Chapter XXIX: Book II: some lines by Coleridge which were afterwards

published, with additions, as _The Destiny of Nations_ in
_Sibylline Leaves_ (1817). Southey refers to the poem
(Preface, 1837) as ‘crudely conceived, rashly prefaced, and
prematurely hurried into the world.’ _The Examiner_ in 1816
published a selection of ‘Specimens of Early Jacobin Poetry,’
entitled ‘Acanthologia.’ One of these (Aug. 25, 1816) was the
‘Inscription for a Monument at Old Sarum,’ with a motto from the
_Quarterly Review_, ‘A Reformer is worse than a housebreaker.’

_Fire, Famine and Slaughter._ First published in _The Morning
Post_ (Jan. 8, 1798) and republished in _Sibylline Leaves_
(1817) with an apologetic preface. Gale and Fenner, publishers
of the _Statesman’s Manual_, carried on business in Paternoster
Row.

_‘Whose grief,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act V. Scene 1.

158. _The editor of ‘The Times.’_ Dr. Stoddart.

_King Cambyses’ vein._ _Henry IV._, Part I. Act II. Scene 4.

‘_Horrors on horror’s head accumulating._’ _Othello_, Act III.
Scene 3.

_Mr. Koenig’s new press._ The steam printing-press of Frederick
Koenig was adopted by _The Times_ in 1814, the number for Nov.
29 containing the announcement that ‘our journal of this day
presents to the public the practical result of the greatest
improvement connected with printing since the discovery of the
art itself,’ See Fox Bourne’s _English Newspapers_, I. 356.

158. _Dr. Slop’s curse._ This name was frequently applied to Stoddart
after he had become editor of _The New Times_. In 1820 William
Hone published a burlesque on _The New Times_, entitled ‘A Slap
at Slop.’

_The roasting of Protestants._ At Nismes. See _ante_, p. 118.

_Lord Castlereagh’s Letter to Mon Prince._ A letter from
Castlereagh, dated Vienna, 11th October 1814, addressed to
Prince Hardenberg, the representative of Prussia at the Vienna
Congress, in which Castlereagh states that he can raise no
objection to the incorporation of Saxony with the Prussian
monarchy. The letter provoked much comment in the press during
the following year and was referred to in the House of Commons
(April 10, 1815).

159. _Like Perillus’s bull._ The bronze bull made for Phalaris by
Perillus, who was himself its first victim:—

‘Thus Phalaris Perillus taught to low,
And made him season first the brazen cow.
A rightful doom, the laws of nature cry,
’Tis, the artificers of death should die.’
Dryden, Ovid’s _Art of Love_, I. 737–40.

‘_His most sweet voice._’ _Coriolanus_, Act II. Scene 3.

_Mr. Walter._ John Walter the Second (1776–1847), son of the
founder of _The Times_, who died in 1812.

_‘Thy stone,’ etc._ Pope, _Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day_, 66–7.

‘_Once a Jacobin always a Jacobin._’ Coleridge contributed an
article under this heading to _The Morning Post_ (_Essays on his
own Times_, II. 542), in which he stated that Pitt in one of his
most powerful speeches (Feb. 17, 1800) had given the adage
‘every advantage that is derivable from stately diction.’
According to Coleridge’s own report (_Essay on his own Times_,
II. 295) Pitt said: ‘The mind once tainted with Jacobinism can
never be wholly free from the taint; I know no means of
purification; when it does not break out on the surface, it
still lurks in the vitals; no antidote can approach the subtlety
of the venom, no length of quarantine secure us against the
obstinacy of the pestilence.’ See _ante_, note to p. 110.

160. ‘_What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba._’ For this and the two
succeeding quotations see _Hamlet_, Act II. Scene 2.

_That unfortunate Miss Bailey._ George Colman the Younger’s _Love
Laughs at Locksmiths_, Act II.

_‘Society became,’ etc._ Wordsworth, _The Excursion_, Book III.

161. _Proof against conviction._ In _The Examiner_ this paragraph was
succeeded by the following passage:—‘What a pity he is not a
poet or a man of genius! (Your dull fellows ought to be honest;
for every body ought to be something.) He might then instead of
wholesome truths have given us agreeable lies; for plain facts,
pompous fictions; he might have strewed the flowers of poetry on
the rotten carcase of corruption, and have made the ugly face of
war look amiable at a distance. He might have trumped up a
romantic episode about the Duchess d’Angouleme,[68] as Mr. Burke
did about her wretched mother, or have seen visions on the
mountain tops like Mr. Wordsworth, or have dreamt a dream more
in the manner of Spenser than The Laureat’s Lay. There might
then have been something like an observation, a thought, a
trope, a jest, a lucky epithet, a well written sentence, in all
the long, dreary, heavy columns of _The Times_ newspaper. But as
our author cannot soar, he grovels; and no one ever sunk so low.
He is a perfect Grub-street. His want of eloquence renders him
abusive; he has no power over _words_, or he would not call
_names_ at the rate he does. He throws dirt and rubbish at the
heads of his adversaries, because he can get nothing else to
throw. Do you think he would go on for ever with that round of
slang-phrases, dreadful to the ear, and petrific even to behold;
monstrous, prodigious, unutterable, without argument, without
sense or decency, calculated only to stupify or disgust, with
which he piles up the columns of _The Times_ newspaper, if he
had any resources either of imagination or understanding? It is
the want of power equal to his will, that inflames his malice
and inflates his style; he makes up for what he wants in
strength, by coarseness; for what he wants in variety, by
repetition; for what he wants in sallies of wit, by systematic
dulness; for what he wants in reason, by brutal outrage. And
then, did any mortal ever read such a style? The flowers of
Billingsgate, arranged according to the rules of Lindley
Murray’s English Exercises, with all the ridiculous pedantry of
subjunctive moods and adverbial expletives:

“In many a winding bout
Of linked dulness long drawn-out.”[69]

It is as if the celebrated pastry-cook in Cornhill[70] should get
cart-loads of mud to do up in twelfth cakes, with cuts of kings,
queens, and bishops, for his Christmas customers. All that is
low in understanding, vulgar and sordid in principle in city
politics, is seen exuding from the formal jaws of _The Times_
newspaper, as we see the filth, and slime, and garbage, and
offal of this great city pouring into the Thames, from the
sewers and conduit-pipes of the scavenger’s company. It is a
patent water-closet for the dirty uses of legitimacy: a leaden
cistern for obsolete prejudices and upstart sophistry “to knot
and gender in.”[71] Is this an exaggerated account? No. We have
not words to do justice to the subject. _The Times_ newspaper is
a phenomenon without any parallel in history: it is the triumph
of the reign of George III. It is supposed to be the organ of
the Stock Exchange politics; and, to be sure, there is a
wonderful sympathy between them. Neither Burke nor Junius would
have done so well. There is nothing in the pages of _The Times_
that can lose in loftiness or elegance by repetition in the
money-market, or draw off the attention of the bulls and bears
from their ledgers, or their soups and venison. The vulgarity of
the Editor’s style might even receive a romantic tincture from
the Hebraism of its pronunciation, and its monotony would
be agreeably relieved by the discordant gabble of that
disinterested congregation of stock-jobbing Jews and Gentiles.
The secret of the composition of _The Times_ is this. The city
wants a bugbear to suit their interest, and the Editor of the
city paper creates a bugbear out of his malice. He nicknames
this bugbear, but as he does not believe in it, he repeats his
nickname ten or a dozen times every day, till by so doing he
begins to believe it. They begin to believe it too; and the echo
and buz of the Stock Exchange gives him courage to go on. He
then tries other and more odious nicknames, which he and others
believe, not because they are true, but because they are odious,
and gratify the malice of the writer, and answer the readers’
ends. Thus the city and the city Editor go on hand in hand,
creating a bugbear out of nothing, and swelling it into a
monster, heaping all sorts of vices and deformities upon it, and
believing them all, in proportion as they are incredible and
contradictory—if they are disproved, repeating them the
louder—making the disgust, fear and hatred, which their bugbear
inspires, a proof of its existence, and determined more
and more to indulge their disgust, fear and hatred, in
proportion as their passions and prejudices have no other
foundation than their own spite and credulity—drowning reason
in passion—overcoming common sense, by shocking common
decency—believing in the chimeras of their own brain, from their
very hideousness, as children put faith in apparitions, in
proportion to their dread of them—ringing everlastingly in each
other’s ears, what they each wish to believe; and believing that
there is some reason for the everlasting din and noise they
make, because they make it—creating a war-bugbear, because they
wanted something to go to war with, requiring the same wanton
and unprincipled sacrifices of the blood and treasure of their
country to be made to this phantom of their own making, as to
the direst necessity; and persisting in the justice and wisdom
of their measures, from the very miseries which these helpmates
of the Bourbons have brought upon the world—to gratify the
mercantile avarice of the Stock Exchange and the literary vanity
of its tool, the Editor of _The Times_. The interest of the
Stock Exchange, and the philosophy of the Editor of _The Times_,
no longer, however, draw the same way and we suspect they will
soon dissolve partnership. Such writers do their country best
service in the end; “kept like an apple in the jaw of an ape,
first mouthed, and last swallowed: it is but squeezing them, and
spunge, you shall be dry again.”[72]

161. ILLUSTRATIONS, _etc._ ON MODERN LAWYERS AND POETS. _The
Examiner_, Literary Notices, No. 20, Dec. 22, 1816.

_Facilis, etc._ _Æneid_, VI. 126 _et seq._

_‘Let no man,’ etc._ _Merchant of Venice_, Act II. Scene 9.

162 _Sam Sharpset._ In Thomas Morton’s (1764?–1838) _The Slave_,
acted at Covent Garden, Nov. 12, 1816.

_‘The Devil,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act II. Scene 2.

_‘Britain’s warriors,’ etc._

‘Of Britain’s Court ... a proud assemblage there,
Her Statesmen, and her Warriors, and her Fair.’
Southey, _Carmen Nuptiale_, The Dream, Stanza 16.

163. _‘Ours is an honest employment,’ etc._ _Beggar’s Opera_, Act I.
Scene 1.

_If he finds it in his retainer._ In _The Examiner_ Hazlitt adds
in a parenthesis, ‘See the State Trials for 1794.’ Edward Law
(1750–1818), created Lord Ellenborough and Lord Chief Justice of
England in 1802, was one of the counsel for the Crown against
Hardy and Horne Tooke in 1794.

‘_Look on both indifferently._’ Julius Caesar, Act I. Scene 2.

164. _Garrow._ See note to Vol. II. p. 186.

165. ‘_The lodged hatred._’ _Merchant of Venice_, Act I. Scene 4.

_Marshal Ney._ Ney was shot on Dec. 7, 1815.

_The declaration of the 25th of March._ Hazlitt refers to the
Declaration of the Allied Powers (Vienna, 13th March, 1815)
which proclaimed that Buonaparte by returning from Elba, had
‘placed himself without the pale of civil and social relations.’

165. _‘With famine,’ etc._ _Henry V._, Act I. Chorus.

166. _‘My soul,’ etc._ Goldsmith, _The Traveller_, 165.

‘_Carnage was the daughter of Humanity._’ See note to Vol. I. 214.

_Pantisocracy’s equal hills._ Pantisocracy, defined by Southey as
‘the equal government of all,’ was to have been carried into
practice in America by Southey, and Coleridge, and others, but
Southey abandoned the scheme. See Mrs. Sandford’s _Thomas Poole
and his Friends_.

_The spirit of poetry, etc._ Hazlitt published this paragraph in
_The Round Table_. See Vol. I. pp. 151–3, and notes.

‘_Constrained by mastery._’

‘That Love will not submit to be controlled
By mastery.’
Wordsworth, _The Excursion_, Book VI.

‘_Heaven’s own tinct._’ _Cymbeline_, Act II. Scene 2.

_‘Being so majestical,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act I. Scene 1.

168. ‘_No figures nor no fantasies._’ _Julius Caesar_, Act II. Scene 1.

‘_No trivial fond records._’ _Hamlet_, Act I. Scene 5.

_‘The bare earth,’ etc._

‘To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.’
Wordsworth, _To my Sister_.

169. ‘THE TIMES’ NEWSPAPER, _etc._ _The Examiner_, Literary
Notices, No. 22, Jan. 12. 1817.

_‘Doubtless the pleasure,’ etc._ Butler’s _Hudibras_, Canto iii.

_We some time ago, etc._ See _ante_, pp. 121–7.

_What we said about Coriolanus._ Hazlitt refers to a theatrical
criticism of his own which appeared in _The Examiner_ on Dec.
15, 1816, and was reprinted in _A View of the English Stage_,
and also (with a few variations) in _Characters of Shakespeare’s
Plays_. See Vol. I. of the present edition, pp. 214 _et seq._

‘_Bore through its castle walls._’ _Richard II._, Act III. Scene
2.

_In the year 1792._ Burke’s pensions were granted in 1794. Paine’s
trial took place in Dec. 1792, after he had escaped to Paris.

170. _‘Oh, name him not,’ etc._ _Julius Caesar_, Act II. Scene 1.

171. ‘_Empty praise or solid pudding._’ Pope’s _Dunciad_, I. 52.

_Companions of Ulysses._ ‘He [Buonaparte] dispersed the
_Compagnons du Lys_, as Ulysses slew the suitors.’ Hazlitt’s
_Life of Napoleon_, Chap. liii.

172. Note 1. _James Madison._ President of the United States during the war
with England, 1812–1814.

_Tom Jones._ Book I. Chaps, x.–xiii.

175. _Omne tulit punctum._ Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 343.

_The last of these props, etc._ Stoddart left _The Times_ at the
beginning of 1817. The following passage in _The Examiner_ is
omitted from the essay as republished: ‘It was to force this
living image of kingly power, this wretched mockery of divine
right, this spurious offspring of the foul blatant Beast, back
on the French that has been the cause, the end and origin, of
all this mischief: and it was for having kept it in check for so
many years by his valour and genius, for having put a hook in
its nostrils, and made it lower its grisly crest, and cease its
horrid roar, and retire to its obscure, obscene den, that
Buonaparte was nicknamed by the two celebrated persons
above-mentioned ‘the enemy of the human race’; and if instead of
packing off Louis the Desired from Hartwell, we had sent over
that idol of eastern temples the _Boa Constrictor_ from
Piccadilly, on the same proud errand, decorated with the symbols
of the Universe and of Ancient Wisdom, instead of Lilies and San
Benitos, we can see no possible reason why John Bull and the
French people might not have been equally satisfied: nor what
should have hindered Mr. Southey from adapting one of Wesley’s
hymns to the occasion, or Mr. Wordsworth from mouthing out some
deep no-meaning about “royal fortitude,” and “time-hallowed
laws,” or Mr. Coleridge from proving that the Serpent was the
more ancient and sacred symbol of the two.’

‘_In contempt of the will of the people._’ Burke, _Reflections on
the Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 17).

176. _Odia in longum, etc._ Tacitus, _Annals_, I. 69.

_Three poets._ Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge.

177. INTERESTING FACTS, _etc._ _The Examiner_, Literary Notices,
No. 23, Feb. 2, 1817.

_‘Come draw the curtain,’ etc._ _Twelfth Night_, Act I. Scene 5.

‘_The dark blanket._’ _Macbeth_, Act I. Scene 5.

‘_Pah! and smells so._’ _Hamlet_, Act V. Scene 1.

_‘That harlot old,’ etc._ See _ante_, note to p. 36.

‘_Sweet thunder._’ _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act IV. Scene 1.

178. _‘She has changed,’ etc._ _Henry VI._, Part II., Act III. Scene 2.

_‘Dressed in a robe,’ etc._ ‘A fair hot wench in flame-coloured
taffeta.’ _Henry IV._, Part I., Act I. Scene 2.

_‘Stand now,’ etc._ Hazlitt quotes sundry scriptural denunciations
of Babylon. See _Isaiah_, chap, xlvii., and _Revelations_, chap.
xvii.

‘_The uses of legitimacy._’ Cf. ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity.’
_As You Like It_, Act II. Scene 1.

179. _Lord William Bentinck._ Lord William Cavendish Bentinck
(1774–1839), afterwards Governor-General of India, went in 1811
to Sicily as envoy and commander-in-chief of the British forces.
In 1814 he commanded an expedition against Genoa.

180. _Sir Robert Wilson._ Sir Robert Thomas Wilson (1777–1849), who,
after a stormy life, was appointed Governor of Gibraltar, was at
this time with the Austrian army in Italy.

_‘How little knew’st thou,’ etc._ Rowe’s _The Fair Penitent_, Act
IV. Scene 1.

_‘You have in part redeemed your errors,’ etc._ The reference is
probably to Wilson’s share in the escape of Lavalette. See
_ante_, p. 157.

_The immortal Congress._ Bentinck had issued a declaration at
Genoa promising independence to that city and the support of
England in effecting the unity of Italy, but the declaration was
disavowed by Castlereagh at the Vienna Congress.

181. _The Duke of Levis._ François, Duc de Levis (1720–87), created
Marshal of France in 1783 and Duc in 1784, fought against
England in the American War.

183. INTERESTING FACTS, _etc._ (concluded). _The Examiner_,
Literary Notices, No. 24, Feb. 9, 1817.

186. _We are glad the Duke is not an Englishman._ In _The Examiner_
Hazlitt wrote, ‘Is not the Duke an Irishman?’

192. _The fool in Lear._ See Act II. Scene 4.

_Berthier._ Louis Alexandre Berthier (1753–1815), one of
Napoleon’s marshals, who committed suicide or was murdered at
Bamberg, in Bavaria, on June 1, 1815.

192. ‘_A master-leaver, and a fugitive._’ _Antony and Cleopatra_, Act
IV. Scene 9.

WAT TYLER; A DRAMATIC POEM, _etc._ _The Examiner_, Literary
Notices, No. 25, March 9, 1817.

_Wat Tyler; a Drama_, which Southey had written ‘in the course of
three mornings in 1794,’ was surreptitiously published in 1817,
with a Preface suitable to recent circumstances, and an
injunction to restrain the publication was refused by Lord Eldon
on the ground of the mischievous tendency of the work. Southey
defended himself from the charge of inconsistency in _A Letter
to William Smith, M.P._ See _ante_, pp. 210–232. He himself
published the Drama in the 1837 edition of his Poems, in order,
as he says, ‘that it may not be supposed I think it any reproach
to have written it, or that I am more ashamed of having been a
republican, than of having been a boy.’

_‘So was it,’ etc._ Wordsworth’s ‘_My heart leaps up._’

193. _The Article on Parliamentary Reform._ Republished in
_Essays, Moral and Political_, I. 327 _et seq._

‘_Fierce extremes._’ _Paradise Lost_, II. 599.

‘_Present ignorant thought._’ Cf.—

‘Thy letters have transported me beyond
This ignorant present.’
_Macbeth_, Act I. Scene 5.

_‘Discourse of reason,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act I. Scene 2 and Act IV.
Scene 4.

_The woman that deliberates is lost._ Addison’s _Cato_, Act IV.
Scene 1.

_‘His poor virtue,’ etc._ _Henry IV._, Part II., Act II. Scene 4.

194. _John Ball._ John Ball, the preacher of social equality, was
executed in 1381 for his share in Tyler’s rebellion. See Burke’s
account of ‘that reverend patriarch of sedition’ in _An Appeal
from the New to the Old Whigs_ (_Works_, Bohn, III. 88), and
William Morris’s _A Dream of John Ball_ (1888) for the view of a
modern disciple.

‘_A sort of squint._’ Cf. _A Letter to William Gifford_, vol. I.
p. 379.

_Morceau I._ _Wat Tyler_, Act I.

‘_Privileg’d r——s._’ ‘Ruffians’ in the 1837 edition.

195. _Morceau II._ Act I.

196. _Morceau III._ Act I.

_Morceau IV._ Act II. Scene 1.

_‘When Adam delv’d,’ etc._ The text of John Ball’s famous sermon.
‘Of this sapient maxim, however,’ says Burke, ‘I do not give him
for the inventor. It seems to have been handed down by
tradition, and had certainly become proverbial.’

197. _Morceau V._ Act II. Scene 1.

198. _Morceau VI._ Act II. Scene 3.

199. _Morceau VII._ Act III. Scene 1.

200. _Morceau the Last._ Act III. Scene 2.

THE COURIER, ETC. From _The Examiner_, March 30, 1817.

_‘Doth not the appetite alter,’ etc._ _Much Ado about Nothing_,