upon the understanding and the honour of the students, the University burdens their consciences to an extent which, in after life, when reflection has enlightened them to the meaning of their engagements, proves either a snare to those who trifle with their engagements, or an insupportable burden to those who do not. For the inculpation of the party imposing such oaths, it is essential that the party taking them should be in a childish condition of the moral sense, and the sense of responsibility; whereas, amongst the Oxonianunder-graduates, I will venture to say that the number is larger of those who rise above than of those who fall below twenty; and, as to sixteen (assumed as the representative age by Lord Radnor), in my time, I heard of only one student, amongst, perhaps, sixteen hundred, who was so young. I grieve to see that the learned prelate who replied to the assailants was so much taken by surprise; the defence might have been made triumphant. With regard to oaths incompatible with the spirit of modern manners, and yet formally unrepealed—thatis a case of neglect and indolent oversight. But thegravamenof that reproach does not press exclusively upon Oxford; all the ancient institutions of Europe are tainted in the same way, more especially the monastic orders of the Romish church.[11]These changes have been accomplished, according to my imperfect knowledge of the case, in two ways: first, by dispensing with the services whenever that could be done; and, secondly, by a wise discontinuance of the order itself in those colleges which were left to their own choice in this matter.[12]FromTait's Magazinefor August 1835.[13]I cannot for a moment believe that the original and most eloquent critic inBlackwoodis himself the dupe of an argument which he has alleged against this passage, under too open a hatred of Shakspeare, as though it involved a contradiction to common sense, by representingallhuman beings of such an age as school-boys, all of such another age as soldiers, of such another as magistrates, &c. Evidently the logic of the famous passage is this,—that, whereas every age has its peculiar and appropriate temper, that profession or employment is selected for the exemplification which seems best fitted, in each case, to embody the characteristic or predominating quality. Thus, because impetuosity, self-esteem, and animal or irreflective courage, are qualities most intense in youth, next it is considered in what profession those qualities find their most unlimited range; and, because that is obviously the military profession, therefore it is that the soldier is selected as the representative of young men. For the same reason, as best embodying the peculiar temper of garrulous old age, the magistrate comes forward as supporting the part of that age. Not that old men are not also soldiers; but that the military profession, so far from strengthening, moderates and tempers the characteristic temper of old age.[14]The diction of Milton is a case absolutely unique in literature: of many writers it has been said, but of him only with truth, that he created a peculiar language. The value must be tried by the result, not by inferences froma prioriprinciples; such inferences might lead us to anticipate an unfortunate result; whereas, in fact, the diction of Milton is such that no other could have supported his majestic style of thinking. The final result is atranscendentanswer to all adverse criticism; but still it is to be lamented that no man properly qualified has undertaken the examination of the Miltonic diction as a separate problem. Listen to a popular author of this day (Mr. Bulwer). He, speaking on this subject, asserts (England and the English, p. 329) that "there is scarcely an English idiom which Milton has not violated, or a foreign one which he has not borrowed." Now, in answer to this extravagant assertion, I will venture to say that the two following are the sole cases of questionable idiom throughout Milton:—1st, "Yet virgin of Proserpina from Jove"; and, in this case, the same thing might be urged in apology which Aristotle urges in another argument, namely, that πρωτον ψευδος (anônymon to pathos), the case is unprovided withanysuitable expression. How would it be possible to convey in good English the circumstances here indicated: viz. that Ceres was yet in those days of maiden innocence, when she had borne no daughter to Jove? 2d, I will cite a case which, so far as I remember, has been noticed by no commentator; and, probably, because they have failed to understand it. The case occurs in the "Paradise Regained"; but where I do not at this moment remember. "Will theytransactwith God?" [The only case of the use of the wordtransactby Milton registered in the Verbal Indexes is inPar. Lost, vi. 286, where Satan says, "Easier to transact with me."—M.] This is the passage; and a most flagrant instance it offers of pure Latinism.Transigere, in the language of the civil law, means to make a compromise; and the wordtransactis here used in that sense—a sense utterly unknown to the English language. This is the worst case in Milton; and I do not know that it has been ever noticed. Yet even here it may be doubted whether Milton is not defensible; asking if they proposed to terminate their difference with God after the fashion in use amongst courts of law, he points properly enough to these worldly settlements by the technical term which designated them. Thus might a divine say: Will he arrest the judgments of God by ademurrer? Thus, again, Hamlet apostrophises the lawyer's skull by the technical terms used in actions for assault, &c. Besides, what proper term is there in English for expressing a compromise? Edmund Burke, and other much older authors, express the idea by the wordtemperament; but that word, though a good one, was at one time considered an exotic term—equally a Gallicism and a Latinism.[15]FromTait's Magazinefor June 1836. Seeante, Preface, pp. 1, 2.—M.[16]Επεα πτεροεντα (Epea pteroenta) literallywinged words. To explain the use and origin of this phrase to non-classical readers, it must be understood that, originally, it was used by Homer to express the few, rapid, and significant words which conveyed some hasty order, counsel, or notice, suited to any sudden occasion or emergency:e.g."To him flying from the field the hero addressed these winged words—'Stop, coward, or I will transfix thee with my spear.'" But by Horne Tooke the phrase was adopted on the title-page of hisDiversions of Purley, as a pleasant symbolic expression for all the non-significant particles, thearticulior joints of language, which in his well-known theory are resolved into abbreviations or compendious forms (and therefore rapid, flying,wingedforms), substituted for significant forms of greater length. Thus,ifis a non-significant particle, but it is an abbreviated form of an imperative in the second person—substituted for gif, or give, or grant the case—put the case that. All other particles are shewn by Horne Tooke to be equally short-hand (orwinged) substitutions.[17]It has been rather too much forgotten that Africa, from the northern margin of Bilidulgerid and the Great Desert, southwards—everywhere, in short, beyond Egypt, Cyrene, and the modern Barbary States—belongs, as much as America, to the New World, the world unknown to the ancients.[18]I might have mastered the philosophy of Kant without waiting for the German language, in which all his capital works are written; for there is a Latin version of the whole by Born, and a most admirable digest of the cardinal work (admirable for its fidelity and the skill by which that fidelity is attained) in the same language by Rhiseldek, a Danish professor. But this fact, such was the slight knowledge of all things connected with Kant in England, I did not learn for some years.[19]De Quincey was so fastidious in the matter of grammatical correctness that he would have been shocked to find that he had let this sentence go forth in print.—M.[20]Those who look back to the newspapers of 1799 and 1800 will see that considerable discussion went on at that time upon the question whether the year 1800 was entitled to open the 19th century or to close the 18th. Mr. Laureate Pye wrote a poem with a long and argumentative preface on the point.[21]FromTait's Magazinefor February 1837, where the title was "A Literary Novitiate."—M.[22]As De Quincey has divulged the name of this clergyman in his Autobiography (see vol. i. pp. 136-138), there is no need for concealing it here. He was the Rev. John Clowes, Rector of St. John's Church, Manchester, and we shall substitute the full name for the blank in the sequel.—M.[23]In a recent [1889] catalogue of a Manchester book-sale I find this entry:—"Clowes (John, of Manchester, the Church of England Swedenborgian). Sermons, Translations, etc., with a Life of him by Theo. Crompton, principally published in Manchester from 1799 to 1850. 17 vols."—M.[24]For a similar passage, seeante, pp. 96, 97.—M.[25]He was first editor of theLondon Magazine, and was killed in an unfortunate duel in February 1821.—M.[26]William Roscoe (1753-1831), author ofLife of Lorenzo de' Medici,Life and Pontificate of Leo X, and other works, was a native of Liverpool, and spent the main part of his life as a banker in that town.—M.[27]The Rev. William Shepherd, author of aLife of Poggio Bracciolini(Liverpool, 1802) andParis in 1802 and 1814(London, 1814), and joint author of a work in two volumes calledSystematic Education, or Elementary Instruction in the various Departments of Literature and Science(London, 1815).—M.[28]Dr. James Currie, born 1756, a native of Dumfriesshire, settled in Liverpool, in medical practice, in 1781. His edition of Burns, with memoir and criticism, published in 1800, was for the benefit of the widow and children of the poet, and realised £1400. Currie died in 1805.—M.[29]Wordsworth's publication was in 1816, under the titleA Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns, occasioned by an intended Republication of the Account of the Life of Burns by Dr. Currie.By William Wordsworth.—M.[30]Jacobinism—although the seminal principle of all political evil in all ages alike of advanced civilization—is natural to the heart of man, and, in a qualified sense, may be meritorious. A good man, a high-minded man, in certain circumstances,mustbe a Jacobin in a certain sense. The aspect under which Burns's Jacobinism appears is striking: there is a thought which an observing reader will find often recurring, which expresses its peculiar bitterness. It is this: the necessity which in old countries exists for the labourer humbly to begpermissionthat he may labour. To eat in the sweat of a man's brow—that is bad; and that is a curse, and pronounced such by God. But, whenthatis all, the labourer is by comparison happy. The second curse makesthata jest: he must sue, he must sneak, he must fawn like an Oriental slave, in order to win his fellow-man, in Burns's indignant words, "to give himleaveto toil." That was the scorpion thought that was for ever shooting its sting into Burns's meditations, whether forward-looking or backward-looking; and, that considered, there arises a world of allowance for that vulgar bluster of independence which Lord Jeffrey, with so much apparent reason charges upon his prose writings.[31]De Quincey's strictures in this paper of 1837 on the Liverpool literary coterie of 1801 gave great offence in that town. The Liverpool papers attacked him for it; and Dr. Shepherd of Gatacre, apparently then the sole survivor of the coterie, addressed a letter of remonstrance to the editor ofTait's Magazine. It appeared in the number of the magazine for May 1837, with some editorial comments. "The question of which I have to treat," wrote Dr. Shepherd, "is a question of accuracy of recollection; and I am constrained to remark that, as, from the appellation by which, with an extraordinary kind of taste, Mr. De Quincey chooses to designate himself in his literary character, he seems to have been at one period of his life the slave of a deleterious drug, which shakes the nerves, and, inflaming the brain, impairs the memory, whilstIhave avoided that poison even in its medical application, thereforemyrecollection is more likely to be correct that his." The letter proceeds to vindicate Dr. Currie, Mr. Roscoe, and the writer himself, from the charge of defective appreciation of the manly demeanour of Burns in his relations with the Scottish aristocracy and lairds; after which come some words of special self-defence of the writer in the matters of his political consistency and his jests at Hannah More. The letter altogether is destitute of effective point; and the editor ofTaitwas quite justified in standing by De Quincey. This is done in every particular of the offending paper, with this included sting: "It may tempt a smile from the few who are likely to trouble themselves about this foolish affair to find that, though solemnly assuming the office of advocate-general for the other members of the extinct coterie, Dr. Shepherd, as well as the newspaper writers, has entirely overlooked the vivacious tailor celebrated by Mr. De Quincey, of whom we think none of his literary friends have the least reason to be ashamed."—— The main matter of interest now in this little controversy of 1837 respects De Quincey's own estimate of Burns. Although he had taken up the cudgels for Burns in that particular in which he thought Dr. Currie and the rest of the Liverpool coterie of 1801, professed democrats though they were, had done Burns injustice,—viz. his spirit of manly independence and superiority to considerations of mere worldly rank,—it remains true that De Quincey's own estimate of Burns all in all fell woefully beneath the proper mark. There are evidences of this in the present paper, and there are other evidences at different points of De Quincey's life. Wordsworth in this respect differed immensely from his friend De Quincey, and might have taught him better. In that letter of Wordsworth's which is referred to by De Quincey (ante, p. 131) precisely because it had deprecated the republication in 1816 of Dr. Currie'sLife of Burnsin 1800, how enthusiastic was the feeling for Burns and his memory compared with anything that De Quincey seems ever to have permitted himself! And, as long before as 1803, had not Wordsworth, in his linesAt the Grave of Burns, given expression to the same feeling in more personal shape? Who can forget that deathless stanza in which, remembering that Burns had died so recently, and that, though they had never met, they had been near neighbours by their places of habitation, the new poet of England had confessed his own indebtedness to the example of the Scottish ploughman bard?—"I mourned with thousands, but as oneMore deeply grieved; for He was goneWhose light I hailed, when first it shoneAnd showed my youthHow verse may build a princely throneOn humble truth."In connexion with the fact of De Quincey's defective appreciation of Burns even so late as 1837, it is additionally significant that, though he refers in the present paper, with modified approbation, to Jeffrey's somewhat captious article on Burns in theEdinburgh Reviewfor January 1809, he does not mention the compensation which had appeared, with Jeffrey's own editorial sanction, in the shape of Carlyle's essay on Burns in the sameReviewfor December 1828.—M.[32]This chapter is composed of four articles contributed toTait's Magazineunder the title of "Samuel Taylor Coleridge: By the English Opium-Eater." They appeared, respectively, in the numbers of the Magazine for September, October, and November 1834, and January 1835. Three of these articles were revised by De Quincey, and thrown into one paper for Vol. II of the Collective Edition of his writings, published in 1854. The fourth article was not included in that paper; but it is added to the reprint of the paper in the American Collective Edition of De Quincey, and is necessary to complete his sketch of Coleridge. It is therefore reproduced here. The reader will understand, accordingly, that as far as to p. 208 we follow De Quincey's revised text of three of his Coleridge articles; after which we have to print the fourth article as it originally stood inTait.—M.[33]Published in 1798.—M.[34]Seeante, p. 61.—M.[35]Published in 1800.—M.[36]The first edition of Southey's epic was published in 1796, the second in 1798, both at Bristol.—M.[37]Published, with other political pieces, in 1798, after having appeared in theMorning Postnewspaper.—M.[38]English Anthologyfor 1799-1800, in 2 vols., published at Bristol, and edited by Southey.—M.[39]The first edition, entitledPoems on Various Subjects, by S. T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College, Cambridge, was published at Bristol in 1796; the second at London in 1797; the third at London in 1803.—M.[40]For a full account of this interesting Mr. Poole seeThomas Poole and his Friends, by Mrs. Henry Sandford, 2 vols., 1888. He was born 1765, and died 1837.—M.[41]More properly speltAlfoxden.—M.[42]In the abrupt phrasing of Mr. Poole's question De Quincey must surely have recollected the similar question put by the clown inTwelfth Nightto the supposed madman Malvolio to test his sanity—"Clown. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?"—M.[43]With respect to all these cases of apparent plagiarism, see an explanatory Note at the end of this chapter.[44]I forget the exact title, not having seen the book since 1823, and then only for one day; but I believe it was Schelling's "Kleine Philosophische Werke."[45]"Whatever Time, or the heedless hand of blind Chance, hath drawn down from of old to this present in her huge drag-net, whether fish, or seaweed, shells or shrubs, unpicked, unchosen, these are the Fathers." Milton's TractOf Prelatical Episcopacy, published in 1641.—M.[46]This might pass as a description of De Quincey himself in his later years, if not all through his life.—M.[47]At the date of this first meeting of De Quincey with Coleridge, De Quincey was twenty-two years of age and Coleridge nearly thirty-seven.—M.[48]Seirisought to have been the title—i.e.Σειρις (Seiris), a chain. From this defect in the orthography, I did not in my boyish days perceive, nor could obtain any light upon, its meaning.[49]Another sentence of faulty grammar: a rare thing with De Quincey.—M.[50]Arthur Young's numerous works, published between 1768 and 1812, are mainly on agricultural subjects, in the form of tours and statistics, but include political doctrines and theories.—M.[51]The service consisted in a gift by De Quincey of £300 conveyed to Coleridge through the Bristol bookseller Cottle. Coleridge's receipt to Cottle for the money is dated 12th November 1807. Coleridge knew nothing more at the time than that the gift came from "a young man of fortune who admired his talents." De Quincey, who had but recently attained his majority, had then plenty of money. He wanted, indeed, to make the gift £500; but Cottle insisted on reducing the sum.—M.[52]Coleridge was born there 21st October 1772, the youngest of a family of nine brothers and four sisters, three of the sisters by a previous marriage of his father.—M.[53]A Critical Latin Grammar, published for the author in 1772, andSententiæ Excerptæ, explaining the Rules of Grammar, printed for the author in 1777. He also published a political sermon. Besides being vicar of Ottery St. Mary, he was master of the grammar school there.—M.[54]This was in July 1782.—M.[55]In February 1791.—M.[56]The Rev. William Frend (1757-1831), a very eminent scholar, had been ejected from his tutorship in Jesus College in 1788, because of his Unitarian opinions and general liberalism, but was still about the University in Coleridge's time, battling stoutly with the authorities.[57]He enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons, 3d December 1793, under the name of Silas Titus Comberback. So says a very minute memoir of him prefixed to Messrs. Macmillan's edition of his Poetical and Dramatic Works in four volumes, 1880.—M.[58]Somewhat otherwise in the memoir mentioned in last note, where the date of his discharge is given as 10th April 1794, and the place as Hounslow. He returned to Cambridge for a few months, and then, after shifting about a little, settled in Bristol with Southey, where he married, 4th October 1795, Sara Fricker, the sister of Southey's wife. De Quincey seems to misdate his first visit to Germany.—M.[59]Which, however, his brother denied as a pure fable. On reading this account, he wrote to me, and in very courteous terms assured me that I had been misinformed. I now retain the story simply as a version, partially erroneous, no doubt, of perhaps some true anecdote that may have escaped the surviving Mr. Wedgwood's knowledge; my reason for thinking thus being that the same anecdote essentially but varied in the circumstances, has reached me at different periods from parties having no connexion whatsoever.[60]He was absent on this tour in Germany from September 1798 to November 1799.—M.[61]Published in Richardson's Correspondence.[62]It was in 1800 that Coleridge removed from London to Keswick, Wordsworth being then at Grasmere.—M.[63]This peculiar usage of an unrelated participle is pretty frequent with De Quincey, and is perhaps the only recurring peculiarity of his grammar to which a purist would object.—M.[64]i.e.—A 'Statesman elliptically for an Estatesman,—a native dalesman possessing and personally cultivating a patrimonial landed estate.[65]"Waiter":—Since this was first written, social changes in London, by introducing females very extensively into the office (once monopolized by men) of attending the visitors at the tables of eating-houses have introduced a corresponding new word—viz.,waitress; which word, twenty-five years back, would have been simply ludicrous; but now is become as indispensable to precision of language as the words traitress, heiress, inheritrix, &c.[66]My doubt is founded upon the varying tenure of these secluded chapels as to privileges of marrying or burying. The mere name of chapel, though, of course, in regular connexion with some mother church, does not of itself imply whether it has or has not the power to solemnize a marriage.[67]At Carlisle, 3d September 1803. His marriage with Mary Robinson, the Beauty of Buttermere, had been on 3d October 1802, when he was forty-three years of age. Originally he had been a commercial traveller; and his early marriage with an illegitimate daughter of a younger son of an English nobleman seems to have had much to do with his subsequent career. Deserting this wife and her children in 1782, he had lived a life of swindling ever since, had married a second wife and deserted her, and was wooing a young Irish lady at the very time when the Buttermere girl became his victim. "His manners were extremely polished and insinuating, and he was possessed of qualities which might have rendered him an ornament of society," is the pleasant character I find of him in oneNewgate Calendarcompendium.—M.[68]In connexion with this mention of "suburban" and minor theatres, it is but fair to cite a passage expressly relating to Mary of Buttermere from the Seventh Book (entitled "Residence in London") of Wordsworth's "Prelude":—"Here, too, wereforms and pressures of the time,Rough, bold, as Grecian comedy display'dWhen Art was young; dramas of living men,And recent things yet warm with life; a sea-fight,Shipwreck, or some domestic incidentDivulged by Truth, and magnified by Fame;Such as the daring brotherhood of lateSet forth, too serious theme for that light place—I mean, O distant friend! a story drawnFrom our own ground—the Maid of Buttermere,And how, unfaithful to a virtuous wife,Deserted and deceived, the spoiler cameAnd wooed the artless daughter of the hills,And wedded her, in cruel mockeryOf love and marriage bonds. These words to theeMust needs bring back the moment when we first,Ere the broad world rang with the maiden's name,Beheld her serving at the cottage inn,Both stricken, as she enter'd or withdrew,With admiration of her modest mienAnd carriage, mark'd by unexampled grace.We since that time not unfamiliarlyHave seen her—her discretion have observed,Her just opinions, delicate reserve,Her patience and humility of mind,Unspoiled by commendation and the excessOf public notice—an offensive lightTo a meek spirit suffering inwardly."The "distant friend" here apostrophized is Coleridge, then at Malta. But it is fair to record this memorial of the fair mountaineer—going perhaps as much beyond the public estimate of her pretensions as my own was below it. It should be added that William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (to whom the writer appeals as in general sympathy with himself) had seen Mary more frequently, and had conversed with her much more freely, than myself.[69]In April 1804.—M.[70]"Ball and Bell"—"Bell and Ball":—viz. Sir Alexander Ball, Governor of Malta, and Dr. Andrew Bell, the importer into England from Madras of that machinery for facilitating popular education which was afterwards fraudulently appropriated by Joseph Lancaster. The Bishop of Durham (Shute Barrington) gave to Dr. Bell, in reward of his Madras services, the princely Mastership of Sherborne Hospital. The doctor saved in this post £125,000, and with this money founded Trinity College, Glenalmond, in Perthshire. Most men have their enemies and calumniators: Dr. Bell hadhis, who happened rather indecorously to be his wife—from whom he was legally separated, or (as in Scotch law it is called)divorced; not, of course, divorcedà vinculo matrimonii(which only amounts to a divorce in the English sense—such a divorce as enables the parties to contract another marriage), but simply divorcedà mensâ et thoro. This legal separation, however, did not prevent the lady from persecuting the unhappy doctor with everlasting letters, indorsed outside with records of her enmity and spite. Sometimes she addressed her epistles thus:—"To that supreme of rogues, who looks the hang-dog that he is, Doctor (such a doctor!) Andrew Bell." Or again:—"To the ape of apes, and the knave of knaves, who is recorded to have once paid a debt—but a small one, you may be sure, it was that he selected for this wonderful experiment—in fact, it was 41/2d. Had it been on the other side of 6d., he must have died before he could have achieved so dreadful a sacrifice." Many others, most ingeniously varied in the style of abuse, I have heard rehearsed by Coleridge, Southey, Lloyd, &c.; and one, in particular, addressed to the doctor, when spending a summer at the cottage of Robert Newton, an old soldier, in Grasmere, presented on the back two separate adjurations: one specially addressed to Robert himself, pathetically urging him to look sharply after the rent of his lodgings; and the other more generally addressed to the unfortunate person, as yet undisclosed to the British public (and in this case turning out to be myself) who might be incautious enough to pay the postage at Ambleside. "Don't grant him an hour's credit," she urged upon the person unknown, "if I had any regard to my family." "Cash down!" she wrote twice over. Why the doctor submitted to these annoyances, nobody knew. Some said it was mere indolence; but others held it to be a cunning compromise with her inexorable malice. The letters were certainly open to the "public " eye; but meantime the "public" was a very narrow one; the clerks in the post-office had little time for digesting such amenities of conjugal affection; and the chance bearer of the letters to the doctor would naturally solve the mystery by supposing anextraportion of madness in the writer, rather than anextraportion of knavery in the reverend receiver.[71]He left Malta 27th September 1805.—M.[72]Coleridge had long been a contributor to theMorning Post.—M.[73]Paris Revisited in 1815 by way of Brusselsis the title of this publication in 1816 of the Aberdonian John Scott. He had previously publishedA Visit to Paris in 1814. He wrote other things, and was editor of theLondon Magazinefrom January 1820 till his death, February 1821, the result of a duel.—M.[74]The very accurate memoir prefixed to Messrs. Macmillan's four-volume edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works states that Stuart, who had been proprietor of theMorning Post, and had become proprietor of theCourier, gave Coleridge apartments in theCourieroffice to save expense in his contributorship to that newspaper.—M.[75]The first number of this celebrated but unfortunate periodical, "printed on stamped paper by a printer of the name of Brown at Penrith," was issued, the already cited memoir of Coleridge informs us, on Thursday, 1st June 1809, and the last on 15th March 1810.—M.[76]Alexander Blair, LL.D., Professor of English Literature in University College, London, from 1830 to 1836.—M.[77]Bishop Richard Watson (1737-1816) is perhaps best remembered now for hisApology for the Bible; of which George III said, when he heard of it, "What, what! Apology for the Bible! Didn't know that it needed an apology." There were, however, twoApologies, published together in 1806,—one for Christianity against Gibbon, the other for the Bible against Thomas Paine.—M.[78]Chemical Essays, in 5 vols., published 1781-7.—M.[79]It wasLadyHolland. I know not how I came to make such a mistake. And the friend was Wordsworth.[80]This supposed falsehood respected the sect called Brownists, and occurs in the "Defensio pro Pop. Anglicano." The whole charge is a blunder, and rests upon the bishop's own imperfect Latinity.[81]Basil Montagu (1770-1851) and his wife were celebrities in London society for many years. Among his publications, besides legal treatises, were an edition of Bacon's Works and a volume of selections from the older English Prose-writers.[82]Inquiry into the Effects of Fermented Liquors. By a Waterdrinker.London. 1814.—M.[83]"Birmingham Doctor":—This was asobriquetimposed on Dr. Parr by "The Pursuits of Literature," that most popular of satires at the end of the eighteenth and opening of the nineteenth centuries. The name had a mixed reference to the Doctor's personal connexion with Warwickshire, but chiefly to the Doctor's spurious and windy imitation of Dr. Johnson. He was viewed as the Birmingham (or mock) Dr. Johnson. Why the wordBirminghamhas come for the last sixty or seventy years to indicate in every class of articles the spurious in opposition to the genuine, I suppose to have arisen from the Birmingham habit of reproducing all sorts of London or Paris trinkets,bijouterie, &c., in cheaper materials and with inferior workmanship.[84]It is at this point that De Quincey's revised reprint in 1854 of his Recollections of Coleridge stops. What follows is from the unrevised sequel inTait's Magazinefor January 1835. See note,ante, p. 138.—M.[85]The Mr. M—— of this sentence was Mr. John Morgan. He had known Coleridge and Southey in Bristol, and now lived in London.—M.[86]Coleridge died at Highgate, 25th July 1834, in the sixty-second year of his age, and the eighteenth of his residence with Mr. Gillman.—M.[87]"Esemplastic":—A writer in "Blackwood," who carried a wrath into the discussion for which I and others found it hard to account, made it a sort of charge against myself, that I had overlooked this remarkable case. If Ihad, there would have been no particular reason for anger or surprise, seeing that the particular German work in which these plagiarisms were traced had been lent to me under most rigorous limitations as to the time for returning it; the owner of the volume was going out of London, and a very few hours (according to my present remembrance only two) were all that he could allow me for hunting through the most impracticable of metaphysical thickets (what Coleridge elsewhere calls "the holy jungle of metaphysics"). Meantime I hadnotoverlooked the case ofesemplastic; I had it in my memory, but hurry of the press and want of room obliged me to omit a good deal. Indeed, if such omissions constituted any reproach, then the critic in "Blackwood" was liable to his own censure. For I remember to this hour several Latin quotations made by Schelling, and repeated by Coleridge as his own, which neither I nor my too rigorous reviewer had drawn out for public exposure. As regarded myself, it was quite sufficient that I had indicated the grounds, and opened the paths, on which the game must be sought; that I left the rest of the chase to others, was no subject for blame, but part of my purpose; and, under the circumstances, very much a matter of necessity.—In taking leave of this affair, I ought to point out a ground of complaint against my reviewer under his present form of expression, which I am sure could not have been designed. It happened that I had forgotten the particular title of Schelling's work; naturally enough, in a situation where no foreign books could be had, I quoted it under a false one. And this inevitable error of mine on a matter so entirely irrelevant is so described that the neutral reader might suppose me to have committed against Coleridge the crime of Lauder against Milton—that is, taxing him with plagiarism by referring, not to real works of Schelling, but to pretended works, of which the very titles were forgeries of my own. This, I am sure, my unknown critic never could have meant. The plagiarisms were really there; more and worse in circumstances than any denounced by myself; and, of all men, the "Blackwood" critic was the most bound to proclaim this; or else what became of his own clamorous outcry? Being, therefore, such as I had represented, of what consequence was the special title of the German volume to which these plagiarisms were referred?—[The reference in this footnote, written by De Quincey in 1854, is to an article on "The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge," which had appeared inBlackwoodfor March 1840, the writer of which had animadverted on De Quincey's previous disclosures on the subject in hisTaitpapers of 1834-5.—M.][88]Composed of articles inTait's Magazinefor January, February, and April 1839, as revised and recast by De Quincey, published, with some additions, for the second volume of the Collective Edinburgh Edition of his writings in 1854.—M.[89]Ante, p. 59.—M.[90]At the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where the town is viewed as a mere ministerial appendage to the numerous colleges—the civic Oxford, for instance, existing for the sake of the academic Oxford, and notvice versâ—it has naturally happened that the students honour with the name of "a man" him only who wears a cap and gown.[91]See the divine passage (in the Sixth Book of "The Excursion") beginning—
[1]FromTait's Magazinefor February 1835.—M.[2]I.e.Lord Westport. Sec vol. i. pp. 161-2et seq.—M.[3]This paragraph is omitted in the American reprint of theTaitpaper, probably because it repeats information given already. See the chapter entitled "The Priory, Chester," in Vol. I, and especially the concluding pages of that chapter. As, however, the paragraph contains some new particulars, and explains what follows, I have retained it, the rather because it ought to be the rule not to tamper with De Quincey's text on any such occasion.—M.[4]FromTait's Magazinefor June 1835.[5]Among the students in Christ Church at this time was Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, afterwards so well known as a fellow-resident with De Quincey in Edinburgh. He was De Quincey's senior by four years, and had entered Christ Church in 1798. Among his acquaintances and fellow-students were Lord Gower, afterwards Duke of Sutherland, Lord Newtown, Elijah Impey (son of the famous Indian judge of that name), and others of high name and rank. In theMemoirs and Correspondence of Kirkpatrick Sharpe(published 1888) there are descriptions of the society of the college, with sketches of Dean Cyril Jackson, &c., from Sharpe's cynical pen.—M.[6]It was Worcester College; and we shall use the full name, instead of the blank W., in the sequel.—M.[7]Oxford may confessedly claim a duration of that extent; and the pretensions of Cambridge, in that respect, if less aspiring, are, however, as I believe, less accurately determined.[8]It may be necessary to inform some readers that the wordnoble, by which so large a system of imposition and fraud, as to the composition of foreign society, has long been practised upon the credulity of the British, corresponds to our wordgentlemanly(or, rather, to the vulgar wordgenteel, if that word were ever used legally, orextra gradum), not merely upon the argument of itsvirtualand operative value in the general estimate of men (that is, upon the argument that a count, baron, &c., does not,quasuch, command any deeper feeling of respect or homage than a British esquire), but also upon the fact, that, originally, in all English registers, as, for instance, in the Oxford matriculation registers, all the upper gentry (knights, esquires, &c.) are technically designated by the wordnobiles.—See Chamberlayne, &c.[9]The subject is amusingly illustrated by an anecdote of Goethe, recorded by himself in his autobiography. Some physiognomist, or phrenologist, had found out, in Goethe's structure of head, the sure promise of a great orator. "Strange infatuation of nature!" observes Goethe, on this assurance, "to endow me so richly and liberally for that particular destination which only the institutions of my country render impossible. Music for the deaf! Eloquence without an audience!"[10]Whilst I am writing, a debate of the present Parliament, reported on Saturday, March 7, 1835, presents us with a determinate repetition of the error which I have been exposing; and, again, as in the last Parliament, this error is notinert, but is used for a hostile (apparently a malicious) purpose; nay, which is remarkable, it is thesolebasis upon which the following argument reposes. Lord Radnor again assumes that the students of Oxford are "boys"; he is again supported in this misrepresentation by Lord Brougham; and again the misrepresentation is applied to a purpose of assault upon the English Universities, but especially upon Oxford. And the nature of the assault does not allow any latitude in construing the wordboys, nor any room for evasion as respects the total charge, except what goes the length of a total retraction. The charge is, that, in a requisition made at the very threshold of academic life, upon the understanding and the honour of the students, the University burdens their consciences to an extent which, in after life, when reflection has enlightened them to the meaning of their engagements, proves either a snare to those who trifle with their engagements, or an insupportable burden to those who do not. For the inculpation of the party imposing such oaths, it is essential that the party taking them should be in a childish condition of the moral sense, and the sense of responsibility; whereas, amongst the Oxonianunder-graduates, I will venture to say that the number is larger of those who rise above than of those who fall below twenty; and, as to sixteen (assumed as the representative age by Lord Radnor), in my time, I heard of only one student, amongst, perhaps, sixteen hundred, who was so young. I grieve to see that the learned prelate who replied to the assailants was so much taken by surprise; the defence might have been made triumphant. With regard to oaths incompatible with the spirit of modern manners, and yet formally unrepealed—thatis a case of neglect and indolent oversight. But thegravamenof that reproach does not press exclusively upon Oxford; all the ancient institutions of Europe are tainted in the same way, more especially the monastic orders of the Romish church.[11]These changes have been accomplished, according to my imperfect knowledge of the case, in two ways: first, by dispensing with the services whenever that could be done; and, secondly, by a wise discontinuance of the order itself in those colleges which were left to their own choice in this matter.[12]FromTait's Magazinefor August 1835.[13]I cannot for a moment believe that the original and most eloquent critic inBlackwoodis himself the dupe of an argument which he has alleged against this passage, under too open a hatred of Shakspeare, as though it involved a contradiction to common sense, by representingallhuman beings of such an age as school-boys, all of such another age as soldiers, of such another as magistrates, &c. Evidently the logic of the famous passage is this,—that, whereas every age has its peculiar and appropriate temper, that profession or employment is selected for the exemplification which seems best fitted, in each case, to embody the characteristic or predominating quality. Thus, because impetuosity, self-esteem, and animal or irreflective courage, are qualities most intense in youth, next it is considered in what profession those qualities find their most unlimited range; and, because that is obviously the military profession, therefore it is that the soldier is selected as the representative of young men. For the same reason, as best embodying the peculiar temper of garrulous old age, the magistrate comes forward as supporting the part of that age. Not that old men are not also soldiers; but that the military profession, so far from strengthening, moderates and tempers the characteristic temper of old age.[14]The diction of Milton is a case absolutely unique in literature: of many writers it has been said, but of him only with truth, that he created a peculiar language. The value must be tried by the result, not by inferences froma prioriprinciples; such inferences might lead us to anticipate an unfortunate result; whereas, in fact, the diction of Milton is such that no other could have supported his majestic style of thinking. The final result is atranscendentanswer to all adverse criticism; but still it is to be lamented that no man properly qualified has undertaken the examination of the Miltonic diction as a separate problem. Listen to a popular author of this day (Mr. Bulwer). He, speaking on this subject, asserts (England and the English, p. 329) that "there is scarcely an English idiom which Milton has not violated, or a foreign one which he has not borrowed." Now, in answer to this extravagant assertion, I will venture to say that the two following are the sole cases of questionable idiom throughout Milton:—1st, "Yet virgin of Proserpina from Jove"; and, in this case, the same thing might be urged in apology which Aristotle urges in another argument, namely, that πρωτον ψευδος (anônymon to pathos), the case is unprovided withanysuitable expression. How would it be possible to convey in good English the circumstances here indicated: viz. that Ceres was yet in those days of maiden innocence, when she had borne no daughter to Jove? 2d, I will cite a case which, so far as I remember, has been noticed by no commentator; and, probably, because they have failed to understand it. The case occurs in the "Paradise Regained"; but where I do not at this moment remember. "Will theytransactwith God?" [The only case of the use of the wordtransactby Milton registered in the Verbal Indexes is inPar. Lost, vi. 286, where Satan says, "Easier to transact with me."—M.] This is the passage; and a most flagrant instance it offers of pure Latinism.Transigere, in the language of the civil law, means to make a compromise; and the wordtransactis here used in that sense—a sense utterly unknown to the English language. This is the worst case in Milton; and I do not know that it has been ever noticed. Yet even here it may be doubted whether Milton is not defensible; asking if they proposed to terminate their difference with God after the fashion in use amongst courts of law, he points properly enough to these worldly settlements by the technical term which designated them. Thus might a divine say: Will he arrest the judgments of God by ademurrer? Thus, again, Hamlet apostrophises the lawyer's skull by the technical terms used in actions for assault, &c. Besides, what proper term is there in English for expressing a compromise? Edmund Burke, and other much older authors, express the idea by the wordtemperament; but that word, though a good one, was at one time considered an exotic term—equally a Gallicism and a Latinism.[15]FromTait's Magazinefor June 1836. Seeante, Preface, pp. 1, 2.—M.[16]Επεα πτεροεντα (Epea pteroenta) literallywinged words. To explain the use and origin of this phrase to non-classical readers, it must be understood that, originally, it was used by Homer to express the few, rapid, and significant words which conveyed some hasty order, counsel, or notice, suited to any sudden occasion or emergency:e.g."To him flying from the field the hero addressed these winged words—'Stop, coward, or I will transfix thee with my spear.'" But by Horne Tooke the phrase was adopted on the title-page of hisDiversions of Purley, as a pleasant symbolic expression for all the non-significant particles, thearticulior joints of language, which in his well-known theory are resolved into abbreviations or compendious forms (and therefore rapid, flying,wingedforms), substituted for significant forms of greater length. Thus,ifis a non-significant particle, but it is an abbreviated form of an imperative in the second person—substituted for gif, or give, or grant the case—put the case that. All other particles are shewn by Horne Tooke to be equally short-hand (orwinged) substitutions.[17]It has been rather too much forgotten that Africa, from the northern margin of Bilidulgerid and the Great Desert, southwards—everywhere, in short, beyond Egypt, Cyrene, and the modern Barbary States—belongs, as much as America, to the New World, the world unknown to the ancients.[18]I might have mastered the philosophy of Kant without waiting for the German language, in which all his capital works are written; for there is a Latin version of the whole by Born, and a most admirable digest of the cardinal work (admirable for its fidelity and the skill by which that fidelity is attained) in the same language by Rhiseldek, a Danish professor. But this fact, such was the slight knowledge of all things connected with Kant in England, I did not learn for some years.[19]De Quincey was so fastidious in the matter of grammatical correctness that he would have been shocked to find that he had let this sentence go forth in print.—M.[20]Those who look back to the newspapers of 1799 and 1800 will see that considerable discussion went on at that time upon the question whether the year 1800 was entitled to open the 19th century or to close the 18th. Mr. Laureate Pye wrote a poem with a long and argumentative preface on the point.[21]FromTait's Magazinefor February 1837, where the title was "A Literary Novitiate."—M.[22]As De Quincey has divulged the name of this clergyman in his Autobiography (see vol. i. pp. 136-138), there is no need for concealing it here. He was the Rev. John Clowes, Rector of St. John's Church, Manchester, and we shall substitute the full name for the blank in the sequel.—M.[23]In a recent [1889] catalogue of a Manchester book-sale I find this entry:—"Clowes (John, of Manchester, the Church of England Swedenborgian). Sermons, Translations, etc., with a Life of him by Theo. Crompton, principally published in Manchester from 1799 to 1850. 17 vols."—M.[24]For a similar passage, seeante, pp. 96, 97.—M.[25]He was first editor of theLondon Magazine, and was killed in an unfortunate duel in February 1821.—M.[26]William Roscoe (1753-1831), author ofLife of Lorenzo de' Medici,Life and Pontificate of Leo X, and other works, was a native of Liverpool, and spent the main part of his life as a banker in that town.—M.[27]The Rev. William Shepherd, author of aLife of Poggio Bracciolini(Liverpool, 1802) andParis in 1802 and 1814(London, 1814), and joint author of a work in two volumes calledSystematic Education, or Elementary Instruction in the various Departments of Literature and Science(London, 1815).—M.[28]Dr. James Currie, born 1756, a native of Dumfriesshire, settled in Liverpool, in medical practice, in 1781. His edition of Burns, with memoir and criticism, published in 1800, was for the benefit of the widow and children of the poet, and realised £1400. Currie died in 1805.—M.[29]Wordsworth's publication was in 1816, under the titleA Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns, occasioned by an intended Republication of the Account of the Life of Burns by Dr. Currie.By William Wordsworth.—M.[30]Jacobinism—although the seminal principle of all political evil in all ages alike of advanced civilization—is natural to the heart of man, and, in a qualified sense, may be meritorious. A good man, a high-minded man, in certain circumstances,mustbe a Jacobin in a certain sense. The aspect under which Burns's Jacobinism appears is striking: there is a thought which an observing reader will find often recurring, which expresses its peculiar bitterness. It is this: the necessity which in old countries exists for the labourer humbly to begpermissionthat he may labour. To eat in the sweat of a man's brow—that is bad; and that is a curse, and pronounced such by God. But, whenthatis all, the labourer is by comparison happy. The second curse makesthata jest: he must sue, he must sneak, he must fawn like an Oriental slave, in order to win his fellow-man, in Burns's indignant words, "to give himleaveto toil." That was the scorpion thought that was for ever shooting its sting into Burns's meditations, whether forward-looking or backward-looking; and, that considered, there arises a world of allowance for that vulgar bluster of independence which Lord Jeffrey, with so much apparent reason charges upon his prose writings.[31]De Quincey's strictures in this paper of 1837 on the Liverpool literary coterie of 1801 gave great offence in that town. The Liverpool papers attacked him for it; and Dr. Shepherd of Gatacre, apparently then the sole survivor of the coterie, addressed a letter of remonstrance to the editor ofTait's Magazine. It appeared in the number of the magazine for May 1837, with some editorial comments. "The question of which I have to treat," wrote Dr. Shepherd, "is a question of accuracy of recollection; and I am constrained to remark that, as, from the appellation by which, with an extraordinary kind of taste, Mr. De Quincey chooses to designate himself in his literary character, he seems to have been at one period of his life the slave of a deleterious drug, which shakes the nerves, and, inflaming the brain, impairs the memory, whilstIhave avoided that poison even in its medical application, thereforemyrecollection is more likely to be correct that his." The letter proceeds to vindicate Dr. Currie, Mr. Roscoe, and the writer himself, from the charge of defective appreciation of the manly demeanour of Burns in his relations with the Scottish aristocracy and lairds; after which come some words of special self-defence of the writer in the matters of his political consistency and his jests at Hannah More. The letter altogether is destitute of effective point; and the editor ofTaitwas quite justified in standing by De Quincey. This is done in every particular of the offending paper, with this included sting: "It may tempt a smile from the few who are likely to trouble themselves about this foolish affair to find that, though solemnly assuming the office of advocate-general for the other members of the extinct coterie, Dr. Shepherd, as well as the newspaper writers, has entirely overlooked the vivacious tailor celebrated by Mr. De Quincey, of whom we think none of his literary friends have the least reason to be ashamed."—— The main matter of interest now in this little controversy of 1837 respects De Quincey's own estimate of Burns. Although he had taken up the cudgels for Burns in that particular in which he thought Dr. Currie and the rest of the Liverpool coterie of 1801, professed democrats though they were, had done Burns injustice,—viz. his spirit of manly independence and superiority to considerations of mere worldly rank,—it remains true that De Quincey's own estimate of Burns all in all fell woefully beneath the proper mark. There are evidences of this in the present paper, and there are other evidences at different points of De Quincey's life. Wordsworth in this respect differed immensely from his friend De Quincey, and might have taught him better. In that letter of Wordsworth's which is referred to by De Quincey (ante, p. 131) precisely because it had deprecated the republication in 1816 of Dr. Currie'sLife of Burnsin 1800, how enthusiastic was the feeling for Burns and his memory compared with anything that De Quincey seems ever to have permitted himself! And, as long before as 1803, had not Wordsworth, in his linesAt the Grave of Burns, given expression to the same feeling in more personal shape? Who can forget that deathless stanza in which, remembering that Burns had died so recently, and that, though they had never met, they had been near neighbours by their places of habitation, the new poet of England had confessed his own indebtedness to the example of the Scottish ploughman bard?—"I mourned with thousands, but as oneMore deeply grieved; for He was goneWhose light I hailed, when first it shoneAnd showed my youthHow verse may build a princely throneOn humble truth."In connexion with the fact of De Quincey's defective appreciation of Burns even so late as 1837, it is additionally significant that, though he refers in the present paper, with modified approbation, to Jeffrey's somewhat captious article on Burns in theEdinburgh Reviewfor January 1809, he does not mention the compensation which had appeared, with Jeffrey's own editorial sanction, in the shape of Carlyle's essay on Burns in the sameReviewfor December 1828.—M.[32]This chapter is composed of four articles contributed toTait's Magazineunder the title of "Samuel Taylor Coleridge: By the English Opium-Eater." They appeared, respectively, in the numbers of the Magazine for September, October, and November 1834, and January 1835. Three of these articles were revised by De Quincey, and thrown into one paper for Vol. II of the Collective Edition of his writings, published in 1854. The fourth article was not included in that paper; but it is added to the reprint of the paper in the American Collective Edition of De Quincey, and is necessary to complete his sketch of Coleridge. It is therefore reproduced here. The reader will understand, accordingly, that as far as to p. 208 we follow De Quincey's revised text of three of his Coleridge articles; after which we have to print the fourth article as it originally stood inTait.—M.[33]Published in 1798.—M.[34]Seeante, p. 61.—M.[35]Published in 1800.—M.[36]The first edition of Southey's epic was published in 1796, the second in 1798, both at Bristol.—M.[37]Published, with other political pieces, in 1798, after having appeared in theMorning Postnewspaper.—M.[38]English Anthologyfor 1799-1800, in 2 vols., published at Bristol, and edited by Southey.—M.[39]The first edition, entitledPoems on Various Subjects, by S. T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College, Cambridge, was published at Bristol in 1796; the second at London in 1797; the third at London in 1803.—M.[40]For a full account of this interesting Mr. Poole seeThomas Poole and his Friends, by Mrs. Henry Sandford, 2 vols., 1888. He was born 1765, and died 1837.—M.[41]More properly speltAlfoxden.—M.[42]In the abrupt phrasing of Mr. Poole's question De Quincey must surely have recollected the similar question put by the clown inTwelfth Nightto the supposed madman Malvolio to test his sanity—"Clown. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?"—M.[43]With respect to all these cases of apparent plagiarism, see an explanatory Note at the end of this chapter.[44]I forget the exact title, not having seen the book since 1823, and then only for one day; but I believe it was Schelling's "Kleine Philosophische Werke."[45]"Whatever Time, or the heedless hand of blind Chance, hath drawn down from of old to this present in her huge drag-net, whether fish, or seaweed, shells or shrubs, unpicked, unchosen, these are the Fathers." Milton's TractOf Prelatical Episcopacy, published in 1641.—M.[46]This might pass as a description of De Quincey himself in his later years, if not all through his life.—M.[47]At the date of this first meeting of De Quincey with Coleridge, De Quincey was twenty-two years of age and Coleridge nearly thirty-seven.—M.[48]Seirisought to have been the title—i.e.Σειρις (Seiris), a chain. From this defect in the orthography, I did not in my boyish days perceive, nor could obtain any light upon, its meaning.[49]Another sentence of faulty grammar: a rare thing with De Quincey.—M.[50]Arthur Young's numerous works, published between 1768 and 1812, are mainly on agricultural subjects, in the form of tours and statistics, but include political doctrines and theories.—M.[51]The service consisted in a gift by De Quincey of £300 conveyed to Coleridge through the Bristol bookseller Cottle. Coleridge's receipt to Cottle for the money is dated 12th November 1807. Coleridge knew nothing more at the time than that the gift came from "a young man of fortune who admired his talents." De Quincey, who had but recently attained his majority, had then plenty of money. He wanted, indeed, to make the gift £500; but Cottle insisted on reducing the sum.—M.[52]Coleridge was born there 21st October 1772, the youngest of a family of nine brothers and four sisters, three of the sisters by a previous marriage of his father.—M.[53]A Critical Latin Grammar, published for the author in 1772, andSententiæ Excerptæ, explaining the Rules of Grammar, printed for the author in 1777. He also published a political sermon. Besides being vicar of Ottery St. Mary, he was master of the grammar school there.—M.[54]This was in July 1782.—M.[55]In February 1791.—M.[56]The Rev. William Frend (1757-1831), a very eminent scholar, had been ejected from his tutorship in Jesus College in 1788, because of his Unitarian opinions and general liberalism, but was still about the University in Coleridge's time, battling stoutly with the authorities.[57]He enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons, 3d December 1793, under the name of Silas Titus Comberback. So says a very minute memoir of him prefixed to Messrs. Macmillan's edition of his Poetical and Dramatic Works in four volumes, 1880.—M.[58]Somewhat otherwise in the memoir mentioned in last note, where the date of his discharge is given as 10th April 1794, and the place as Hounslow. He returned to Cambridge for a few months, and then, after shifting about a little, settled in Bristol with Southey, where he married, 4th October 1795, Sara Fricker, the sister of Southey's wife. De Quincey seems to misdate his first visit to Germany.—M.[59]Which, however, his brother denied as a pure fable. On reading this account, he wrote to me, and in very courteous terms assured me that I had been misinformed. I now retain the story simply as a version, partially erroneous, no doubt, of perhaps some true anecdote that may have escaped the surviving Mr. Wedgwood's knowledge; my reason for thinking thus being that the same anecdote essentially but varied in the circumstances, has reached me at different periods from parties having no connexion whatsoever.[60]He was absent on this tour in Germany from September 1798 to November 1799.—M.[61]Published in Richardson's Correspondence.[62]It was in 1800 that Coleridge removed from London to Keswick, Wordsworth being then at Grasmere.—M.[63]This peculiar usage of an unrelated participle is pretty frequent with De Quincey, and is perhaps the only recurring peculiarity of his grammar to which a purist would object.—M.[64]i.e.—A 'Statesman elliptically for an Estatesman,—a native dalesman possessing and personally cultivating a patrimonial landed estate.[65]"Waiter":—Since this was first written, social changes in London, by introducing females very extensively into the office (once monopolized by men) of attending the visitors at the tables of eating-houses have introduced a corresponding new word—viz.,waitress; which word, twenty-five years back, would have been simply ludicrous; but now is become as indispensable to precision of language as the words traitress, heiress, inheritrix, &c.[66]My doubt is founded upon the varying tenure of these secluded chapels as to privileges of marrying or burying. The mere name of chapel, though, of course, in regular connexion with some mother church, does not of itself imply whether it has or has not the power to solemnize a marriage.[67]At Carlisle, 3d September 1803. His marriage with Mary Robinson, the Beauty of Buttermere, had been on 3d October 1802, when he was forty-three years of age. Originally he had been a commercial traveller; and his early marriage with an illegitimate daughter of a younger son of an English nobleman seems to have had much to do with his subsequent career. Deserting this wife and her children in 1782, he had lived a life of swindling ever since, had married a second wife and deserted her, and was wooing a young Irish lady at the very time when the Buttermere girl became his victim. "His manners were extremely polished and insinuating, and he was possessed of qualities which might have rendered him an ornament of society," is the pleasant character I find of him in oneNewgate Calendarcompendium.—M.[68]In connexion with this mention of "suburban" and minor theatres, it is but fair to cite a passage expressly relating to Mary of Buttermere from the Seventh Book (entitled "Residence in London") of Wordsworth's "Prelude":—"Here, too, wereforms and pressures of the time,Rough, bold, as Grecian comedy display'dWhen Art was young; dramas of living men,And recent things yet warm with life; a sea-fight,Shipwreck, or some domestic incidentDivulged by Truth, and magnified by Fame;Such as the daring brotherhood of lateSet forth, too serious theme for that light place—I mean, O distant friend! a story drawnFrom our own ground—the Maid of Buttermere,And how, unfaithful to a virtuous wife,Deserted and deceived, the spoiler cameAnd wooed the artless daughter of the hills,And wedded her, in cruel mockeryOf love and marriage bonds. These words to theeMust needs bring back the moment when we first,Ere the broad world rang with the maiden's name,Beheld her serving at the cottage inn,Both stricken, as she enter'd or withdrew,With admiration of her modest mienAnd carriage, mark'd by unexampled grace.We since that time not unfamiliarlyHave seen her—her discretion have observed,Her just opinions, delicate reserve,Her patience and humility of mind,Unspoiled by commendation and the excessOf public notice—an offensive lightTo a meek spirit suffering inwardly."The "distant friend" here apostrophized is Coleridge, then at Malta. But it is fair to record this memorial of the fair mountaineer—going perhaps as much beyond the public estimate of her pretensions as my own was below it. It should be added that William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (to whom the writer appeals as in general sympathy with himself) had seen Mary more frequently, and had conversed with her much more freely, than myself.[69]In April 1804.—M.[70]"Ball and Bell"—"Bell and Ball":—viz. Sir Alexander Ball, Governor of Malta, and Dr. Andrew Bell, the importer into England from Madras of that machinery for facilitating popular education which was afterwards fraudulently appropriated by Joseph Lancaster. The Bishop of Durham (Shute Barrington) gave to Dr. Bell, in reward of his Madras services, the princely Mastership of Sherborne Hospital. The doctor saved in this post £125,000, and with this money founded Trinity College, Glenalmond, in Perthshire. Most men have their enemies and calumniators: Dr. Bell hadhis, who happened rather indecorously to be his wife—from whom he was legally separated, or (as in Scotch law it is called)divorced; not, of course, divorcedà vinculo matrimonii(which only amounts to a divorce in the English sense—such a divorce as enables the parties to contract another marriage), but simply divorcedà mensâ et thoro. This legal separation, however, did not prevent the lady from persecuting the unhappy doctor with everlasting letters, indorsed outside with records of her enmity and spite. Sometimes she addressed her epistles thus:—"To that supreme of rogues, who looks the hang-dog that he is, Doctor (such a doctor!) Andrew Bell." Or again:—"To the ape of apes, and the knave of knaves, who is recorded to have once paid a debt—but a small one, you may be sure, it was that he selected for this wonderful experiment—in fact, it was 41/2d. Had it been on the other side of 6d., he must have died before he could have achieved so dreadful a sacrifice." Many others, most ingeniously varied in the style of abuse, I have heard rehearsed by Coleridge, Southey, Lloyd, &c.; and one, in particular, addressed to the doctor, when spending a summer at the cottage of Robert Newton, an old soldier, in Grasmere, presented on the back two separate adjurations: one specially addressed to Robert himself, pathetically urging him to look sharply after the rent of his lodgings; and the other more generally addressed to the unfortunate person, as yet undisclosed to the British public (and in this case turning out to be myself) who might be incautious enough to pay the postage at Ambleside. "Don't grant him an hour's credit," she urged upon the person unknown, "if I had any regard to my family." "Cash down!" she wrote twice over. Why the doctor submitted to these annoyances, nobody knew. Some said it was mere indolence; but others held it to be a cunning compromise with her inexorable malice. The letters were certainly open to the "public " eye; but meantime the "public" was a very narrow one; the clerks in the post-office had little time for digesting such amenities of conjugal affection; and the chance bearer of the letters to the doctor would naturally solve the mystery by supposing anextraportion of madness in the writer, rather than anextraportion of knavery in the reverend receiver.[71]He left Malta 27th September 1805.—M.[72]Coleridge had long been a contributor to theMorning Post.—M.[73]Paris Revisited in 1815 by way of Brusselsis the title of this publication in 1816 of the Aberdonian John Scott. He had previously publishedA Visit to Paris in 1814. He wrote other things, and was editor of theLondon Magazinefrom January 1820 till his death, February 1821, the result of a duel.—M.[74]The very accurate memoir prefixed to Messrs. Macmillan's four-volume edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works states that Stuart, who had been proprietor of theMorning Post, and had become proprietor of theCourier, gave Coleridge apartments in theCourieroffice to save expense in his contributorship to that newspaper.—M.[75]The first number of this celebrated but unfortunate periodical, "printed on stamped paper by a printer of the name of Brown at Penrith," was issued, the already cited memoir of Coleridge informs us, on Thursday, 1st June 1809, and the last on 15th March 1810.—M.[76]Alexander Blair, LL.D., Professor of English Literature in University College, London, from 1830 to 1836.—M.[77]Bishop Richard Watson (1737-1816) is perhaps best remembered now for hisApology for the Bible; of which George III said, when he heard of it, "What, what! Apology for the Bible! Didn't know that it needed an apology." There were, however, twoApologies, published together in 1806,—one for Christianity against Gibbon, the other for the Bible against Thomas Paine.—M.[78]Chemical Essays, in 5 vols., published 1781-7.—M.[79]It wasLadyHolland. I know not how I came to make such a mistake. And the friend was Wordsworth.[80]This supposed falsehood respected the sect called Brownists, and occurs in the "Defensio pro Pop. Anglicano." The whole charge is a blunder, and rests upon the bishop's own imperfect Latinity.[81]Basil Montagu (1770-1851) and his wife were celebrities in London society for many years. Among his publications, besides legal treatises, were an edition of Bacon's Works and a volume of selections from the older English Prose-writers.[82]Inquiry into the Effects of Fermented Liquors. By a Waterdrinker.London. 1814.—M.[83]"Birmingham Doctor":—This was asobriquetimposed on Dr. Parr by "The Pursuits of Literature," that most popular of satires at the end of the eighteenth and opening of the nineteenth centuries. The name had a mixed reference to the Doctor's personal connexion with Warwickshire, but chiefly to the Doctor's spurious and windy imitation of Dr. Johnson. He was viewed as the Birmingham (or mock) Dr. Johnson. Why the wordBirminghamhas come for the last sixty or seventy years to indicate in every class of articles the spurious in opposition to the genuine, I suppose to have arisen from the Birmingham habit of reproducing all sorts of London or Paris trinkets,bijouterie, &c., in cheaper materials and with inferior workmanship.[84]It is at this point that De Quincey's revised reprint in 1854 of his Recollections of Coleridge stops. What follows is from the unrevised sequel inTait's Magazinefor January 1835. See note,ante, p. 138.—M.[85]The Mr. M—— of this sentence was Mr. John Morgan. He had known Coleridge and Southey in Bristol, and now lived in London.—M.[86]Coleridge died at Highgate, 25th July 1834, in the sixty-second year of his age, and the eighteenth of his residence with Mr. Gillman.—M.[87]"Esemplastic":—A writer in "Blackwood," who carried a wrath into the discussion for which I and others found it hard to account, made it a sort of charge against myself, that I had overlooked this remarkable case. If Ihad, there would have been no particular reason for anger or surprise, seeing that the particular German work in which these plagiarisms were traced had been lent to me under most rigorous limitations as to the time for returning it; the owner of the volume was going out of London, and a very few hours (according to my present remembrance only two) were all that he could allow me for hunting through the most impracticable of metaphysical thickets (what Coleridge elsewhere calls "the holy jungle of metaphysics"). Meantime I hadnotoverlooked the case ofesemplastic; I had it in my memory, but hurry of the press and want of room obliged me to omit a good deal. Indeed, if such omissions constituted any reproach, then the critic in "Blackwood" was liable to his own censure. For I remember to this hour several Latin quotations made by Schelling, and repeated by Coleridge as his own, which neither I nor my too rigorous reviewer had drawn out for public exposure. As regarded myself, it was quite sufficient that I had indicated the grounds, and opened the paths, on which the game must be sought; that I left the rest of the chase to others, was no subject for blame, but part of my purpose; and, under the circumstances, very much a matter of necessity.—In taking leave of this affair, I ought to point out a ground of complaint against my reviewer under his present form of expression, which I am sure could not have been designed. It happened that I had forgotten the particular title of Schelling's work; naturally enough, in a situation where no foreign books could be had, I quoted it under a false one. And this inevitable error of mine on a matter so entirely irrelevant is so described that the neutral reader might suppose me to have committed against Coleridge the crime of Lauder against Milton—that is, taxing him with plagiarism by referring, not to real works of Schelling, but to pretended works, of which the very titles were forgeries of my own. This, I am sure, my unknown critic never could have meant. The plagiarisms were really there; more and worse in circumstances than any denounced by myself; and, of all men, the "Blackwood" critic was the most bound to proclaim this; or else what became of his own clamorous outcry? Being, therefore, such as I had represented, of what consequence was the special title of the German volume to which these plagiarisms were referred?—[The reference in this footnote, written by De Quincey in 1854, is to an article on "The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge," which had appeared inBlackwoodfor March 1840, the writer of which had animadverted on De Quincey's previous disclosures on the subject in hisTaitpapers of 1834-5.—M.][88]Composed of articles inTait's Magazinefor January, February, and April 1839, as revised and recast by De Quincey, published, with some additions, for the second volume of the Collective Edinburgh Edition of his writings in 1854.—M.[89]Ante, p. 59.—M.[90]At the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where the town is viewed as a mere ministerial appendage to the numerous colleges—the civic Oxford, for instance, existing for the sake of the academic Oxford, and notvice versâ—it has naturally happened that the students honour with the name of "a man" him only who wears a cap and gown.[91]See the divine passage (in the Sixth Book of "The Excursion") beginning—
[1]FromTait's Magazinefor February 1835.—M.
[2]I.e.Lord Westport. Sec vol. i. pp. 161-2et seq.—M.
[3]This paragraph is omitted in the American reprint of theTaitpaper, probably because it repeats information given already. See the chapter entitled "The Priory, Chester," in Vol. I, and especially the concluding pages of that chapter. As, however, the paragraph contains some new particulars, and explains what follows, I have retained it, the rather because it ought to be the rule not to tamper with De Quincey's text on any such occasion.—M.
[4]FromTait's Magazinefor June 1835.
[5]Among the students in Christ Church at this time was Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, afterwards so well known as a fellow-resident with De Quincey in Edinburgh. He was De Quincey's senior by four years, and had entered Christ Church in 1798. Among his acquaintances and fellow-students were Lord Gower, afterwards Duke of Sutherland, Lord Newtown, Elijah Impey (son of the famous Indian judge of that name), and others of high name and rank. In theMemoirs and Correspondence of Kirkpatrick Sharpe(published 1888) there are descriptions of the society of the college, with sketches of Dean Cyril Jackson, &c., from Sharpe's cynical pen.—M.
[6]It was Worcester College; and we shall use the full name, instead of the blank W., in the sequel.—M.
[7]Oxford may confessedly claim a duration of that extent; and the pretensions of Cambridge, in that respect, if less aspiring, are, however, as I believe, less accurately determined.
[8]It may be necessary to inform some readers that the wordnoble, by which so large a system of imposition and fraud, as to the composition of foreign society, has long been practised upon the credulity of the British, corresponds to our wordgentlemanly(or, rather, to the vulgar wordgenteel, if that word were ever used legally, orextra gradum), not merely upon the argument of itsvirtualand operative value in the general estimate of men (that is, upon the argument that a count, baron, &c., does not,quasuch, command any deeper feeling of respect or homage than a British esquire), but also upon the fact, that, originally, in all English registers, as, for instance, in the Oxford matriculation registers, all the upper gentry (knights, esquires, &c.) are technically designated by the wordnobiles.—See Chamberlayne, &c.
[9]The subject is amusingly illustrated by an anecdote of Goethe, recorded by himself in his autobiography. Some physiognomist, or phrenologist, had found out, in Goethe's structure of head, the sure promise of a great orator. "Strange infatuation of nature!" observes Goethe, on this assurance, "to endow me so richly and liberally for that particular destination which only the institutions of my country render impossible. Music for the deaf! Eloquence without an audience!"
[10]Whilst I am writing, a debate of the present Parliament, reported on Saturday, March 7, 1835, presents us with a determinate repetition of the error which I have been exposing; and, again, as in the last Parliament, this error is notinert, but is used for a hostile (apparently a malicious) purpose; nay, which is remarkable, it is thesolebasis upon which the following argument reposes. Lord Radnor again assumes that the students of Oxford are "boys"; he is again supported in this misrepresentation by Lord Brougham; and again the misrepresentation is applied to a purpose of assault upon the English Universities, but especially upon Oxford. And the nature of the assault does not allow any latitude in construing the wordboys, nor any room for evasion as respects the total charge, except what goes the length of a total retraction. The charge is, that, in a requisition made at the very threshold of academic life, upon the understanding and the honour of the students, the University burdens their consciences to an extent which, in after life, when reflection has enlightened them to the meaning of their engagements, proves either a snare to those who trifle with their engagements, or an insupportable burden to those who do not. For the inculpation of the party imposing such oaths, it is essential that the party taking them should be in a childish condition of the moral sense, and the sense of responsibility; whereas, amongst the Oxonianunder-graduates, I will venture to say that the number is larger of those who rise above than of those who fall below twenty; and, as to sixteen (assumed as the representative age by Lord Radnor), in my time, I heard of only one student, amongst, perhaps, sixteen hundred, who was so young. I grieve to see that the learned prelate who replied to the assailants was so much taken by surprise; the defence might have been made triumphant. With regard to oaths incompatible with the spirit of modern manners, and yet formally unrepealed—thatis a case of neglect and indolent oversight. But thegravamenof that reproach does not press exclusively upon Oxford; all the ancient institutions of Europe are tainted in the same way, more especially the monastic orders of the Romish church.
[11]These changes have been accomplished, according to my imperfect knowledge of the case, in two ways: first, by dispensing with the services whenever that could be done; and, secondly, by a wise discontinuance of the order itself in those colleges which were left to their own choice in this matter.
[12]FromTait's Magazinefor August 1835.
[13]I cannot for a moment believe that the original and most eloquent critic inBlackwoodis himself the dupe of an argument which he has alleged against this passage, under too open a hatred of Shakspeare, as though it involved a contradiction to common sense, by representingallhuman beings of such an age as school-boys, all of such another age as soldiers, of such another as magistrates, &c. Evidently the logic of the famous passage is this,—that, whereas every age has its peculiar and appropriate temper, that profession or employment is selected for the exemplification which seems best fitted, in each case, to embody the characteristic or predominating quality. Thus, because impetuosity, self-esteem, and animal or irreflective courage, are qualities most intense in youth, next it is considered in what profession those qualities find their most unlimited range; and, because that is obviously the military profession, therefore it is that the soldier is selected as the representative of young men. For the same reason, as best embodying the peculiar temper of garrulous old age, the magistrate comes forward as supporting the part of that age. Not that old men are not also soldiers; but that the military profession, so far from strengthening, moderates and tempers the characteristic temper of old age.
[14]The diction of Milton is a case absolutely unique in literature: of many writers it has been said, but of him only with truth, that he created a peculiar language. The value must be tried by the result, not by inferences froma prioriprinciples; such inferences might lead us to anticipate an unfortunate result; whereas, in fact, the diction of Milton is such that no other could have supported his majestic style of thinking. The final result is atranscendentanswer to all adverse criticism; but still it is to be lamented that no man properly qualified has undertaken the examination of the Miltonic diction as a separate problem. Listen to a popular author of this day (Mr. Bulwer). He, speaking on this subject, asserts (England and the English, p. 329) that "there is scarcely an English idiom which Milton has not violated, or a foreign one which he has not borrowed." Now, in answer to this extravagant assertion, I will venture to say that the two following are the sole cases of questionable idiom throughout Milton:—1st, "Yet virgin of Proserpina from Jove"; and, in this case, the same thing might be urged in apology which Aristotle urges in another argument, namely, that πρωτον ψευδος (anônymon to pathos), the case is unprovided withanysuitable expression. How would it be possible to convey in good English the circumstances here indicated: viz. that Ceres was yet in those days of maiden innocence, when she had borne no daughter to Jove? 2d, I will cite a case which, so far as I remember, has been noticed by no commentator; and, probably, because they have failed to understand it. The case occurs in the "Paradise Regained"; but where I do not at this moment remember. "Will theytransactwith God?" [The only case of the use of the wordtransactby Milton registered in the Verbal Indexes is inPar. Lost, vi. 286, where Satan says, "Easier to transact with me."—M.] This is the passage; and a most flagrant instance it offers of pure Latinism.Transigere, in the language of the civil law, means to make a compromise; and the wordtransactis here used in that sense—a sense utterly unknown to the English language. This is the worst case in Milton; and I do not know that it has been ever noticed. Yet even here it may be doubted whether Milton is not defensible; asking if they proposed to terminate their difference with God after the fashion in use amongst courts of law, he points properly enough to these worldly settlements by the technical term which designated them. Thus might a divine say: Will he arrest the judgments of God by ademurrer? Thus, again, Hamlet apostrophises the lawyer's skull by the technical terms used in actions for assault, &c. Besides, what proper term is there in English for expressing a compromise? Edmund Burke, and other much older authors, express the idea by the wordtemperament; but that word, though a good one, was at one time considered an exotic term—equally a Gallicism and a Latinism.
[15]FromTait's Magazinefor June 1836. Seeante, Preface, pp. 1, 2.—M.
[16]Επεα πτεροεντα (Epea pteroenta) literallywinged words. To explain the use and origin of this phrase to non-classical readers, it must be understood that, originally, it was used by Homer to express the few, rapid, and significant words which conveyed some hasty order, counsel, or notice, suited to any sudden occasion or emergency:e.g."To him flying from the field the hero addressed these winged words—'Stop, coward, or I will transfix thee with my spear.'" But by Horne Tooke the phrase was adopted on the title-page of hisDiversions of Purley, as a pleasant symbolic expression for all the non-significant particles, thearticulior joints of language, which in his well-known theory are resolved into abbreviations or compendious forms (and therefore rapid, flying,wingedforms), substituted for significant forms of greater length. Thus,ifis a non-significant particle, but it is an abbreviated form of an imperative in the second person—substituted for gif, or give, or grant the case—put the case that. All other particles are shewn by Horne Tooke to be equally short-hand (orwinged) substitutions.
[17]It has been rather too much forgotten that Africa, from the northern margin of Bilidulgerid and the Great Desert, southwards—everywhere, in short, beyond Egypt, Cyrene, and the modern Barbary States—belongs, as much as America, to the New World, the world unknown to the ancients.
[18]I might have mastered the philosophy of Kant without waiting for the German language, in which all his capital works are written; for there is a Latin version of the whole by Born, and a most admirable digest of the cardinal work (admirable for its fidelity and the skill by which that fidelity is attained) in the same language by Rhiseldek, a Danish professor. But this fact, such was the slight knowledge of all things connected with Kant in England, I did not learn for some years.
[19]De Quincey was so fastidious in the matter of grammatical correctness that he would have been shocked to find that he had let this sentence go forth in print.—M.
[20]Those who look back to the newspapers of 1799 and 1800 will see that considerable discussion went on at that time upon the question whether the year 1800 was entitled to open the 19th century or to close the 18th. Mr. Laureate Pye wrote a poem with a long and argumentative preface on the point.
[21]FromTait's Magazinefor February 1837, where the title was "A Literary Novitiate."—M.
[22]As De Quincey has divulged the name of this clergyman in his Autobiography (see vol. i. pp. 136-138), there is no need for concealing it here. He was the Rev. John Clowes, Rector of St. John's Church, Manchester, and we shall substitute the full name for the blank in the sequel.—M.
[23]In a recent [1889] catalogue of a Manchester book-sale I find this entry:—"Clowes (John, of Manchester, the Church of England Swedenborgian). Sermons, Translations, etc., with a Life of him by Theo. Crompton, principally published in Manchester from 1799 to 1850. 17 vols."—M.
[24]For a similar passage, seeante, pp. 96, 97.—M.
[25]He was first editor of theLondon Magazine, and was killed in an unfortunate duel in February 1821.—M.
[26]William Roscoe (1753-1831), author ofLife of Lorenzo de' Medici,Life and Pontificate of Leo X, and other works, was a native of Liverpool, and spent the main part of his life as a banker in that town.—M.
[27]The Rev. William Shepherd, author of aLife of Poggio Bracciolini(Liverpool, 1802) andParis in 1802 and 1814(London, 1814), and joint author of a work in two volumes calledSystematic Education, or Elementary Instruction in the various Departments of Literature and Science(London, 1815).—M.
[28]Dr. James Currie, born 1756, a native of Dumfriesshire, settled in Liverpool, in medical practice, in 1781. His edition of Burns, with memoir and criticism, published in 1800, was for the benefit of the widow and children of the poet, and realised £1400. Currie died in 1805.—M.
[29]Wordsworth's publication was in 1816, under the titleA Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns, occasioned by an intended Republication of the Account of the Life of Burns by Dr. Currie.By William Wordsworth.—M.
[30]Jacobinism—although the seminal principle of all political evil in all ages alike of advanced civilization—is natural to the heart of man, and, in a qualified sense, may be meritorious. A good man, a high-minded man, in certain circumstances,mustbe a Jacobin in a certain sense. The aspect under which Burns's Jacobinism appears is striking: there is a thought which an observing reader will find often recurring, which expresses its peculiar bitterness. It is this: the necessity which in old countries exists for the labourer humbly to begpermissionthat he may labour. To eat in the sweat of a man's brow—that is bad; and that is a curse, and pronounced such by God. But, whenthatis all, the labourer is by comparison happy. The second curse makesthata jest: he must sue, he must sneak, he must fawn like an Oriental slave, in order to win his fellow-man, in Burns's indignant words, "to give himleaveto toil." That was the scorpion thought that was for ever shooting its sting into Burns's meditations, whether forward-looking or backward-looking; and, that considered, there arises a world of allowance for that vulgar bluster of independence which Lord Jeffrey, with so much apparent reason charges upon his prose writings.
[31]De Quincey's strictures in this paper of 1837 on the Liverpool literary coterie of 1801 gave great offence in that town. The Liverpool papers attacked him for it; and Dr. Shepherd of Gatacre, apparently then the sole survivor of the coterie, addressed a letter of remonstrance to the editor ofTait's Magazine. It appeared in the number of the magazine for May 1837, with some editorial comments. "The question of which I have to treat," wrote Dr. Shepherd, "is a question of accuracy of recollection; and I am constrained to remark that, as, from the appellation by which, with an extraordinary kind of taste, Mr. De Quincey chooses to designate himself in his literary character, he seems to have been at one period of his life the slave of a deleterious drug, which shakes the nerves, and, inflaming the brain, impairs the memory, whilstIhave avoided that poison even in its medical application, thereforemyrecollection is more likely to be correct that his." The letter proceeds to vindicate Dr. Currie, Mr. Roscoe, and the writer himself, from the charge of defective appreciation of the manly demeanour of Burns in his relations with the Scottish aristocracy and lairds; after which come some words of special self-defence of the writer in the matters of his political consistency and his jests at Hannah More. The letter altogether is destitute of effective point; and the editor ofTaitwas quite justified in standing by De Quincey. This is done in every particular of the offending paper, with this included sting: "It may tempt a smile from the few who are likely to trouble themselves about this foolish affair to find that, though solemnly assuming the office of advocate-general for the other members of the extinct coterie, Dr. Shepherd, as well as the newspaper writers, has entirely overlooked the vivacious tailor celebrated by Mr. De Quincey, of whom we think none of his literary friends have the least reason to be ashamed."—— The main matter of interest now in this little controversy of 1837 respects De Quincey's own estimate of Burns. Although he had taken up the cudgels for Burns in that particular in which he thought Dr. Currie and the rest of the Liverpool coterie of 1801, professed democrats though they were, had done Burns injustice,—viz. his spirit of manly independence and superiority to considerations of mere worldly rank,—it remains true that De Quincey's own estimate of Burns all in all fell woefully beneath the proper mark. There are evidences of this in the present paper, and there are other evidences at different points of De Quincey's life. Wordsworth in this respect differed immensely from his friend De Quincey, and might have taught him better. In that letter of Wordsworth's which is referred to by De Quincey (ante, p. 131) precisely because it had deprecated the republication in 1816 of Dr. Currie'sLife of Burnsin 1800, how enthusiastic was the feeling for Burns and his memory compared with anything that De Quincey seems ever to have permitted himself! And, as long before as 1803, had not Wordsworth, in his linesAt the Grave of Burns, given expression to the same feeling in more personal shape? Who can forget that deathless stanza in which, remembering that Burns had died so recently, and that, though they had never met, they had been near neighbours by their places of habitation, the new poet of England had confessed his own indebtedness to the example of the Scottish ploughman bard?—
"I mourned with thousands, but as oneMore deeply grieved; for He was goneWhose light I hailed, when first it shoneAnd showed my youthHow verse may build a princely throneOn humble truth."
"I mourned with thousands, but as oneMore deeply grieved; for He was goneWhose light I hailed, when first it shoneAnd showed my youthHow verse may build a princely throneOn humble truth."
In connexion with the fact of De Quincey's defective appreciation of Burns even so late as 1837, it is additionally significant that, though he refers in the present paper, with modified approbation, to Jeffrey's somewhat captious article on Burns in theEdinburgh Reviewfor January 1809, he does not mention the compensation which had appeared, with Jeffrey's own editorial sanction, in the shape of Carlyle's essay on Burns in the sameReviewfor December 1828.—M.
[32]This chapter is composed of four articles contributed toTait's Magazineunder the title of "Samuel Taylor Coleridge: By the English Opium-Eater." They appeared, respectively, in the numbers of the Magazine for September, October, and November 1834, and January 1835. Three of these articles were revised by De Quincey, and thrown into one paper for Vol. II of the Collective Edition of his writings, published in 1854. The fourth article was not included in that paper; but it is added to the reprint of the paper in the American Collective Edition of De Quincey, and is necessary to complete his sketch of Coleridge. It is therefore reproduced here. The reader will understand, accordingly, that as far as to p. 208 we follow De Quincey's revised text of three of his Coleridge articles; after which we have to print the fourth article as it originally stood inTait.—M.
[33]Published in 1798.—M.
[34]Seeante, p. 61.—M.
[35]Published in 1800.—M.
[36]The first edition of Southey's epic was published in 1796, the second in 1798, both at Bristol.—M.
[37]Published, with other political pieces, in 1798, after having appeared in theMorning Postnewspaper.—M.
[38]English Anthologyfor 1799-1800, in 2 vols., published at Bristol, and edited by Southey.—M.
[39]The first edition, entitledPoems on Various Subjects, by S. T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College, Cambridge, was published at Bristol in 1796; the second at London in 1797; the third at London in 1803.—M.
[40]For a full account of this interesting Mr. Poole seeThomas Poole and his Friends, by Mrs. Henry Sandford, 2 vols., 1888. He was born 1765, and died 1837.—M.
[41]More properly speltAlfoxden.—M.
[42]In the abrupt phrasing of Mr. Poole's question De Quincey must surely have recollected the similar question put by the clown inTwelfth Nightto the supposed madman Malvolio to test his sanity—"Clown. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?"—M.
[43]With respect to all these cases of apparent plagiarism, see an explanatory Note at the end of this chapter.
[44]I forget the exact title, not having seen the book since 1823, and then only for one day; but I believe it was Schelling's "Kleine Philosophische Werke."
[45]"Whatever Time, or the heedless hand of blind Chance, hath drawn down from of old to this present in her huge drag-net, whether fish, or seaweed, shells or shrubs, unpicked, unchosen, these are the Fathers." Milton's TractOf Prelatical Episcopacy, published in 1641.—M.
[46]This might pass as a description of De Quincey himself in his later years, if not all through his life.—M.
[47]At the date of this first meeting of De Quincey with Coleridge, De Quincey was twenty-two years of age and Coleridge nearly thirty-seven.—M.
[48]Seirisought to have been the title—i.e.Σειρις (Seiris), a chain. From this defect in the orthography, I did not in my boyish days perceive, nor could obtain any light upon, its meaning.
[49]Another sentence of faulty grammar: a rare thing with De Quincey.—M.
[50]Arthur Young's numerous works, published between 1768 and 1812, are mainly on agricultural subjects, in the form of tours and statistics, but include political doctrines and theories.—M.
[51]The service consisted in a gift by De Quincey of £300 conveyed to Coleridge through the Bristol bookseller Cottle. Coleridge's receipt to Cottle for the money is dated 12th November 1807. Coleridge knew nothing more at the time than that the gift came from "a young man of fortune who admired his talents." De Quincey, who had but recently attained his majority, had then plenty of money. He wanted, indeed, to make the gift £500; but Cottle insisted on reducing the sum.—M.
[52]Coleridge was born there 21st October 1772, the youngest of a family of nine brothers and four sisters, three of the sisters by a previous marriage of his father.—M.
[53]A Critical Latin Grammar, published for the author in 1772, andSententiæ Excerptæ, explaining the Rules of Grammar, printed for the author in 1777. He also published a political sermon. Besides being vicar of Ottery St. Mary, he was master of the grammar school there.—M.
[54]This was in July 1782.—M.
[55]In February 1791.—M.
[56]The Rev. William Frend (1757-1831), a very eminent scholar, had been ejected from his tutorship in Jesus College in 1788, because of his Unitarian opinions and general liberalism, but was still about the University in Coleridge's time, battling stoutly with the authorities.
[57]He enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons, 3d December 1793, under the name of Silas Titus Comberback. So says a very minute memoir of him prefixed to Messrs. Macmillan's edition of his Poetical and Dramatic Works in four volumes, 1880.—M.
[58]Somewhat otherwise in the memoir mentioned in last note, where the date of his discharge is given as 10th April 1794, and the place as Hounslow. He returned to Cambridge for a few months, and then, after shifting about a little, settled in Bristol with Southey, where he married, 4th October 1795, Sara Fricker, the sister of Southey's wife. De Quincey seems to misdate his first visit to Germany.—M.
[59]Which, however, his brother denied as a pure fable. On reading this account, he wrote to me, and in very courteous terms assured me that I had been misinformed. I now retain the story simply as a version, partially erroneous, no doubt, of perhaps some true anecdote that may have escaped the surviving Mr. Wedgwood's knowledge; my reason for thinking thus being that the same anecdote essentially but varied in the circumstances, has reached me at different periods from parties having no connexion whatsoever.
[60]He was absent on this tour in Germany from September 1798 to November 1799.—M.
[61]Published in Richardson's Correspondence.
[62]It was in 1800 that Coleridge removed from London to Keswick, Wordsworth being then at Grasmere.—M.
[63]This peculiar usage of an unrelated participle is pretty frequent with De Quincey, and is perhaps the only recurring peculiarity of his grammar to which a purist would object.—M.
[64]i.e.—A 'Statesman elliptically for an Estatesman,—a native dalesman possessing and personally cultivating a patrimonial landed estate.
[65]"Waiter":—Since this was first written, social changes in London, by introducing females very extensively into the office (once monopolized by men) of attending the visitors at the tables of eating-houses have introduced a corresponding new word—viz.,waitress; which word, twenty-five years back, would have been simply ludicrous; but now is become as indispensable to precision of language as the words traitress, heiress, inheritrix, &c.
[66]My doubt is founded upon the varying tenure of these secluded chapels as to privileges of marrying or burying. The mere name of chapel, though, of course, in regular connexion with some mother church, does not of itself imply whether it has or has not the power to solemnize a marriage.
[67]At Carlisle, 3d September 1803. His marriage with Mary Robinson, the Beauty of Buttermere, had been on 3d October 1802, when he was forty-three years of age. Originally he had been a commercial traveller; and his early marriage with an illegitimate daughter of a younger son of an English nobleman seems to have had much to do with his subsequent career. Deserting this wife and her children in 1782, he had lived a life of swindling ever since, had married a second wife and deserted her, and was wooing a young Irish lady at the very time when the Buttermere girl became his victim. "His manners were extremely polished and insinuating, and he was possessed of qualities which might have rendered him an ornament of society," is the pleasant character I find of him in oneNewgate Calendarcompendium.—M.
[68]In connexion with this mention of "suburban" and minor theatres, it is but fair to cite a passage expressly relating to Mary of Buttermere from the Seventh Book (entitled "Residence in London") of Wordsworth's "Prelude":—
"Here, too, wereforms and pressures of the time,Rough, bold, as Grecian comedy display'dWhen Art was young; dramas of living men,And recent things yet warm with life; a sea-fight,Shipwreck, or some domestic incidentDivulged by Truth, and magnified by Fame;Such as the daring brotherhood of lateSet forth, too serious theme for that light place—I mean, O distant friend! a story drawnFrom our own ground—the Maid of Buttermere,And how, unfaithful to a virtuous wife,Deserted and deceived, the spoiler cameAnd wooed the artless daughter of the hills,And wedded her, in cruel mockeryOf love and marriage bonds. These words to theeMust needs bring back the moment when we first,Ere the broad world rang with the maiden's name,Beheld her serving at the cottage inn,Both stricken, as she enter'd or withdrew,With admiration of her modest mienAnd carriage, mark'd by unexampled grace.We since that time not unfamiliarlyHave seen her—her discretion have observed,Her just opinions, delicate reserve,Her patience and humility of mind,Unspoiled by commendation and the excessOf public notice—an offensive lightTo a meek spirit suffering inwardly."
"Here, too, wereforms and pressures of the time,Rough, bold, as Grecian comedy display'dWhen Art was young; dramas of living men,And recent things yet warm with life; a sea-fight,Shipwreck, or some domestic incidentDivulged by Truth, and magnified by Fame;Such as the daring brotherhood of lateSet forth, too serious theme for that light place—I mean, O distant friend! a story drawnFrom our own ground—the Maid of Buttermere,And how, unfaithful to a virtuous wife,Deserted and deceived, the spoiler cameAnd wooed the artless daughter of the hills,And wedded her, in cruel mockeryOf love and marriage bonds. These words to theeMust needs bring back the moment when we first,Ere the broad world rang with the maiden's name,Beheld her serving at the cottage inn,Both stricken, as she enter'd or withdrew,With admiration of her modest mienAnd carriage, mark'd by unexampled grace.We since that time not unfamiliarlyHave seen her—her discretion have observed,Her just opinions, delicate reserve,Her patience and humility of mind,Unspoiled by commendation and the excessOf public notice—an offensive lightTo a meek spirit suffering inwardly."
The "distant friend" here apostrophized is Coleridge, then at Malta. But it is fair to record this memorial of the fair mountaineer—going perhaps as much beyond the public estimate of her pretensions as my own was below it. It should be added that William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (to whom the writer appeals as in general sympathy with himself) had seen Mary more frequently, and had conversed with her much more freely, than myself.
[69]In April 1804.—M.
[70]"Ball and Bell"—"Bell and Ball":—viz. Sir Alexander Ball, Governor of Malta, and Dr. Andrew Bell, the importer into England from Madras of that machinery for facilitating popular education which was afterwards fraudulently appropriated by Joseph Lancaster. The Bishop of Durham (Shute Barrington) gave to Dr. Bell, in reward of his Madras services, the princely Mastership of Sherborne Hospital. The doctor saved in this post £125,000, and with this money founded Trinity College, Glenalmond, in Perthshire. Most men have their enemies and calumniators: Dr. Bell hadhis, who happened rather indecorously to be his wife—from whom he was legally separated, or (as in Scotch law it is called)divorced; not, of course, divorcedà vinculo matrimonii(which only amounts to a divorce in the English sense—such a divorce as enables the parties to contract another marriage), but simply divorcedà mensâ et thoro. This legal separation, however, did not prevent the lady from persecuting the unhappy doctor with everlasting letters, indorsed outside with records of her enmity and spite. Sometimes she addressed her epistles thus:—"To that supreme of rogues, who looks the hang-dog that he is, Doctor (such a doctor!) Andrew Bell." Or again:—"To the ape of apes, and the knave of knaves, who is recorded to have once paid a debt—but a small one, you may be sure, it was that he selected for this wonderful experiment—in fact, it was 41/2d. Had it been on the other side of 6d., he must have died before he could have achieved so dreadful a sacrifice." Many others, most ingeniously varied in the style of abuse, I have heard rehearsed by Coleridge, Southey, Lloyd, &c.; and one, in particular, addressed to the doctor, when spending a summer at the cottage of Robert Newton, an old soldier, in Grasmere, presented on the back two separate adjurations: one specially addressed to Robert himself, pathetically urging him to look sharply after the rent of his lodgings; and the other more generally addressed to the unfortunate person, as yet undisclosed to the British public (and in this case turning out to be myself) who might be incautious enough to pay the postage at Ambleside. "Don't grant him an hour's credit," she urged upon the person unknown, "if I had any regard to my family." "Cash down!" she wrote twice over. Why the doctor submitted to these annoyances, nobody knew. Some said it was mere indolence; but others held it to be a cunning compromise with her inexorable malice. The letters were certainly open to the "public " eye; but meantime the "public" was a very narrow one; the clerks in the post-office had little time for digesting such amenities of conjugal affection; and the chance bearer of the letters to the doctor would naturally solve the mystery by supposing anextraportion of madness in the writer, rather than anextraportion of knavery in the reverend receiver.
[71]He left Malta 27th September 1805.—M.
[72]Coleridge had long been a contributor to theMorning Post.—M.
[73]Paris Revisited in 1815 by way of Brusselsis the title of this publication in 1816 of the Aberdonian John Scott. He had previously publishedA Visit to Paris in 1814. He wrote other things, and was editor of theLondon Magazinefrom January 1820 till his death, February 1821, the result of a duel.—M.
[74]The very accurate memoir prefixed to Messrs. Macmillan's four-volume edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works states that Stuart, who had been proprietor of theMorning Post, and had become proprietor of theCourier, gave Coleridge apartments in theCourieroffice to save expense in his contributorship to that newspaper.—M.
[75]The first number of this celebrated but unfortunate periodical, "printed on stamped paper by a printer of the name of Brown at Penrith," was issued, the already cited memoir of Coleridge informs us, on Thursday, 1st June 1809, and the last on 15th March 1810.—M.
[76]Alexander Blair, LL.D., Professor of English Literature in University College, London, from 1830 to 1836.—M.
[77]Bishop Richard Watson (1737-1816) is perhaps best remembered now for hisApology for the Bible; of which George III said, when he heard of it, "What, what! Apology for the Bible! Didn't know that it needed an apology." There were, however, twoApologies, published together in 1806,—one for Christianity against Gibbon, the other for the Bible against Thomas Paine.—M.
[78]Chemical Essays, in 5 vols., published 1781-7.—M.
[79]It wasLadyHolland. I know not how I came to make such a mistake. And the friend was Wordsworth.
[80]This supposed falsehood respected the sect called Brownists, and occurs in the "Defensio pro Pop. Anglicano." The whole charge is a blunder, and rests upon the bishop's own imperfect Latinity.
[81]Basil Montagu (1770-1851) and his wife were celebrities in London society for many years. Among his publications, besides legal treatises, were an edition of Bacon's Works and a volume of selections from the older English Prose-writers.
[82]Inquiry into the Effects of Fermented Liquors. By a Waterdrinker.London. 1814.—M.
[83]"Birmingham Doctor":—This was asobriquetimposed on Dr. Parr by "The Pursuits of Literature," that most popular of satires at the end of the eighteenth and opening of the nineteenth centuries. The name had a mixed reference to the Doctor's personal connexion with Warwickshire, but chiefly to the Doctor's spurious and windy imitation of Dr. Johnson. He was viewed as the Birmingham (or mock) Dr. Johnson. Why the wordBirminghamhas come for the last sixty or seventy years to indicate in every class of articles the spurious in opposition to the genuine, I suppose to have arisen from the Birmingham habit of reproducing all sorts of London or Paris trinkets,bijouterie, &c., in cheaper materials and with inferior workmanship.
[84]It is at this point that De Quincey's revised reprint in 1854 of his Recollections of Coleridge stops. What follows is from the unrevised sequel inTait's Magazinefor January 1835. See note,ante, p. 138.—M.
[85]The Mr. M—— of this sentence was Mr. John Morgan. He had known Coleridge and Southey in Bristol, and now lived in London.—M.
[86]Coleridge died at Highgate, 25th July 1834, in the sixty-second year of his age, and the eighteenth of his residence with Mr. Gillman.—M.
[87]"Esemplastic":—A writer in "Blackwood," who carried a wrath into the discussion for which I and others found it hard to account, made it a sort of charge against myself, that I had overlooked this remarkable case. If Ihad, there would have been no particular reason for anger or surprise, seeing that the particular German work in which these plagiarisms were traced had been lent to me under most rigorous limitations as to the time for returning it; the owner of the volume was going out of London, and a very few hours (according to my present remembrance only two) were all that he could allow me for hunting through the most impracticable of metaphysical thickets (what Coleridge elsewhere calls "the holy jungle of metaphysics"). Meantime I hadnotoverlooked the case ofesemplastic; I had it in my memory, but hurry of the press and want of room obliged me to omit a good deal. Indeed, if such omissions constituted any reproach, then the critic in "Blackwood" was liable to his own censure. For I remember to this hour several Latin quotations made by Schelling, and repeated by Coleridge as his own, which neither I nor my too rigorous reviewer had drawn out for public exposure. As regarded myself, it was quite sufficient that I had indicated the grounds, and opened the paths, on which the game must be sought; that I left the rest of the chase to others, was no subject for blame, but part of my purpose; and, under the circumstances, very much a matter of necessity.—In taking leave of this affair, I ought to point out a ground of complaint against my reviewer under his present form of expression, which I am sure could not have been designed. It happened that I had forgotten the particular title of Schelling's work; naturally enough, in a situation where no foreign books could be had, I quoted it under a false one. And this inevitable error of mine on a matter so entirely irrelevant is so described that the neutral reader might suppose me to have committed against Coleridge the crime of Lauder against Milton—that is, taxing him with plagiarism by referring, not to real works of Schelling, but to pretended works, of which the very titles were forgeries of my own. This, I am sure, my unknown critic never could have meant. The plagiarisms were really there; more and worse in circumstances than any denounced by myself; and, of all men, the "Blackwood" critic was the most bound to proclaim this; or else what became of his own clamorous outcry? Being, therefore, such as I had represented, of what consequence was the special title of the German volume to which these plagiarisms were referred?—[The reference in this footnote, written by De Quincey in 1854, is to an article on "The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge," which had appeared inBlackwoodfor March 1840, the writer of which had animadverted on De Quincey's previous disclosures on the subject in hisTaitpapers of 1834-5.—M.]
[88]Composed of articles inTait's Magazinefor January, February, and April 1839, as revised and recast by De Quincey, published, with some additions, for the second volume of the Collective Edinburgh Edition of his writings in 1854.—M.
[89]Ante, p. 59.—M.
[90]At the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where the town is viewed as a mere ministerial appendage to the numerous colleges—the civic Oxford, for instance, existing for the sake of the academic Oxford, and notvice versâ—it has naturally happened that the students honour with the name of "a man" him only who wears a cap and gown.
[91]See the divine passage (in the Sixth Book of "The Excursion") beginning—