teresting as well as useful." Mr. Gillman's acquaintance with Dr. Adams was but slight, and he had had no previous intention of receiving an inmate into his house. But the case very naturally interested him; he sought an interview with Dr. Adams, and it was agreed that the latter should drive Coleridge to Highgate the following evening. At the appointed hour, however, Coleridge presented himhimself alone, and, after spending the evening at Mr. Gillman's, left him, as even in his then condition he left most people who met him for the first time, completely captivated by the amiability of his manners and the charm of his conversation. The next day Mr. Gillman received from him a letter finally settling the arrangement to place himself under the doctor's care, and concluding with the following pathetic passage:

"And now of myself. My ever wakeful reason and the keenness of my moral feelings will secure you from all unpleasant circumstances connected with me save only one, viz., the evasion of a specific madness. You will never hear anything but truth from me; prior habits render it out of my power to tell an untruth, but, unless carefully observed, I dare not promise that I should not, with regard to this detested poison, be capable of acting one. Not sixty hours have yet passed without my having taken laudanum, though, for the last week, comparatively trifling doses. I have full belief that your anxiety need not be extended beyond the first week, and for the first week I shall not, must not, be permitted to leave your house, unless with you; delicately or indelicately, this must be done, and both the servants, and the assistant, must receive absolute commands from you. The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but, when I am alone, the horrors I have suffered from laudanum, the degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. If (as I feel for the first time a soothing confidence that it will prove) I should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it is not myself only that will love and honour you; every friend I have (and, thank God! in spite of this wretched vice I have many and

**

warm ones, who were friends of my youth, and have never deserted me) will thank you with reverence. I have taken no notice of your kind apologies. If I could not be comfortable in your house and with your family, I should deserve to be miserable."

This letter was written on a Saturday, and on the following Monday Coleridge presented himself at Mr. Gillman's, bringing in his hand the proof-sheets of Christabel, now printed for the first time. He had looked, as the letter just quoted shows, with a "soothing confidence" to leaving his retreat at some future period in a.restored condition of moral and bodily health; and as regards the restoration, his confidence was in a great measure justified. But the friendly doors which opened to receive him on this 15th of April, 1816, were destined to close only upon his departing bier. Under the watchful and almost reverential care of this well-chosen guardian, sixteen years of comparatively quiet and well-ordered life, of moderate but effective literary activity, and of gradual though never complete emancipation from his fatal habit, were reserved to him. He had still, as we shall see, to undergo certain recurrences of restlessness and renewals of pecuniary difficulty; his shattered health was but imperfectly and temporarily repaired; his "shaping spirit of imagination" could not and did not return; his transcendental broodings became more and more the "habit of his soul." But henceforth he recovers for us a certain measure of his longlost dignity, and a figure which should always have been "meet for the reverence of the hearth" in the great household of English literature, but which had far too long and too deeply sunk below it, becomes once more a worthy and even a venerable presence. At evening-time it was light.

CHAPTER IX.

LIFE AT HIGHGATE.-RENEWED ACTIVITY.—PUBLICATIONS AND REPUBLICATIONS. THE BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA.”. -THE LECTURES OF 1818.-COLERIDGE AS A SHAKESPEARIAN CRITIC.

[1816-1818.]

THE results of the step which Coleridge had just taken became speedily visible in more ways than one, and the public were among the first to derive benefit from it. For not only was he stimulated to greater activity of production, but his now more methodical way of life gave him time and inclination for that work of arrangement and preparation for the press which, distasteful to most writers, was no doubt especially irksome to him, and thus insured the publication of many pieces which otherwise might never have seen the light. The appearance of Christabel was, as we have said, received with signal marks of popular favour, three editions being called for and exhausted in the same year. In 1816 there appeared also The Statesman's Manual; or the Bible the best guide to Political Skill and Foresight: a Lay Sermon addressed to the higher classes of Society, with an Appendix containing Comments and Essays connected with the Study of the Inspired Writings; in 1817 another Lay Sermon, addressed to the higher and middle classes on the existing distresses and discontents; and in the same year followed

the most important publication of this period, the Biographia Literaria.

Too

In 1817, too, it was that Coleridge at last made his long-meditated collection and classification of his already published poems, and that for the first time something approaching to a complete edition of the poet's works was given to the world. The Sibylline Leaves, as this reissue was called, had been intended to be preceded by another volume of verse, and "accordingly on the printer's signatures of every sheet we find Vol. II. appearing." characteristically, however, the scheme was abandoned, and Volume II. emerged from the press without any Volume I. to accompany it. The drama of Zapolya followed in the same year, and proved more successful with the public than with the critic of Drury Lane. The "general reader ” assigned no "ludicrous objections to its metaphysics;" on the contrary, he took them on trust, as his generous manner is, and Zapolya, published thus as a Christmas tale, became so immediately popular that two thousand copies were sold in six weeks. In the year 1818 followed the three-volume selection of essays from the Friend, a reissue to which reference has already been made. With the exception of Christabel, however, all the publications of these three years unfortunately proceeded from the house of Gale and Fenner, a firm which shortly afterwards became bankrupt; and Coleridge thus lost all or nearly all of the profits of their sale.

The most important of the new works of this period was, as has been said, the Biographia Literaria, or, to give it its other title, Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions. Its interest, however, is wholly critical and illustrative; as a narrative it would be found extremely disappointing and probably irritating by the aver

age reader. With the exception of one or two incidental disclosures, but little biographical information is to be derived from it which is not equally accessible from sources independent of the author; and the almost complete want of sequence and arrangement renders it a very inconvenient work of reference even for these few biographical details. Its main value is to be found in the contents of seven chapters, from the fourteenth to the twentieth; but it is not going too far to say that, in respect of these, it is literally priceless. No such analysis of the principles of poetry-no such exact discrimination of what was sound in the modern "return-to-nature" movement from what was false—has ever been accomplished by any other critic, or with such admirable completeness by this consummate critic at any other time. Undoubtedly it is not of the light order of reading; none, or very little, of Coleridge's prose is. The whole of Chapter XV., for instance, in which the specific elements of "poetic power" are “distinguished from general talent determined to poetic composition by accidental motives," requires a close and sustained effort of the attention, but those who bestow it will find it amply repaid. I know of no dissertation conceived and carried out in terms of the abstract which in the result so triumphantly justifies itself upon application to concrete cases. As regards the question of poetic expression, and the laws by which its true form is determined, Coleridge's analysis is, it seems to me, final. I cannot, at least, after the most careful reflection upon it, conceive it as being other than the absolutely last word on the subject. Reasoning and illustration are alike so convincing that the reader, like the contentious student who listened unwillingly to his professor's demonstration of the first proposition of Euclid, is compelled to confess that