Chapter X: Grasmere and the Friend

1808-1810

CLXX. TO DANIEL STUART.

[December 9, 1808.]

MY DEAR STUART,--Scarcely when listening to count the hour, have I been more perplexed by the “_Inopem me copia fecit_” of the London church clocks, than by the press of what I have to say to you. I must do one at a time. Briefly, a very happy change[47] has taken place in my health and spirits and mental activity since I placed myself under the care and inspection of a physician, and I dare say with confident hope, “Judge me from the 1st January, 1809.”

I send you the Prospectus, and intreat you to do me all the good you can; which like the Lord’s Prayer is Thanksgiving in the disguise of petition. If you think that it should be advertized in any way, or if Mr. Street can do anything for me--but I know you will do what you can.

I have received promises of contribution from many tall fellows with big names in the world of Scribes, and count even Pharisees (two or three Bishops) in my list of patrons. But whether I shall have 50, 100, 500, or 1,000 subscribers I am not able even to conjecture. All must depend on the zeal of my friends, on which I fear I have thrown more water than oil--but some like the Greek fire burn beneath the wave!

Wordsworth has nearly finished a series of most masterly Essays[48] on the Affairs of Portugal and Spain, and by my advice he will first send them to you that if they suit the “Courier” they may be inserted.

I have not heard from Savage, but I suppose that he has printed a thousand of these Prospectuses, and you may have any number from him. He lives hard by some of the streets in Covent Garden which I do not remember, but a note to Mr. Savage, R. Institution, Albemarle Street, will find him.

May God Almighty bless you! I feel that I shall yet live, to give proof of what is deep within me towards you.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CLXXI. TO FRANCIS JEFFREY.

GRASMERE, December 14, 1808.

DEAR SIR,--The only thing in which I have been able to detect any degree of hypochrondriasis in my feelings is the reading and answering of letters, and in this instance I have been at times so wofully under its domination as to have left every letter received lie unopened for weeks together, all the while thoroughly ashamed of the weakness and yet without power to get rid of it. This, however, has not been the case of late, and I was never yet so careless as knowingly to suffer a letter relating to money to remain unanswered by the next post in my power. I, therefore, on reading your very kind letter of 8 Dec. conclude that one letter from you during my movements from Grasmere, now to Keswick, now to Bratha and Elleray, and now to Kendal, has been mislayed.

As I considered your insertion of the review of Mr. Clarkson’s as an act of personal kindness and attention to the request of one a stranger to you except by name, the thought of any pecuniary remuneration never once occurred to me; and had it been written at your request I should have thought twenty guineas a somewhat extravagant price whether I considered the quantity or quality of the communication. As to the alterations, your character and interest, as the known Editor of the Review, are pledged for a general consistency of principle in the different articles with each other, and you had every possible right to alter or omit _ad libitum_, unless a special condition had been insisted on of _aut totum aut nihil_. As the writer, therefore, I neither thought nor cared about the alterations; as a general reader, I differed with you as [to] the scale of merit relatively to Mr. Wilberforce, whose services I deem to have been overrated, not, perhaps, so much absolutely as by comparison. At all events, some following passages should have been omitted, as they are in blank contradiction to the paragraph inserted, and betrayed a co-presence of two writers in one article. As to the longer paragraph, Wordsworth thinks you on the true side; and Clarkson himself that you were not far from the truth. As to my own opinion, I believed what I wrote, and deduced my belief from all the facts pro and con, with which Mr. Clarkson’s conversation have furnished [me]; but such is my detestation of that pernicious Minister,[49] such my contempt of the cowardice and fatuity of his measures, and my horror at the yet unended train of their direful consequences, that, if obedience to truth could ever be painful to me, this would have been. I acted well in writing what on the whole I believed the more probable, and I was pleased that you acted equally well in altering it according to your convictions.

I had hoped to have furnished a letter of more interesting contents to you, but an honest gentleman in London having taken a great fancy to two thirds of the possible profits of my literary labours without a shadow of a claim, and having over-hurried the business through overweening of my simplicity and carelessness, has occasioned me some perplexity and a great deal of trouble and letter-writing. I will write, however, again to you my first leisure evening, whether I hear from you or no in the interim.

I trust you have received my scrawl with the prospectus[50] and feel sincerely thankful to you for your kindness on the arrival of the prospectuses, prior to your receipt of the letter which was meant to have announced them. But our post here is very irregular as well as circuitous--but three times a week--and then, too, we have to walk more than two miles for the chance of finding letters. This you will be so good as to take into account whenever my answers do not arrive at the time they might have been expected from places in general. I remain, dear sir, with kind and respectful feeling, your obliged,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

I entirely coincide in your dislike of “speculative gloom”--it is illogical as well as barbarous, and almost as bad as “picturesque eye.” I do not know how I came to pass it; for when I first wrote it, I undermarked it, not as the expression, but as a remembrancer of some better that did not immediately occur to me. “Year-long absences” I think doubtful--had any one objected to it, I should have altered it; but it would not _much_ offend me in the writings of another. But to “moral impulses” I see at present no objections, nor does any other phrase suggest itself to me which would have expressed my meaning. That there is a semblance of presumptuousness in the manner I exceedingly regret, if so it be--my heart bears me witness that the feeling had no place there. Yet I need not say to you that it is impossible to succeed in such a work unless at the commencement of it there be a quickening and throb in the pulse of hope; and what if a blush from inward modesty disguise itself on these occasions, and the hectic of unusual self-assertion increase the appearance of that excess which it in reality resists and modifies? It will amuse you to be informed that from two correspondents, both of them men of great literary celebrity, I have received reproof for a supposed affectation of humility in the style of the prospectus. In my own consciousness I was guilty of neither. Yet surely to advance as a teacher, and in the very act to declare yourself inferior to those whom you propose to teach, is incongruous; and must disgust a pure mind by its evident hypocrisy.

CLXXII. TO THOMAS WILKINSON.[51]

GRASMERE, December 31, 1808.

DEAR SIR,--I thank you for your exertions in my behalf, and--which more deeply interests me--for the openness with which you have communicated your doubts and apprehensions. So much, indeed, am I interested, that I cannot lay down my head on my pillow in perfect tranquillity, without endeavoring to remove them. First, however, I must tell you that ... “The Friend” will not appear at the time _conditionally_ announced. There are, besides, great difficulties at the Stamp Office concerning it. But the particulars I will detail when we meet. Myself, with William Wordsworth and the family, are glad that we are so soon to see you. Now then for what is so near my heart. Only a certain number of prospectuses were printed at Kendal, and sent to acquaintances. The much larger number, which were to have been printed at London, have not been printed. When they are, you will see in the article, noted in this copy, that I neither intend to omit, nor from any fear of offence have scrupled to announce my intention of treating, the subject of religion. I had supposed that the words “speculative gloom” would have conveyed this intention. I had inserted another article, which I was induced to omit, from the fear of exciting doubts and queries. This was: On the transition of natural religion into revelation, or the principle of internal guidance: and the grounds of the possibility of the connection of spiritual revelation with historic events; that is, its manifestation in the world of the senses. This meant as a preliminary--leaving, as already performed by others, the proof of the reality of this connection in the particular fact of Christianity. Herein I wished to prove only that true philosophy rather leads to Christianity, than contained anything preclusive of it, and therefore adopted the phrase used in the definition of philosophy in general: namely, The science which answers the question of things _actual_, how they are _possible_? Thus the laws of gravitation illustrate the _possibility_ of the motion of the heavenly bodies, the action of the lever, etc.; the reality of which was already known. I mention this, because the argument assigned which induced me to omit it in a prospectus was, that by making a distinction between revelation _in itself_ (_i. e._ a principle of internal supernatural guidance), and the same revelation conjoined with the power of external manifestation by supernatural works, would proclaim me to be a Quaker, and “The Friend” as intended to propagate peculiar and sectarian principles. Think then, dear Friend! what my regret was at finding that you had taken it for granted that I denied the existence of an internal monitor! I trust I am neither of Paul, or of Apollos, or of Cephas; but of Christ. Yet I feel reverential gratitude toward those who have conveyed the spirit of Christ to my heart and understanding so as to afford light to the latter and vital warmth to the former. Such gratitude I owe and feel toward W. Penn. Take his Preface to G. Fox’s Journal, and his Letter to his Son,--if they contain a faithful statement of genuine Christianity according to your faith, I am one with you. I subscribe to each and all of the principles therein laid down; and by them I propose to try, and endeavour to justify, the charge made by me (my conscience bears me witness) in the spirit of entire love against some passages of the journals of later Friends. Oh--and it is a groan of earnest aspiration! a strong wish of bitter tears and bitter self-dissatisfaction,--Oh that in all things, in self-subjugation, unwearied beneficence, and unfeigned listening and obedience to the Voice within, I were as like the evangelic John Woolman, as I know myself to be in the belief of the existence and the sovran authority of that Voice! When we meet, I will endeavour to be wholly known to you as I am, in principle at least.

A few words more. Unsuspicious of the possibility of misunderstanding, I had inserted in this prospectus Dress and Dancing among the fine Arts, the principles common to which I was to develope. Now surely anything common to Dress or Dancing with Architecture, Gardening, and Poetry could contain nothing to alarm any man who is not alarmed by Gardening, Poetry, etc., and secondly, principles common to Poetry, Music, etc., etc., could hardly be founded in the ridiculous hopping up and down in a modern ball-room, or the washes, paints, and patches of a fine lady’s toilet. It is well known how much I admired Thomas Clarkson’s Chapter on Dancing. The truth is, that I referred to the drapery and ornamental decoration of Painting, Statuary, and the Greek Spectacles; and to the scientific dancing of the ancient Greeks, the business of a life confined to a small class, and placed under the direction of particular magistrates. My object was to prove the truth of the principles by shewing that even dress and dancing, when the ingenuity and caprice of man had elaborated them into Fine Arts, were bottomed in the same principles. But desirous even to avoid suspicion, the passage will be omitted in the future prospectuses. Farewell! till we meet.

S. T. COLERIDGE. _See P. S._

P. S. Do you not know enough of the world to be convinced that by declaring myself a warm defender of the Established Church against all sectarians, or even by attacking Quakerism in particular as a sect hateful to the bigots of the day from its rejection of priesthood and outward sacraments, I should gain twenty subscribers to one? It shocks me even to think that so mean a motive could be supposed to influence me. I say aloud everywhere, that in the essentials of their faith I believe as the Quakers do, and so I make enemies of the Church, of the Calvinists, and even of the Unitarians. Again, I declare my dissatisfaction with several points both of _notion_ and of _practice_ among the present Quakers--I dare not conceal my convictions--and therefore receive little good opinion even from those, with whom I most accord. But Truth is sacred.

CLXXIII. TO THOMAS POOLE.

GRASMERE, KENDAL, February 3, 1809.

MY DEAREST POOLE,--For once in my life I shall have been blamed by you for silence, indolence, and procrastination without reason. Even now I write this letter on a speculation, for I am to take it with me to-morrow to Kendal, and if I can bring the proposed printer and publisher to final terms, to put it into the post. It would be a tiresome job were I to detail to you all the vexations, hindrances, scoundrelisms, disappointments, and pros and cons that, without the least fault or remissness on my part, have rendered it impracticable to publish “The Friend” till the first week of March. The whole, however, is now settled, provided that Pennington (a worthy old bookseller and printer of Kendal, but a _genius_ and mightily indifferent about the affairs of this life, both from that cause and from age, and from being as rich as he wishes) will become, as he has almost promised, the printer and publisher.[52]

“The Friend” will be stamped as a newspaper and under the Newspaper Act, which will take 3½d. from each shilling, but enable the essay to pass into all parts and corners of the Empire without expense or trouble. It will be so published as to appear in London every Saturday morning, and be sent off from the Kendal post to every part of the Kingdom by the Thursday morning’s post. I hope that Mr. Stuart will have the prospectuses printed by this time,--at all events, within a day or two after your receipt of this letter you will receive a parcel of them. The money is to be paid to the bookseller, the agent, in the next town, once in twenty weeks, where there are several subscribers in the same vicinity; otherwise, [it] must be remitted to me direct. This is the ugliest part of the business: but there is no getting over it without a most villainous diminution of my profits. You will, I know, exert yourself to procure me as many names as you can, for if it succeeds, it will almost _make_ me.

Among my subscribers I have Mr. Canning and Sturges Bourne, and Mr. W. Rose, of whose moral odour your nose, I believe, has had competent experience. The first prospectus I receive, I shall send with letters to Lord Egmont and Lady E. Percival, and to Mr. Acland.

You will probably have seen two of Wordsworth’s Essays in the “Courier,” signed “G.” The two last columns of the second, excepting the concluding paragraph, were written all but a few sentences by me.[53] An accident in London delayed the publication ten days. The whole, therefore, is now publishing as a pamphlet, and I believe with a more comprehensive title.

I cannot say whether I was--indeed, both I and W. W.--more pleased or affected by the whole of your last letter; it came from a very pure and warm heart through the moulds of a clear and strong brain. But I have not now time to write on these concerns. For _my_ opinions, feelings, hopes, and apprehensions, I can safely refer you to Wordsworth’s pamphlet. The minister’s conduct hitherto is easily defined. A great deal too much because not half enough. Two essays of my own on this most lofty theme,--what we are entitled to hope, what compelled to fear concerning the Spanish nation, by the light of history and psychological knowledge, you will soon see in the “Courier.” Poor Wardle![54] I fear lest his zeal may have made him confound that degree of evidence which is sufficient to convince an unprejudiced private company with that which will satisfy an unwilling numerous assembly of factious and corrupt judges. As to the truth of the charges, I have little doubt, knowing myself similar facts.

O dear Poole! Beddoes’ departure[55] has taken more hope out of my life than any former event except perhaps T. Wedgwood’s. That did indeed pull very hard at me; never a week, seldom two days have passed in which the recollection has not made me sad or thoughtful. Beddoes’ seems to pull yet harder, because it combines with the former, because it is the _second_, and because I have not been in the habit of connecting such a weight of despondency with my attachment to him as with my love of my revered and dear benefactor. Poor Beddoes! he was good and beneficent to all men, but to me he was, moreover, affectionate and loving, and latterly his sufferings had opened out his being to a delicacy, a tenderness, a moral beauty, and unlocked the source of sensibility as with a key from heaven.

My own health is more _regular_ than formerly, for I am severely temperate and take nothing that has not been pronounced medically unavoidable; yet my sufferings are often great, and I am rarely indeed wholly without pain or sensations more oppressive than definite pain. But my mind, and what is far better, my _will_ is active. I must leave a short space to add at Kendal after all is settled.

My beloved and honoured friend! may God preserve you and your obliged, and affectionately grateful,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

MY DEAREST POOLE,--Old Mr. Pennington has ultimately declined the printing and publishing; indeed, he is about to decline business altogether. There is no other in this country capable of doing the work, and to printing and publishing in London there are gigantic objections. What think you of a press at Grasmere? I will write when I get home. Oh, if you knew what a warmth of unusual feeling, what a genial air of new and living hope breathed upon me as I read that casual sentence in your letter, seeming to imply a chance we have of seeing you at Grasmere! I assure you that the whole family, Mrs. Wordsworth and her all-amiable sister, not with less warmth than W. W. and Dorothy, were made cheerful and wore a more holiday look the whole day after. Oh, _do, do_ come!

CLXXIV. TO DANIEL STUART.

Posted March 31, 1809.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--I have been severely indisposed, _knocked up_ indeed, with a complaint of a contagious nature called _the Mumps_;[56] preceded by most distressing low spirits, or rather absence of all spirits; and accompanied with deafness and stupefying perpetual _echo_ in the ear. But it is going off. Little John Wordsworth was attacked with it last year when I was in London, and from the stupor with which it suffuses the eyes and look, it was cruelly mistaken for water on the brain. It has been brought here a second time by some miners, and is a disease with little danger and no remedy.

I attributed your silence to its right cause, and I assure you when I was at Penrith and Kendal it was very pleasant to me to hear how universally the conduct of the “Courier” was extolled; indeed, you have behaved most nobly, and it is impossible but that you must have had a great weight in the displacing of that prime grievance of grievances. Among many reflections that kept crowding on my mind during the trial,[57] this was perhaps the chief--What if, after a long, long reign, some titled sycophant should whisper to Majesty, “By what means do your Ministers manage the Legislature?” “By the distribution of patronage, according to the influence of individuals who claim it.” “Do this yourself, or by your own family, and you become independent of parties, and your Ministers are your servants. The Army under a favourite son, the Church with a wife, etc., etc.” Good heavens! the very essence of the Constitution is unmoulded, and the venerable motto of our liberty, “The king can do no wrong,” becomes nonsense and blasphemy. As soon as ever my mind is a little at ease, I will put together the fragments I have written on this subject, and if Wordsworth have not anticipated me, add to it some thoughts on the effect of the military principle. We owe something to Whitbread for his quenching at the first _smell_ a possible fire. How is it possible that a man apparently so honest can talk and think as he does respecting France, peace, and Buonaparte?...

On Thursday Wordsworth, Southey, and myself, with the printer and publisher, go to Appleby to sign and seal, which paper, etc., will of course be immediately dispatched to London. I doubt not but that the £60 will be now paid at the “Courier” office in a few days; and as soon as you will let me know whether the stamped paper is to be paid for necessarily in ready money, or with what credit, I shall instantly write to some of my friends to advance me what is absolutely necessary. I can only say I am ready and eager to commence, and that I earnestly hope to see “The Friend” advertised shortly for the first of May. As to the Paper, how and from whom, and what and in what quantity, I must again leave to your judgment, and recommend to your affection for me. I have reason to believe that I shall commence with 500 names.

I write from Keswick. Mrs. Southey was delivered yester-morning of a girl.[58] I forgot to say, that I have been obliged to purchase, and have paid for, a font of types of small pica, the same with the London Prospectus, from Wilsons of Glasgow. I was assured they would cost only from £25 to £28, instead of which, £38 odd.

God bless you and

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CLXXV. TO THE SAME.

GRASMERE, KENDAL, June 13, 1809.

DEAR STUART,--I left Penrith Monday noon, and, prevented by the heavy rain from crossing Grisedale Tarn (near the summit of Helvellyn, and our most perilous and difficult Alpine Pass), the same day I slept at Luff’s, and crossed it yester-morning, and arrived here by breakfast time. I was sadly grieved at Wordsworth’s account of your late sorrows and troubles....

I cannot adequately express how much I am concerned lest anything I wrote in my last letter (though God knows under the influence of no one feeling which you would not wish me to have) should chance to have given you any additional unpleasantness, however small. Would that I had worthier means than words and professions of proving to you what my heart is....

I rise every morning at five, and work three hours before breakfast, either in letter-writing or serious composition....

I take for granted that more than the poor £60 has been expended in the paper I have received. But I have written to Mr. Clarkson to see what can be done; for it would be a sad thing to give it all up now I am going on so well merely for want of means to provide the first twenty weeks paper. My present stock will not quite suffice for three numbers. I printed 620 of No. 1, and 650 of No. 2, and so many more are called for that I shall be forced to reprint both as soon as I hear from Clarkson. The proof sheet of No. 3 goes back to-day, and with it the copy of No. 4, so that henceforth we shall be secure of regularity; indeed it was not all my fault before, but the printer’s inexperience and the multitude of errors, though from a very decent copy, which took him a full day and more in correcting. I had altered my plan for the Introductory Essays after my arrival at Penrith, which cost me exceeding trouble; but the numbers to come are in a very superior style of polish and easy intelligibility. The only thing at present which I am under the necessity of applying to you for respects Clement. It may be his interest to sell “The Friend” at his shop, and a certain number will always be sent; but I am quite in the dark as to what profits he expects. Surely not book-profits for a newspaper that can circulate by the post? And it is certainly neither my interest, nor that of the regular purchasers of “The Friend,” to have it bought at a shop, instead of receiving it as a franked letter. All I want to know is his terms, for I have quite a horror of booksellers, whose mode of carrying on trade in London is absolute rapacity....

On this ruinous plan poor Southey has been toiling for years, with an industry honourable to human nature, and must starve upon it were it not for the more profitable employment of reviewing; a task unworthy of him, or even of a man with not one half of his honour and honesty.

I have just read Wordsworth’s pamphlet, and more than fear that your friendly expectations of its sale and influence have been too sanguine. Had I not known the author I would willingly have travelled from St. Michael’s Mount to Johnny Groat’s House on a pilgrimage to see and reverence him. But from the public I am apprehensive, first, that it will be impossible to rekindle an exhausted interest respecting the Cintra Convention, and therefore that the long porch may prevent readers from entering the Temple. Secondly, that, partly from Wordsworth’s own style, which represents the chain of his thoughts and the movements of his heart, admirably for me and a few others, but I fear does not possess the more profitable excellence of translating these down into that style which might easily convey them to the understandings of common readers, and partly from Mr. De Quincey’s strange and most mistaken system of punctuation--(The periods are often alarmingly long, perforce of their construction, but De Quincey’s punctuation has made several of them immeasurable, and perplexed half the rest. Never was a stranger whim than the notion that , ; : and . could be made logical symbols, expressing all the diversities of logical connection)--but, lastly, I fear that readers, even of judgement, may complain of a want of shade and background; that it is all foreground, all in hot tints; that the first note is pitched at the height of the instrument, and never suffered to sink; that such depth of feeling is so incorporated with depth of thought, that the attention is kept throughout at its utmost strain and stretch; and--but this for my own feeling. I could not help feeling that a considerable part is almost a self-robbery from some great philosophical poem, of which it would form an appropriate part, and be fitlier attuned to the high dogmatic eloquence, the oracular [tone] of impassioned blank verse. In short, cold readers, conceited of their supposed judgement, on the score of their possessing nothing else, and for that reason only, taking for granted that they _must_ have judgement, will abuse the book as positive, violent, and “in a mad passion;” and readers of sense and feeling will have no other dread, than that the Work (if it should die) would die of a plethora of the highest qualities of combined philosophic and poetic genius. The Apple Pie they may say is made all of Quinces. I much admired our young friend’s note on Sir John Moore and his despatch;[59] it was excellently arranged and urged. I have had no opportunity, as yet, to speak a word to Wordsworth himself about it; I wrote to you as usual in full confidence.

I shall not be a little anxious to have your opinion of my third number. Lord Lonsdale blames me for excluding party politics and the events of the day from my plan. I exclude both the one and the other, only as far as they are merely _party_, _i. e._ personal and temporal interests, or merely events of To-day, that are defunct in the To-morrow. I flatter myself that I have been the first, who will have given a calm, disinterested account of our Constitution as it really _is_ and _how_ it is so, and that I have, more radically than has been done before, shown the unstable and boggy grounds on which all systematic reformers hitherto have stood. But be assured that I shall give up this opinion with joy, and consider a truer view of the question a more than recompense for the necessity of retracting what I have written.

God bless you! Do, pray, let me hear from you, though only three lines.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CLXXVI. TO THOMAS POOLE.

October 9, 1809.

MY DEAR POOLE,--I received yours late last night, and sincerely thank you for the contents. The whole shall be arranged as you have recommended. Yet if I know my own wishes, I would far rather you had refused me, and said you should have an opportunity in a few days of explaining your motives _in person_, for oh, the autumn is divine here. You never beheld, I will answer for it, such combinations of exquisite _beauty_ with _sufficient_ grandeur of elevation, even in Switzerland. Besides, I sorely want to talk with you on many points.

All the defects you have mentioned I am perfectly aware of, and am anxiously endeavouring to avoid. There is too often an _entortillage_ in the sentences and even in the thought (which nothing can justify), and, always almost, a stately piling up of _story_ on _story_ in one architectural period, which is not suited to a periodical essay or to essays at all (Lord Bacon, whose style mine more nearly resembles than any other, in his greater works, thought Seneca a better model for his Essays), but least of all suited to the present illogical age, which has, in imitation of the French, rejected all the _cements_ of language, so that a popular book is now a mere bag of marbles, that is, aphorisms and epigrams on one subject. But be assured that the numbers will improve; indeed, I hope that if the dire stoppage have not prevented it, you will have seen proof of improvement already in the seventh and eighth numbers,--still more in the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth numbers. Strange! but the “Three Graves” is the _only_ thing I have yet heard generally praised and inquired after!! Remember how many different guests I have at my Round Table. I groan beneath the _Errata_, but I am thirty miles cross-post from my printer and publisher, and Southey, who has been my corrector, has been strangely oscitant, or, which I believe is sometimes the case, has not understood the sentences, and thought they might have a meaning for _me_ though they had not for him. There was one direful one,[60] No. 5, p. 80, lines 3 and 4. Read,--“its _functions_ being to take up the passive affections of the senses into distinct _thoughts_ and _judgements_, according to its own essential _forms_, formæ formantes in the language of Lord Bacon in contradistinction to the formæ formatæ.”

My greatest difficulty will be to avoid that _grievous_ defect of running one number into another, I not being present at the printing. To really cut down or stretch out every subject to the Procrustes-Bed of sixteen pages is not possible without a sacrifice of my whole plan, but most often I will divide them polypus-wise, so that the first half should get itself a new tail of its own, and the latter a new head, and _always_ take care to leave off at a paragraph. With my best endeavours I am baffled in respect of making one Essay fill one number. The tenth number is, W. thinks, the most interesting, “On the Errors of both Parties,” or “Extremes Meet;” and, do what I would, it stretched to seven or eight pages more; but I have endeavoured to take your advice _in toto_, and shall announce to the public that, with the exception of my volume of Political Essays and State Memorials, and some technical works of Logic and Grammar, I shall consider “The Friend” as both the reservoir and the living fountain of all my mind, that is, of both my powers and my attainments, and shall therefore publish all my poems in “The Friend,” as occasion rises. I shall begin with the “Fears in Solitude,” and the “Ode on France,” which will fill up the remainder of No. 11; so that my next Essay on vulgar Errors concerning Taxation, in which I have alluded to a conversation with you, will just fill No. 12 by itself.

I have been much affected by your efforts respecting poor Blake. Cannot you with propriety give me that narrative? But, above all, if you have no _particular_ objection, no _very_ particular and _insurmountable_ reason against it, do, do let me have that divine narrative of John Walford,[61] which of itself stamps you a poet of the first class in the pathetic, and the painting of poetry so very rarely combined.

As to politics, I am sad at the very best. Two cabinet ministers _duelling_ on Cabinet measures like drunken Irishmen. O heaven, Poole! this is wringing the dregs in order to drink the last drops of degradation. Such base insensibility to the awfulness of their situation and the majesty of the country! As soon as I can get them transcribed, I will send you some most interesting letters from the ablest soldier I ever met with (extra aide-de-camp to Sir J. Moore, and shot through the body at Flushing, but still alive); they will serve as a key to more than one woe-trumpet in the Apocalypse of national calamity. But the truth is, that to combine a government every way fitted as ours is for quiet, justice, freedom, and commercial activity _at home_, with the conditions of raising up that individual greatness, and of securing in every department the very man for the very place, which are requisite for maintaining the safety of our Empire and the Majesty of our power abroad, is a state-riddle which yet remains to be solved. I have thought myself as well employed as a private citizen can be, in drawing off well-intentioned patriots from the wrong scent and pointing out _what_ the _true_ evils are and _why_, and the exceeding difficulty of removing them without hazarding worse.... I was asked for a motto for a _market clock_. I uttered the following literally, without a moment’s premeditation:--

What now, O man! thou dost or mean’st to do
Will help to give thee peace, or make thee rue,
When hovering o’er the Dot this hand shall tell
The moment that secures thee _Heaven_ or _Hell_.[62]

May God bless you! My kindest remembrances to Mr. Chubb, and to Ward. Pray remember me when you write to your sister and Mr. King. Oh, but Poole! do stretch a point and come. If the F. rises to a 1,000 I will frank you. Do come; never will you have layed out money better.

CLXXVII. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY.

December, 1809.

MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--I suspect you have misunderstood me, and applied to the Maltese Regiment what I said of the Corsican Rangers. Both are bad enough, but of the former I know little, of course, as I was away from Malta before the regiment had left the island. But in the Essays (2 or 3) which I am now writing on Sir A. Ball, I shall mention it as an exemplification among many others of his foresight. It was a _job_, I have no doubt, merely to get General Valette a lucrative regiment; but _G. V._ is dead, and it was not such a job as that of the Corsican Rangers, which can be made _appear_ glaring. The long and short of the story is, that the men were four fifths married, would have fought as well as the best, _at home_ and behind their own walls, but could not be expected to fight abroad, where they had no interest. Besides, it was _cruel_, _shameful_ to take 1,500 men as soldiers for any part of our enormous Empire, out of a population, man, woman, and child, not at that time more than 100,000. There were two Maltese Militia Regiments officered by their own Maltese nobility--these against the entreaties and _tears_ of the men and officers (I myself saw them weeping), against the remonstrances and memorial (written by myself) of Sir A. B., were melted into one large one, officered by English officers, and a general affront given to the island, _because_ General Valette had great friends at the War Office, Duke of York, etc.! This is the whole, but do not either expose yourself or me to judicial inquiries. It is one thing to _know_ a thing, and another to be able to _prove_ it in a law court. This remark applies to the _damnable_ treatment of the prisoners of war at Malta.

I should have thought your facts, with which I am familiar, a confirmation of Miss Schöning.[63] Be that as it may, take my word for it, that in _substance_ the story is as certain as that Dr. Dodd was hung. To mention one proof only, Von Hess,[64] the celebrated historian of Hamburg, and, since Lessing, the best German prosist, went himself to Nuremberg, examined into the facts officially and personally, and it was on him that I relied, though if you knew the government of Nuremberg, you would see that the first account could not have been published as it was, if it had not been too notorious even for concealment to be hoped for. After I left Germany, Von Hess had a public controversy that threatened to become a _Diet_ concern with the magistrates of Nuremberg, for some other bitter charges against them. I have their defence of themselves, but they do not even attempt to deny the _fact_ of _Harlin_ and _Schöning_. But, indeed, Southey! it is almost as bad as if I could have mistaken _e converso_ Patch’s trial for a novel.

Your remark on the voice is most just, but that was my purpose. Not only so, but the _whole_ passage was inserted, and intertruded after the rest was written, _reluctante amanuensi meâ_, in order to _unrealize_ it even at the expense of _dis_naturalizing it. Lady B. therefore pleased me by saying, “never was the golden tint of the poet more judiciously employed,” etc. For this reason, too, I introduced the simile of the leaf, etc., etc. I not only thought the “voice” part out of place, but in bad taste _per se_.

May God bless you all.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CLXXVIII. TO THOMAS POOLE.

GRASMERE, KENDAL, January 28, 1810.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--My “mantraps and spring guns in this garden” have hitherto existed only in the painted board, _in terrorem_. Of course, I have received and thank you for both your letters. What Wordsworth may do I do not know, but I think it highly probable that I shall settle in or near London. Of the fate of “The Friend” I remain in the same ignorance nearly as at the publication of the 20th November. It would make you sick were I to waste my paper by detailing the numerous instances of meanness in the mode of payment and discontinuance, especially among the Quakers. So just was the answer I once made in the presence of some “Friends” to the query: What is genuine Quakerism? Answer, The antithesis of the present Quakers. I have received this evening together with yours, one as a specimen. (N. B. Three days after the publication of the 21st Number, and sixteen days after the publication of the “Supernumerary” [number of “The Friend,” January 11, 1810], a bill upon a postmaster, an order of discontinuance, and information that any others that may come will not be paid for, as if I had been gifted with prophecy. And this precious epistle directed, “To Thomas Coleridge, of Grazemar”! And yet this Mr. ---- would think himself libelled, if he were called a dishonest man.)... We will take for granted that “The Friend” can be continued. On this supposition I have lately studied “The Spectator,” and with increasing pleasure and admiration. Yet it must be evident to you that there is a class of thoughts and feelings, and these, too, the most important, even practically, which it would be impossible to convey in the manner of Addison, and which, if Addison had possessed, he would not have been Addison. Read, for instance, Milton’s prose tracts, and only _try_ to conceive them translated into the style of “The Spectator,” or the finest part of Wordsworth’s pamphlet. It would be less absurd to wish that the serious Odes of Horace had been written in the same style as his Satires and Epistles. Consider, too, the very different objects of “The Friend,” and of “The Spectator,” and above all do not forget, that these are AWEFUL TIMES! that the love of reading as a refined pleasure, weaning the mind from GROSSER enjoyments, which it was one of “The Spectator’s” chief objects to awaken, has by that work, and those that followed (Connoisseur, World, Mirror, etc.), but still more, by Newspapers, Magazines, and Novels, been carried into excess: and “The Spectator” itself has innocently contributed to the general taste for unconnected writing, just as if “Reading made easy” should act to give men an aversion to words of more than two syllables, instead of drawing them _through_ those words into the power of reading books in general. In the present age, whatever flatters the mind in its ignorance of its ignorance, tends to aggravate that ignorance, and, I apprehend, does on the whole do more harm than good. Have you read the debate on the Address? What a melancholy picture of the intellectual feebleness of the country! So much on the one side of the question. On the other (1) I will, preparatory to writing on any chosen subject, consider whether it _can_ be treated popularly, and with that lightness and variety of illustration which form the charms of “The Spectator.” If it can, I will do my best. If not, next, whether yet there may not be furnished by the _results_ of such an Essay thoughts and truths that may be so treated, and form a second Essay. (2) I shall always, _besides_ this, have at least one number in four of rational entertainment, such as “Satyrane’s Letters,” as instructive as I can, but yet making entertainment the chief object in my own mind. But, lastly, in the Supplement of “The Friend” I shall endeavour to include whatever of higher and more abstruse meditation may be needed as the foundations of all the work after it; and the difference between those who will read and master that Supplement, and those who decline the toil, will be simply this, that what to the former will be _demonstrated conclusions_, the latter must start from as from _postulates_, and (to all whose minds have not been sophisticated by a half-philosophy) _axioms_. For no two things, that are yet different, can be in closer harmony than the deductions of a profound philosophy, and the dictates of plain common sense. Whatever tenets are obscure in the one, and requiring the greatest powers of abstraction to reconcile, are the same which are held in manifest contradiction by the common sense, and yet held and firmly believed, without sacrificing A to --A, or --A to A.... After this work I shall endeavour to pitch my note to the idea of a common, well-educated, thoughtful man, of ordinary talents; and the exceptions to this rule shall not form more than one fifth of the work. If with all this it will not do, well! And _well_ it will be, in its noblest sense: for _I_ shall have done my best. Of parentheses I may be too fond, and will be on my guard in this respect. But I am certain that no work of impassioned and eloquent reasoning ever did or could subsist without them. They are the _drama_ of reason, and present the thought growing, instead of a mere _Hortus siccus_. The aversion to them is one of the numberless symptoms of a feeble Frenchified Public. One other observation: I have reason to _hope_ for contributions from strangers. Some from _you I rely_ on, and these will give a variety which is highly desirable--so much so, that it would weigh with me even to the admission of many things from unknown correspondents, though but little above mediocrity, if they were proportionately short, and on subjects which I should not myself treat....

May God bless you, and your affectionate

S. T. COLERIDGE.

CHAPTER XI

A JOURNALIST, A LECTURER, A PLAYWRIGHT

1810-1813