chapter ii

.; _Letters of Charles Lamb_, Macmillan, 1888, i. 6.

[116] On the side of the road, opposite to Poole’s house in Castle Street, Nether Stowey, is a straight gutter through which a stream passes. See _Thomas Poole and his Friends_, i. 147.

[117] _The Peripatetic, or Sketches of the Heart, of Nature, and of Society_, a miscellany of prose and verse issued by John Thelwall, in 1793.

[118] January 10, 1795. See _Poetical Works_, p. 41, and Editor’s Note, p. 575. Margarot, a West Indian, was one of those tried and transported with Gerrald.

[119] See _Poetical Works_, p. 66.

[120] Early in the autumn of 1796, a proposal had been made to Coleridge that he should start a day school in Derby. Poole dissuaded him from accepting this offer, or rather, perhaps, Coleridge succeeded in procuring Poole’s disapproval of a plan which he himself dreaded and disliked.

[121] Thomas Ward, at first the articled clerk, and afterwards partner in business and in good works, of Thomas Poole. He it was who transcribed in “Poole’s Copying Book” Coleridge’s letters from Germany, and much of his correspondence besides. See _Thomas Poole and his Friends_, i. 159, 160, 304, 305, etc.

[122] This letter, first printed in Gillman’s _Life_, pp. 338-340, and since reprinted in the notes to Canon Ainger’s edition of _Lamb’s Letters_ (i. 314, 315), was written in response to a request of Charles Lamb in his letter of September 27, 1796, announcing the “terrible calamities” which had befallen his family. “Write me,” said Lamb, “as religious a letter as possible.” In his next letter, October 3, he says, “Your letter is an inestimable treasure.” But a few weeks later, October 24, he takes exception to the sentence, “You are a temporary sharer in human miseries that you may be an eternal partaker of the Divine nature.” Lamb thought that the expression savoured too much of theological subtlety, and outstepped the modesty of weak and suffering humanity. Coleridge’s “religious letter” came from his heart, but he was a born preacher, and naturally clothes his thoughts in rhetorical language. I have seen a note written by him within a few hours of his death, when he could scarcely direct his pen. It breathes the tenderest loving-kindness, but the expressions are elaborate and formal. It was only in poetry that he attained to simplicity.

[123] Coleridge must have resorted occasionally to opiates long before this. In an unpublished letter to his brother George, dated November 21, 1791, he says, “Opium never used to have any disagreeable effects on me.” Most likely it was given to him at Christ’s Hospital, when he was suffering from rheumatic fever. In the sonnet on “Pain,” which belongs to the summer of 1790, he speaks of “frequent pangs,” of “seas of pain,” and in the natural course of things opiates would have been prescribed by the doctors. Testimony of this nature appears at first sight to be inconsistent with statements made by Coleridge in later life to the effect that he began to take opium in the second year of his residence at Keswick, in consequence of rheumatic pains brought on by the damp climate. It was, however, the first commencement of the secret and habitual resort to narcotics which weighed on memory and conscience, and there is abundant evidence that it was not till the late spring of 1801 that he could be said to be under the dominion of opium. To these earlier indulgences in the “accursed drug,” which probably left no “disagreeable effects,” and of which, it is to be remarked, he speaks openly, he seems to have attached but little significance.

Since the above note was written, Mr. W. Aldis Wright has printed in the _Academy_, February 24, 1894, an extract from an unpublished letter from Coleridge to the Rev. Mr. Edwards of Birmingham, recently found in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. It is dated Bristol, “12 March, 1795” (read “1796”), and runs as follows:--

“Since I last wrote you, I have been tottering on the verge of madness--my mind overbalanced on the _e contra_ side of happiness--the blunders of my associate [in the editing of the _Watchman_, G. Burnett], etc., etc., abroad, and, at home, Mrs. Coleridge dangerously ill.... Such has been my situation for the last fortnight--I have been obliged to take laudanum almost every night.”

[124] The news of the evacuation of Corsica by the British troops, which took place on October 21, 1796, must have reached Coleridge a few days before the date of this letter. Corsica was ceded to the British, June 18, 1794. A declaration of war on the part of Spain (August 19, 1796) and a threatened invasion of Ireland compelled the home government to withdraw their troops from Corsica. In a footnote to