cracy. Coleridge and Lamb at the to Cambridge, full of the new scheme of Pantisocracy and emigration to the Susquehana, Pantiso- in which Southey, Lovell, Favell, Burnett, Robert Allen, Le Grice and others, with Southey's mother and all the Frickers, were to join him. After being talked about, and forming the subject of many plans, letters and conversations, this wild and extravagant project was in the course of about a year abandoned, as might have been expected. Michaelmas Term of 1794 was the last which Coleridge kept in Cambridge. We find him spending the vacation following in Salutation. London, mainly with Charles Lamb. At this period his series of "Sonnets on Eminent Characters " and a few other pieces, appeared from time to time in the Morning Chronicle. Lamb refers in his letters to their meetings during this season at the "Cat and Salutation." The lines" to a Friend, together with an unfinished Poem," dated December 1794, * were addressed to Lamb before the dark shadow had fallen over his life: they refer to Mary Lamb also, and to her brother's affectionate tendance at her sick-bed, and Coleridge alludes also to the early loss of his own only sister, a few years before. Poems in Lectures Of In the beginning of 1795 Coleridge returned with Southey to Bristol. During the spring and summer of this year he devoted himself to the delivery of public lectures in that city. these the first four (or the substance of them), delivered in the month of February, were shortly afterwards printed in a pamphlet form.† at Bristol. * Vide infrà, pp. 110-112. +1. A Moral and Political Lecture, delivered at Bristol. By In a copy of the Conciones ad Populum, on reperusing it far on in later life at Highgate, Coleridge wrote the following remarks, in defence of his substantial political consistency throughout the whole of his career as an author:-" Except the two or three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical necessity and Unitarianism, I see little or nothing in these outbursts of my youthful zeal to retract, and with the exception of some flame-coloured epithets applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and others, or rather to personifications (for such they really were to me), as little to regret. Qualis ab initio eσtnon (S. T. C). In June and July Coleridge gave a course of six lectures, presenting a comparative view of the Civil War under Charles I. and the French Revolution. The tone throughout them all was vehemently hostile to the policy of the great Minister of that day; but it was equally opposed to the spirit and maxims of Ja cobinism. Another course of six Lectures followed course of "On Revealed Religion, its corruptions, Second and its political views." The Prospectus Lectures. states that "these Lectures are intended S. T. Coleridge, of Jesus College, Cambridge. Bristol : Printed by George Routh, in Corn-Street, (price sixpence), pp. 19: substantially the same as the Introductory Address in the Conciones. Noticed in the Critical Review of April 1795. 2. Conciones ad Populum, or Addresses to the People. By S. T. Coleridge, 1795, pp. 69. The Preface is dated Clevedon, November 16, 1795. Then follows "A Letter from Liberty to her dear friend Famine." § Introductory Address, dated February 1795. § On the Present War, same date. 3. The Plot Discovered; or An Address to the People, against Ministerial Treason. By S. T. Coleridge. Bristol, 1795, PP. 52. for two classes of men, Christians and Infidels; to the former, that they may be able to give a reason for the hope that is in them;—to the latter, that they may not determine against Christianity from arguments applicable to its corruptions only." Nothing remains of these Addresses, nor of two detached Lectures or Sermons on the Slave Trade and the Hair Powder Tax, which were delivered in the interval between the two principal courses. It has been stated by one of his biographers,* that during an excursion into Somersetshire first meeting in the summer of this year, Coleridge first with Words- met Wordsworth at the house of a Mr. Supposed worth. Pinney, and Mr. Gillman† had seen (he says) a letter of this period from Wordsworth to a brother of Charles Mathews the elder, who was at that time educating for the bar, in which Wordsworth wrote: "To-morrow I am going to Bristol to see those two extraordinary young men, Southey and Coleridge." If Wordsworth and Coleridge actually met once or twice at so early a period, which for reasons one and another I take leave to doubt, it is certain that they did not become intimate until two years later. On the 4th October, 1795, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was married at St. Mary Redcliffe Church, Marriage. Bristol, to Sarah (or as he always insisted on spelling it, Sara §) Fricker, and went to reside in * Henry Nelson Coleridge, in the Biographical Supplement to Biographia Literaria (vol. ii. p. 346). + Life of Coleridge, p. 74. See Note infrà, p. 82. § "My love to Sara, if so it must be .... however, as it is the casting out of a spiritus asper, which is an evil spirit— for the omen's sake, Amen!"-Southey to Coleridge, Bristol, Aug. 4, 1802. Cottage at Clevedon. a cottage at Clevedon on the Bristol Channel, which is described in two of his early poems.* "The cottage," says kind Mr. Cottle, who visited the newlymarried pair a few days afterwards, "possessed everything that heart could desire. The situation also was peculiarly eligible. It was in the extremity, not in the centre of the village. It had the benefit of being but one story high; the rent was only five pounds per annum, and the taxes nought. There was also a small garden with several pretty flowers; and the "tallest rose-tree "failed not to be pointed out, which peeped at the chamber window." I observed, however, that the parlour, from my perverted taste, looked rather awkward, in being only whitewashed, and the same effected in rather the olden time; to remedy which fanciful inconvenience, on my return to Bristol, I sent an honest upholsterer down to this retired and happy abode, with a few pieces of sprightly paper, to tarnish the half immaculate sitting-room walls . . . . The cottage at Clevedon had walls and doors and windows; but furniture only such as became a philosopher."+ 66 Means were now wanting, however, to keep love warm even in a cottage, and Coleridge was determined to be up and doing. He had taken of late to preaching occasionally in Unitarian pulpits; and he had vague projects for establishing a school. The latter scheme never came to any maturity, and was ap * The Eolian Harp, infrà, p. 157; Reflections on having left a place of retirement, p. 160. + Early Recollections chiefly relating to the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge during his long residence in Bristol, by Joseph Cottle, Lond. 1837, vol. i. pp. 58-60. parently abandoned. But in the early part of 1796 Coleridge issued the Prospectus of a small newspapermagazine, to be published every eight days and to be entitled The Watchman. He made a can Starts The vassing tour in the midland counties, to Watchman. obtain subscribers, preaching also in the various towns through which he passed; and though his applications were in some cases met with rebuffs *—with boorish incivility or bovine obtuse * "I set off on a tour to the north, from Bristol to Sheffield, for the purpose of procuring customers, preaching by the way in most of the great towns, as a hireless volunteer, in a blue coat and white waistcoat, that not a rag of the woman of Babylon might be seen on me; for I was at that time, though a Trinitarian (i. e. ad normam Platonis) in philosophy, yet a zealous Unitarian in religion... My campaign commenced at Birmingham, and my first attack was on a rigid Calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. He was a tall dingy man, in whom length was so predominant over breadth, that he might almost have been borrowed for a foundry poker. O that face! a face κατ' ἔμφασιν ! I have it before me at this moment. The lank, black, twine-like hair, pingui-nitescent, cut in a straight line, along the black stubble of his thin gunpowder eyebrows, that looked like a scorched aftermath from a last week's shaving. His coat-collar behind in perfect unison, both of colour and lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage that I suppose he called his hair, and which with a bend inward at the nape of the neck, (the only approach to flexure in his whole figure) slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance lank, dark, very hard, and with strong perpendicular furrows, gave me a dim notion of some one looking at me through a used gridiron, all soot, grease, and iron!... A person to whom one of my letters of recommendation had been addressed, was my introducer. It was a new event in my life, my first stroke in the new business I had |