that its introduction can require no apology. Coleridge appears to have passed his time very much to his satisfaction at the Herr Pastor's, with whom he spoke, or began to speak, German, and smoked a pipe occasionally, and partook of the good things of a wellserved board. One of the old gentleman's maxims was to eat slowly. "Eat slowly," he used to say, "" and you will be able,"-to do what? Why, "to eat the more." Coleridge principally studied the German language with a gentleman who happened to be residing at the Amptman's as tutor to his sons; and, about the middle of January, deeming, I suppose, his proficiency equal to the Academic arena, he started for Göttingen; but before I commune with him again there, I have to say a few words more on the subject of our tour to the Brocken. Blumenbach supplied us with the statistics of the interesting district through which we passed; and at Clausthall, situated in the centre of the Harz, where we spent the greater part of Friday the 17th of May, he introduced us to the superintendant of the mines, which were visited by all the party except Coleridge, who had no wish to descend with us into the bowels of the earth, but was better pleased with occupying himself, during our absence, with letter-writing.* See page 64. We returned to the inn from our subterranean visit, just in time for the table d'hôte at the usual dinner hour of half-past twelve; and notwithstanding the manner in which the morning had been spent, it so happened that our conversation, both during dinner and after, was chiefly political, owing, not improbably, to an extra glass of good Medoc with which our host had tempted us. The Pittites of our party, from having Coleridge opposed to them, got decidedly worst off, and we were content to leave him thenceforward in undisputed possession of the field of politics, with which I must say he never showed any desire to meddle, as far as our intercourse with him went. And although, upon the above occasion, consistently with his early associations, he stoutly defended Fox against Pitt, there is abundant evidence, in much of his subsequent writings, to show that no one was better able than himself to depict the difficulties of the appalling crisis with which that great minister had to contend†, when Still I have never been so fortunate as to meet with a single compliment to Pitt, personally, in any of Coleridge's writings-the nearest approach to it is the following—which, it will be seen, is only praise at second hand : "Clarkson (the moral steam-engine, or giant with one idea) had recently published his book, and being in a very irritable state of mind, his wife expressed great fears of the effect of any severe review in the then state of his feelings. I wrote," Coleridge says, "to Jeffrey, and expressed to him my opinion of the cruelty of any censure being passed upon the work as a composition. In return I had a very polite letter, expressing a wish that I should review it. I did so; but when the review was published, in the place of some just eulogiums due to Mr. Pitt, and which I stated were upon the best he stood forth as the guardian, not only of his country, but of the whole civilized world, against the fastspreading desolation of that moral pestilence, under which infuriated France was labouring. What can be more in concert with the feelings of thousands on the subject of the French Revolution, than the following extract from No. III. of "The Friend": - "The teeth of the old serpent planted by the Cadmuses of French literature, under Louis XV., produced a plenteous crop of philosophers and truthtrumpeters of this kind, in the reign of his successor. They taught many truths, historical, political, physiological, and ecclesiastical, and diffused their notions so widely, that the very ladies and hair-dressers of Paris became fluent encyclopædists; and the sole price which their scholars paid for these treasures of new information, was to believe Christianity an imposture, the Scriptures a forgery, the worship (if not the belief) of God superstition, hell a fable, heaven a dream, our life without Providence, and our death without hope. authority (in fact they were from Tom Clarkson himself), was substituted some abuse and detraction."-Letters, &c. vol. ii. p. 112. In the very same "Letters" we find him speaking of Pitt as "a man utterly unfitted for the conduct of a war; all his plans being based upon, so called, expediency, and pernicious short-sightedness, which would never allow him to take into his calculation the future."-Ibid, vol. i. p. 134. They became as gods as soon as the fruit of their Upas tree of knowledge and liberty had opened their eyes to perceive that they were no more than brutes, somewhat more cunning perhaps, and abundantly more mischievous. What can be more natural than the result, that self-acknowledged brutes should first act and next suffer themselves to be treated as brutes. The disbelief of essential wisdom and goodness necessarily prepares the imagination for the supremacy of cunning with malignity. Folly and vice have their appropriate religions, as well as virtue and true knowledge; and in some way or other, fools will dance round the golden calf, and wicked men beat their timbrels and kettle drums 'To Moloch, horrid king, besmeared with blood Coleridge is well known to have possessed what I remember to have heard a droll-looking little German music-master, expressing his own dislike of the French, denominate "ein art von antipathie gegen den Franzozen" (a sort of antipathy to the French); and this may account for his not being particularly ready to fall in with any complimentary allusion even to their most eloquent divines. Speaking, one day, of the progressive nature of an unchecked course of vice, and its gradual, perhaps, but sure termination in the abyss of perdition, a passage was quoted from a sermon of the celebrated Bishop of Clermont, where, alluding to this melancholy truth, he says "thus though the sun be already withdrawn from our hemisphere, yet certain rays of his light still continue to tinge the sky, and form as it were an imperfect day; it is only in proportion as he sinks that gloom gains, and the darkness of night at last prevails." He said he thought such beautiful imagery was in bad keeping with the gloomy subject it was intended to illustrate, and that consequently Massillon had exhibited a specimen of bad taste. He may have been right for the matter of taste, but I was inclined to think at the time, that the remark partook somewhat of the little music-master's "antipathy to the French." He never appeared to tire of mental exercise; talk seemed to him a perennial pastime; and his endeavours to inform and amuse us ended only with the cravings of hunger or the fatigue of a long march, from which neither his conversational powers, nor his stoicism, could protect himself or us. In proportion as hunger and aches were gaining ascendancy over us, conversation usually began to flag, and at such times, particularly when we had no reason to expect good quarters and a comfortable meal at our journey's end, our thoughts were very provokingly apt to turn upon the good things of Old England; and a vivid recital of the dishes spread over a Cambridge supper table, |