THE

NORTH BRITISH

No. LXXXVI.

FOR DECEMBER, 1865.

And

things, absence of high imagination, repres- ceding age, and did much to supply it; who sion of the deeper feelings, man looked at strove to base philosophy on principles of mainly on his conventional side, careful de- universal reason; and who, into thought and scriptions of manners, but no open vision,- sentiment dwarfed and starved by the effects these are the prevailing characteristics. of Enlightenment, poured the inspiration of Doubtless the higher truth was not even soul and spirit. The men who mainly did then left without its witnesses, Butler and this in England were Wordsworth and ColeBerkeley in speculation, Burns and Cowper ridge. These are the native champions of in poetry, Burke in political philosophy, spiritual truth against the mechanical philothese were either the criers in the wilderness sophy of the Illumination. Of the former of against the idols of their times, or the pro- the two we took occasion to speak not long phets of the new truth that was being born. since in this Review. In something of the Men's thoughts cannot deal earnestly with same way we propose to place now before many things at once; and each age has its our readers some account of the friend of own work assigned it; and the work of the Wordsworth, whom his name naturally reeighteenth century was mainly one of the calls, a man not less original nor remarkable utilitarian understanding, one of active but than he-Samuel Taylor Coleridge. narrow intelligence, divorced from imagina- yet, though the two were friends, and shared tion, from deep feeling, from reverence, from together many mental sympathies, between spiritual insight. And when this one-sided the lives and characters of the philosophic work was done, the result was isolation, indi- poet and the poetic philosopher there was vidualism, self-will; the universal in thought more of contrast than of likeness. The one, lost sight of, the universal in ethics denied; robust and whole in body as in mind, resoeverywhere, in speculation as in practice, the lute in will, and single in purpose, knowing private will dominant, the Universal Will little of books and of other men's thoughts, and forgotten. To exult over the ignorant past, to caring less for them, set himself, with his own glory in the wonderful present, to have got unaided resources, to work out the great oririd of all prejudices, to have no strong beliefs ginal vein of poetry that was within him, and except in material progress, to be tolerant of stopt not, nor turned aside, till he had fuiall things but fanaticism, this was its highest filled his task, had enriched English literature boast. And though this self-complacent wis- with a new poetry of the deepest and purest dom received some rude shocks in the crash ore, and thereby made the world for ever his of revolution with which its peculiar era debtor. The other, master of an ampler and closed, and though the soul and spirit that more varied, though not richer field, of are in man, long unheeded, then once more quicker sympathies, less self-sustained, but awoke and made themselves heard, that one-touching life and thought at more numerous sided and soulless intelligence, if weakened, was not destroyed. It was carried over into this century in the brisk but barren criticism of the early Edinburgh Review. And at this very moment there are symptoms enough on every side that the same spirit, after having received a temporary repulse, is again more than usually alive.

points, eager to know all that other men had thought and known, and working as well on a basis of wide erudition as on his own internal resources, but with a body that did him grievous wrong, and frustrated, not obeyed, his better aspirations, and a will faltering and irresolute to follow out the behests of his surpassing intellect, he but drove in a shaft here The same manner of thought which we and there into the vast mine of thought that have attempted to describe as it existed in was in him, and died leaving samples rather our own country, dominated in others during of what he might have done, than a full and the same period. So well is it known in rounded achievement,-yet samples so rich, Germany that they have a name for it, which so varied, so suggestive, that to thousands we want. They call it by a term which they have been the quickeners of new intelmeans the Illumination or Enlightenment, lectual life, and that to this day they stand and they have marked the notes by which it unequalled by anything his country has since is known. Some who are deep in German produced. In one point, however, the friends lore tell us that Europe has produced but one are alike. They both turned aside from propower really counteractive of this Illumina- fessional aims, devoted themselves to pure tiou, or tyranny of the mere understanding, thought, set themselves to counter-work the and that is, the philosophy of Kant and He- mechanical and utilitarian bias of their time, gel. And they affect no small scorn for any and became the great spiritualizers of the attempt at reaction, which has originated thought of their countrymen, the fountainelsewhere. Nevertheless, at the turn of the heads from which has flowed most of what is century, there did arise nearer home men high and unworldly and elevating in the who felt the defect in the thought of the pre-thinking and speculation of the succeeding age.

It is indeed strange, that of Coleridge's union of transcendent genius with infirmity philosophy, once so much talked of, and really of will and irregular impulses, the failure and so important in its influence, no comprehen- the penitential regret, lend to his story a sive account has been ever attempted. The humanizing, even a tragic, pathos, which only attempt in this direction that we know touches our common nature more closely of, is that made six years after Coleridge's than any gifts of genius. death, and now more than twenty years ago, by one who has since become the chief expounder of that philosophy which Coleridgeshire, laboured all his life to refute. In his wellknown essay, Mr. Mill, while fully acknowledging that no other Englishman, save only his own teacher Bentham, had left so deep an impress on his age, yet turns aside from making a full survey of Coleridge's whole range of thought, precluded, as he confesses, by his own radical opposition to Coleridge's fundamental principles. After setting forth clearly the antagonistic schools of thought which, since the dawn of philosophy, have divided opinion as to the origin of knowledge, and after declaring his own firm adhesion to the sensational school, and his consequent inability to sympathize with Coleridge's metaphysical views, he passes from this part of the subject, and devotes the rest of his essay mainly to the consideration of Coleridge as a political philosopher. This, however, is but one, and that by no means the chief department of thought, to which Coleridge devoted himself. Had Mr. Mill felt disposed to give to the other and more important of Coleridge's speculations,-his views on metaphysics, on morals, and on religion, as well as to his criticisms and his poetry, the same masterly treatment which he has given to his politics, any further attempt in that direction might have been spared. But it is characteristic of Mr. Mill, that, though gifted with a power which no other writer of his school possesses, of entering into lines of thought, and of apparently sympathizing with modes of feeling, most alien to his own, he still, after the widest sweep of appreciation, returns at last to the ground from which he started, and there entrenches himself within his original tenets as firmly as if he had never caught a glimpse of other and higher truths, with which his own principles are inconsistent.

Before we enter on the intellectual result of Coleridge's labours, and inquire what new elements he has added to British thought, it may be well to pause for a moment, and review briefly the well-known circumstances of his life. This will not only add a human interest to the more abstract thoughts which follow, but may perhaps help to make them better understood. And if, in contrast with the life of Wordsworth, and with its own splendid promise, the life of Coleridge is disappointing even to sadness, it has not the less for that a mournful interest; while the

The vicarage of Ottery St. Mary's, Devonwas the birthplace and early home of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As in Wordsworth, we said that his whole character was in keeping with his native Cumberland-the robust northern yeoman, only touched with genius-so the character of Coleridge, as far as it had any local hue, seems more native to South England. Is it fanciful to imagine that there was something in that character which accords well with the soft mild air, and the dreamy loveliness that rests on the blue combes and sea-coves of South Devon? He was born on the 21st of October, 1772, the youngest child of ten by his father's second marriage with Anne Bowdon, said to have been a woman of strong practical sense, thrifty, industrious, very ambitious for her sons, but herself without any "tincture of letters." Plainly not from her, but wholly from his father, did Samuel Taylor take his temperament. The Rev. John Coleridge, sometime head-master of the Free Grammar School, afterwards vicar of the parish of Ottery St. Mary's, is described as, for his age,. a great scholar, studious, immersed in books, altogether unknowing and regardless of the world and its ways, simple in nature and primitive in manners, heedless of passing events, and usually known as "the absent man.' In a Latin grammar which he wrote for his pupils, he changed the case which Julius Caesar named, from the ablative to the Quale-quare-quidditive, just as his son might have done had he ever taken to writing grammars. He wrote dissertations on portions of the Old Testament, showing the same sort of discursiveness which his son afterwards did on a larger scale. In his sermons, he used to quote the very words of the Hebrew Scriptures, till the country people used to exclaim admiringly, "How fine he was! He gave us the very words the Spirit spoke in." Of his absent fits and his other eccentricities many stories were long preserved in his own neighbourhood, which Coleridge used to tell. to his friends at Highgate, till the tears ran down his face at the remembrance. Among other well-known stories, it is told that once when he had to go from home for several days, his wife packed his portmanteau with a shirt for each day, charging him strictly to be sure and use them. On his return, his wife, on opening the portmanteau, was surprised to find no shirts there.

On asking

him to account for this, she found that he | had duly obeyed her commands, and had put on a shirt every day, but each above the other. And there were all the shirts, not in the portmanteau, but on his own back. With all these eccentricities, he was a good and unworldly Christian pastor, much beloved and respected by his own people. Though Coleridge was only seven years old when his father was taken away by a sudden death, he remembered him to the last with deep reverence and love. "O that I might so pass away, if, like him, I were an Israelite without guile! The image of my father-my revered, kind, learned, simple-licarted father -is a religion to me."

During his childhood, he tells us, he never took part in the plays and games of his brothers, but sought refuge by his mother's side to read his little books and listen to the talk of his elders. If he played at all it was at cutting down nettles with a stick, and fancying them the seven champions of Christendom. He had, he says, the simplicity and docility of a child, but he never thought or spoke as a child.

sketched off as no other could sketch them, may turn to Lamb's essay, Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago. "To this late hour of my life," he represents Coleridge as saying, "I trace impressions left by the recollection of those friendless holidays. The long warm days of summer never return, but they bring with them a gloom from the haunting memory of those whole-day leaves, when, by some strange arrangement, we were turned out for the livelong day upon our own hands, whether we had friends to go to or none. I remember those bathing excursions to the New River. How merrily we would sally forth into the fields, and strip under the first warmth of the sun, and wanton like young dace in the streams, getting us appetites for noon, which those of us that were penniless (our scanty morning crust long since exhausted) had not the means of allaying; the very beauty of the day, and the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of liberty setting a keener edge upon them! How faint and languid, finally, we would return towards nightfall to our desired morsel, half-rejoicing, half-reluctant that the hours of our uneasy liberty had expired." In one of these bathing excursions Coleridge swam the New River in his clothes, and let them dry in the fields on his back. This laid the first seeds of those rheumatic pains and that prolonged bodily suffering which never afterwards left him, and which did so much to frustrate the rich promise of his youth.

But his childhood, such as it was, did not long last. At the age of nine he was removed to a school in the heart of London, Christ's Hospital, "an institution," says Charles Lamb, "to keep those who yet hold up their heads in the world from sinking." The presentation to this charity school, no. doubt a great thing for the youngest of so many sons, was obtained through the influ- In the lower school at Christ's the time ence of Judge Buller, formerly one of his was spent in idleness, and little was learnt. father's pupils. "O what a change," writes But even then Coleridge was a devourer of Coleridge in after years, "from home to this books, and this appetite was fed by a strange city school depressed, moping, friendless, a accident, which, though often told, must here poor orphan, half-starved!" Of this school be repeated once again. One day as the Charles Lamb, the school companion, and lower schoolboy walked down the Strand, through life the firm friend of Coleridge, has going with his arms as if in the act of swimleft two descriptions in his delightful Essays. ming, he touched the pocket of a passer-by. Everything in the world has, they say, two "What, so young and so wicked!" exclaimed sides; certainly Christ's Hospital must have the stranger, at the same time seizing the had. One cannot imagine any two things boy for a pickpocket. "I am not a pickmore unlike than the picture which Lamb pocket; I only thought I was Leander swimdraws of the school in his first essay and that ming the Hellespont." The capturer, who in the second. The first sets forth the look must have been a man of some feeling, was which the school wore to Lamb himself, a so struck with the answer, and with the inLondon boy, with his family close at hand, telligence as well as simplicity of the boy, ready to welcome him at all hours, and ready that instead of handing him over to the poto send him daily supplies of additional food, lice, he subscribed to a library, that thence and with influential friends among the trus- Coleridge might in future get his fill of books. tees, who, if he had wrongs, would soon see In a short time he read right through the them righted. The second shows the step-catalogue and exhausted the library. While dame side it turned on Coleridge, an orphan from the country, with no friends at hand, moping, half-starved, "for in those days the food of the Blue-coats was cruelly insufficient for those who had no friends to supply them." Any one who cares to see these things

Coleridge was thus idling his time in the lower school, Middleton, an elder boy, afterwards writer on the Greek article and Bishop of Calcutta, found him one day sitting in a corner and reading Virgil by himself, not as a lesson, but for pleasure. Middleton re

ance in his 'Passy,' or passionate wig. Nothing was more common than to see him make a headlong entry into the schoolroom from his singling out a lad, roar out, "Ods my life, sirinner recess or library, and with turbulent eye, rah (his favourite adjuration), I have a great mind to whip you,' then with as retracting an impulse fling back into his lair, and then, after a cooling relapse of some minutes (during which all but the culprit had totally forgotten the context), drive headlong out again, piecing out his litany, with the expletory yell, and I will, too.' imperfect sense, as if it had been some devil's In his gentler moods he had resort to an ingenious method, peculiar, for what I have heard, to himself, of whipping a boy and reading the Debates at the same time-a paragraph and a lash between." "Perhaps," adds Lamb,

ported this to Dr. Bowyer, then head-master | the school when he made his morning appearof the school, who, on questioning the master of the lower school about Coleridge, was told that he was a dull scholar, could never repeat a single rule of syntax, but was always ready to give one of his own. Henceforth Coleridge was under the head-master's eye, and soon passed into the upper school to be under his immediate care. Dr. Bowyer was one of the stern old disciplinarians of those days, who had boundless faith in the lash. Coleridge was one of those precocious boys who might easily have been converted into a prodigy, had that been the fashion at the time. But, "thank Heaven," he said, "I was flogged instead of flattered." He was so ordinary looking a boy, with his great black head, that Bowyer, when he had flogged him, generally ended with an extra cut, "For are such an ugly fellow." When he was teen, Coleridge, in order to get rid of school, wished to be apprenticed to a shoemaker and his wife, who had been kind to him. On the day when some of the boys were to be apprenticed to trades, Crispin appeared and sued for Coleridge. The head-master, on hearing the proposal, and Coleridge's assent, hurled the tradesman from the room with such violence, that had this last been litigiously inclined, he might have sued the doctor for assault. And so Coleridge used to joke, "I lost the opportunity of making safeguards for the understandings of those who will never thank me for what I am trying to do in exercising their reason.”

you

we cannot dismiss him better than with the pious ejaculation of Coleridge (the joke was no fif-doubt Lamb's own) when he heard that his old all his faults be forgiven, and may he be wafted master was on his deathbed, "Poor J. B., may to bliss by little cherub boys, all head and wings, with no bottoms to reproach his sublunary infirmities.'"

While Coleridge was at school, one of his brothers was attending the London Hospital, and from his frequent visits there the Biuecoat boy imbibed a love of surgery and doctoring, and was for a time set on making this his profession. He devoured English, Latin, and Greek books of medicine voraciously, and had by heart a whole Latin medical dictionary. But this dream gave way, or led on to a rage for metaphysics, which set him on a course of abstruse reading, and finally landed him in Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, after perusing which, he sported infidel. When this new turn reached Bowyer's ears, he sent for Coleridge. "So, sirrah! you are an infidel, are you? Then I'll flog your infidelity out of you." So saying, the doctor administered the severest, and, as Coleridge used to say, the only just flogging

he ever received.

Of this stern scholastic Lamb has left the following portrait :

"He had two wigs, both pedantic, but of different omen. The one serene, smiling, powdered, betokening a mild day. The other, an old discoloured, unkempt, angry caxon, denot

How much of all this may be Lamb's love of fun one cannot say. Coleridge always spoke of Dr. Bowyer with grateful affection. In his literary life he speaks of having enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though severe master; one who taught him to prefer Demosthenes to Cicero, Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and Virgil to Ovid; who accustomed his pupils to compare Lucretius, Terence, and the purer poems of Catullus, not only with "the Roman poets of the silver, but even with those of the Augustan era, and on grounds of plain sense and universal logic, to see the superiority of the former in the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and diction." This doctrine was wholesome though rare in those days, not so common even now, so much so that some have supposed that in these and other lessons with which Coleridge credited Dr. Bowyer, he was but reflecting back on his master from his own after thoughts.

While Coleridge was being thus wholesomely drilled in the great ancient models, his own poetic power began to put forth some buds. Up to the age of fifteen, his school verses were not beyond the mark of a clever schoolboy. At sixteen, however, the genius cropped out. The first ray of it appears in a short allegory, written at the latter age, and entitled "Real and Imaginary Time." The opening lines are

"On the wide level of a mountain's head,
I knew not where; but 'twas some faery
place."

ing frequent and bloody execution. Woe to In that short piece, short and slight as it is,