MR

R. COLERIDGE was the youngest son of the Rev. John Coleridge, vicar of St. Mary Ottery, Devonshire, and Ann his wife, and was born in that parish, where he was baptized, 30th December, 1772. His father died in the month of October, 1781, leaving his widow with a family of eleven children. A presentation to Christ's Hospital, London, was procured for the future poet from John Way, Esq., one of the governors; and the boy was admitted to that excellent school on the 18th of July, 1782. He has himself, in his Biographia Literaria," published in the year 1817, left us some records of his early and most important days.

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"At school I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time a very severe, master (the rev. James Bowyer). He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, Terence, and, above all, the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the

Roman poets of the (so called) silver and brazen ages, but with even those of the Augustan era; and, on grounds of plain sense and universal logic, to see and assert the superiority of the former in the truth and nativeness, both of their thoughts and diction. At the same time, that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read Shakspeare and Milton as lessons, and they were the lessons, too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learned from him that poetry, even that of the loftiest and seemingly that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science, and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive, causes.

"I had just entered my seventeenth year when the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented to me by a schoolfellow who had quitted us for the University, and who, during the whole time that he was in our first form, (or, in our school language, a Grecian) had been my patron and

protector,-I refer to Dr. Middleton, the truly learned and every way excellent bishop of Calcutta. It was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender recollection, that I should have received from so revered a friend the first knowledge of a poet, by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and inspired. As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following publications of the same author,"

On the 7th of September, 1791, Mr. Coleridge was sent from Christ's Hospital, with one of the exhibitions belonging to that foundation, to Jesus College, Cambridge. The only university honour, for which his indolence and indifference allowed him to become a candidate, was sir William Browne's medal for the best Greek ode; and even this, we are told, he gained only by the compulsion of his friends, who made him a prisoner in a room containing nothing but pen, ink, and paper, till he had written it.

He remained at Cambridge till October term, 1794, when he quitted the University without cause assigned, and without taking a degree. The master and fellows of the College, consequently, made an order that his name should be removed from the College boards, unless he returned before the 14th of June, 1795 ; and the committee of Christ's Hospital, considering that their exhibitions are voted by the general court under a restriction that, if the students absent

themselves from college without permission, their allowance is to cease, and having further considered that the general example of a scholar of such distinguished abilities might be highly detrimental to the youth of the house, resolved that his exhibitions, which had been paid to the 5th of April, 1795, should be from that time withheld.

It was in the long vacation of

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the year 1792, that he became acquainted with Mr. Southey, then a student of Baliol College, Oxford. The two young poets, both dazzled with the specious opening of the French revolution, commenced an enthusiastic friendship; and struck out a scheme for settling themselves in the wilds of America, and for there" tablishing a genuine system of property, which they entitled pantisocracy. It was with the view of realizing it, that Mr. Southey, in the year 1795, married a young lady of Bristol, of the name of Fricker, to whom he had been long attached, and that about the same time Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Robert Lovell, were respectively united to her two sisters. This project of emigration and pantisocracy, however, was never carried into execution. Mr. Southey, on the very day after his secret marriage, obeyed his mother's uncle, by accompanying him to Lisbon for six months; and on his return quietly settled in Gray's Inn as a law-student. Mr. Coleridge remained with his wife at or near Bristol.

In the previous winter of 17945, he had delivered there a course of lectures on the French revolu tion; having even before that published, in conjunction with Mr. Southey, a hasty drama, called "The Fall of Robespierre." In the

nounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn ilence through the universe. The sermon was upon peace and war-upon church and state-not their alliance, but their separation on the spirit of the world, and the spirit of Chris tianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another. He talked of those who had inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore." He made a poetical and pastoral excursion, and to show the fatal effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, as though he should never be old,' and the same poor country lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an alehouse, turned into a wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the loathsome finery of the profession of blood; and, for myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres.

"On the Tuesday following, the half-inspired speaker came. I was called down into the room where he was, and went halfhoping, half-afraid. He received me very graciously; and I listened for a long time without uttering a word. I did not suffer in his opinion by my silence. For those two hours (he was afterwards pleased to say) he was conversing with W. H.'s forehead.' His appearance was different from what I had anticipated from seeing him

before. At a distance, and in the dim light of the chapel, there was to me a strange wildness in his aspect, a dusky obscurity, and I thought him pitted with the smallpox. His complexion was at that time clear, and even bright. His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with darkened lustre. His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-humoured and round; but his nose, the rudder of the face, and the index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing

like what he has done. It might seem that the genius of his face, as from a height, surveyed and projected him (with sufficient capacity and huge aspiration) into the world unknown of thought and imagination, with nothing to support or guide his veering purpose, as if Columbus had launched his adventurous course for the New World in a scallop, without oars or compass. Coleridge in his person was rather above the common size, inclining to the corpulent, or, like the lord Hamlet, somewhat fat and pursy. His hair was then black and glossy as the raven's, and fell in smooth masses over his forehead."

Mr. Coleridge, in the years 1796 and 1797, published his first poetical volume, in conjunc tion with a few poems by his friends, Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd, just as Mr. Southey had previously published his earliest poetical effusions bound up with those of his friend Mr. Lovell. In 1796, was published separately the "Ode on the Departing Year," and in 1798, the "Fears in Solitude," "France, an Ode," and

"Frost at Midnight." In the year 1798, also appeared the first edition of the celebrated "Lyrical Ballads," of Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge.

In the autumn of the year 1798, Mr. Coleridge, to whom his friends, Messrs. Josiah and Thomas Wedgewood, of Etruria, in Staffordshire, had generously granted an annuity of 100l., commenced his travels in Germany, accompanied by Mr. Wordsworth. Of these travels the only records are contained in a few letters in "The Friends," (repeated in the "Biographia Literaria); but the fruits of his German studies of men and books, are apparent in every after-production of his mind

and pen.

On his return from Germany, in the year 1800, Mr. Coleridge went to reside at Keswick, where Mr. Southey had, after filling for some time the situation of secretary to Mr. Corry, the Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer, finally settled. Mr. Wordsworth was then living at Grasmere ; and here Coleridge's religious tenets, to use his own expression, found a final re-conversion to the whole truth in Christ. He tells us, indeed, that even before this, while meditating, his heart had long been with the blessed Paul, and the beloved John, though his head was with Spinoza. He now became convinced, both head and heart, of the doctrine of St. Paul, and a firm believer in the divine trinity in unity. "Soon after my return from Germany," says he, "I was solicited to undertake the literary and political department of 'The Morning Post;' and I acceded to the proposal on condition that the paper should thenceforward be conducted on certain fixed and announced principles, and that I should be neither obliged nor re

quested to deviate from them in favour of any party or in any event. In consequence, that journal became, and for many years continued, anti-ministerial, indeed, yet with a very qualified approbation. of the opposition, and with greater. earnestness and zeal both antijacobin and anti-gallican. From the commencement of the Adding. ton administration, to the present day, whatever I have written in "The Morning Post,' or, after that paper was transferred to other pro prietors, in 'The Courier,' has been in defence or furtherance of the measures of government. "Things of this nature scarce survive the night

That gives them birth: they perish in the light,

Cast by so far from after-life, that there Can scarcely ought be said but that they

were.'

CARTWRIGHT.

"Yet in these labours I employed, and, in the belief of partial friends, wasted, the prime and manhood of my intellect. Most assuredly, they added nothing to my fortune or my reputation. From government, or the friends of government, I not only never received remuneration, or ever ex pected it, but I was never honoured with a single acknowledgment or expression of satisfaction. Yet the retrospect is far from painful, or matter of regret. I am not, indeed, silly enough to take as any thing more than a violent hyperbole of party debate Mr. Fox's assertion, that the late war was a war produced by "The Morning Post," or I should be proud to have the words inscribed upon my tomb. As little do I regard the circumstance that I was a specified object of Buonaparte's resentment during my residence in Italy, in consequence of those essays in