Those who knew Coleridge in his latter years will be quite as ready to believe that the setting sun is "burnt out," and that his glory passes away with his rays. That which was outward and accidental had passed away; but his spirit only reigned the more "in perfect kingliness." Among the motives which kept him so long near London, external ones were assuredly the strongest first, the res angusta domi, of which he speaks more than once; next, the state of his health, which rendered constant medical attendance almost an absolute necessity; and lastly, the affection of the admirable pair whose house was his home during the last eighteen years, and who richly deserve the earthly immortality bestowed on them in the dedication to the Friend.

The Opium-eater, however, has not exhausted his tattle. He follows Coleridge to London, and tells us that he became "domesticated under Mr. Basil Montagu's roof-a connexion the most trying to friendship, and which, in this instance, led to a perpetual rupture of it." He then relates a story, after his fashion, about the cause of this rupture, "simply as the tale was then generally borne upon the breath, not of scandal, but of jest and merriment;" and concludes by adding that "the result, however, was no jest; for bitter words ensued-words that festered in the remembrance; and a rupture between the parties followed, which no reconciliation ever healed." Now, whether such a quarrel ever did take place, I know not; nor is it worth the trouble of inquiring. The best thing that can betide a quarrel is to be forgotten. Even the Opium-eater does not vouch for the truth of his anecdote: he merely reports it "as it was borne on the breath of jest and merriment." He is going through his exercises for taking his degree as eaves-dropper to the green-room. But there is one thing for which he does vouch twice over, that the rupture was perpetual, and that "no reconciliation ever healed it." Now this, I am happy to know, is utterly false for it would have been painful to think of such a gentle spirit as Coleridge's, which "altered not, even where it alteration found," separated by a life-long breach from a person with whom he had once lived as a friend. Whether there ever was a rupture, I say, I know not; but at all events the friendship was renewed, and restored to a footing of intimacy. I know this even from evidence which is before the world-from Mr. Irving's dedication of the second volume of his Sermons to Mr. Basil Montagu, which contains the following remarkable declaration: “I must ever acknowledge myself more beholden to our sage friend, Mr. Coleridge (whose acquaintance and friendship I owe to you), than to all men besides, for the knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus." This was written in 1828 and it may further serve to shew that Coleridge, when he went to London, did not "fly away," as the Opium-eater asserts, "from all commerce with his own soul, and bury himself in the profoundest abstractions from life and human sensibilities." He, of whom Mr. Irving, in the maturity of his manhood, after years spent in the ministry in the same town with Dr. Chalmers, could say, that to him more than to all men besides, he was beholden for the knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus," had not been taking refuge in profound abstractions from the prospect of his own decayed powers, but had been mounting from one pinnacle of knowledge, from one peak of truth to a higher, leaving the flowers of earth indeed below him, to shed their bloom and fragrance around the track of his former footsteps, while he trod "on shadowy ground, sinking deep, and aloft ascending, till he breathed in worlds to which the heaven of heavens is but a veil." A like generous and affectionate acknowledgment of his obligations to Coleridge, as having been "more profitable to his faith in orthodox doctrine, to his spiritual understanding of the word of God, and to his right conception of the Christian church, than any or all of the men with whom he had entertained friendship or conversation," we find, in 1825, in Mr. Irving's noble dedication to him of his Orations for Missionaries after the Apostolical School. When he made him this " offering of a heart which loved his heart, and of a mind which looked up with reverence to his mind," he must already have

been some time his friend and disciple: and, at the time when this acquaintance began, Mr. Basil Montagu must have been enjoying the happiness of being Coleridge's friend. So he was in 1829: and knowing how to prize that happiness, he was then in the habit of attending Coleridge's Thursday evening conversations, where one of my own friends met him. And one of the six mourning rings which Coleridge bequeathes in his will, is "to his old and very kind friend, Basil Montagu, Esq.”

But I desist. Although I could not withstand the temptation to expose some of the misrepresentations and falsehoods about Coleridge in the Opiumeater's articles, I did not sit down with any purpose of answering them. That, indeed, is needless: they answer themselves. All the persons I have met with who have read them, have risen from them with the same disgust. From Tait's advertisements, I see that this is not the opinion of the newspaper critics, who seem to be quite bewitched with them. So the writer knew the palates he was catering for, and will probably plume himself on his success; although, if Phocion were living in these days, and were by any strange chance to fall under the applause of the public press, he would still cry, with more bitterness than ever, What have I been doing that is so very foolish or wrong? To those who knew Coleridge, to those-and not a few there are-whose hearts glow with gratitude and love toward him, as their teacher and master, the establisher of their faith, and the emancipater of their spiritual life from the bondage of the carnal understanding-to such persons a Vatican all libels against him would be of no moment; except so far as it filled them with pain and sorrow, to see that great gift, which enables the wise and good to endow their thoughts with a life coeval and co-extensive with the earth, turned into a means of slander, and a tool of malice. My object in taking up my pen was to remind those from whose memory it may have slipped, among others the Opium-eater himself, of an admirable passage in the Friend, which he must have read formerly, but must have entirely forgotten-a passage in which Coleridge inveighs, with his usual thoughtful and fervid eloquence, against all such tell-tales and anecdote-mongers as gather up what their betters let drop and sweep away, to vend the contents of their dust-pan under the name of biography. Never before did a dead man lift up an arm of such power to smite the defacer of his tomb. Had the Opium-eater's articles been lying before him, he could not have described them more accurately. The Opiumeater must assuredly have seen this passage, must have read it, must have admired it when he read it. But his heart did not impel him to speak worthily of his glorious master; wherefore Nemesis sponged it out of his memory, lest it should frighten him, and thus save him from falling into the condemnation he merited. May it raise him out of it! May it stir him to make a full and generous atonement to the great man whom he has been treating thus dishonorably. Else it will pursue him like that which, he will call to mind, is the most horrible of all curses, "the curse in a dead man's eye."

The passage I refer to occurs in the introduction to the Life of Sir Alexander Ball; and, as I have said already, if the Opium-eater's articles had been lying before Coleridge, he could not have given a more complete analysis of the feelings which inspired and dictated them :

"An inquisitiveness into the minutest circumstances and casual sayings of eminent contemporaries is indeed quite natural: but so are all our follies; and the more natural they are, the more caution should we exert in guarding against them. To scribble trifles, even on the perishable glass of an inn window, is the mark of an idler but to engrave them on the marble monument sacred to the memory of the departed great, is something worse than idleness. The spirit of genuine biography is in nothing more conspicuous than in the firmness with which it withstands the cravings of worthless curiosity, as distinguished from the thirst after useful knowledge, For in the first place, such anecdotes as derive their whole and sole interest from the great name of VOL. VII.-Jan. 1835.

E

the person concerning whom they are related, and neither illustrate his general character nor his particular actions, would scarcely have been noticed or remembered, except by men of weak minds. It is not unlikely, therefore, that they were misapprehended at the time; and it is most probable that they have been related as incorrectly, as they were noticed injudiciously. Nor are the consequences of such garrulous biography merely negative. For as insignificant stories can derive no real respectability from the eminence of the person who happens to be the subject of them, but rather an additional deformity of disproportion, they are apt to have their insipidity seasoned by the same bad passions that accompany the habit of gossiping in general: and the misapprehensions of weak men, meeting with the misinterpretations of malignant men, have not seldom formed the groundwork of the most grievous calumnies. In the second place, those trifles are subversive of the great end of biography, which is to fix the attention and to interest the feelings of men on those qualities and actions which have made a particular life worthy of being recorded. It is no doubt the duty of an honest biographer to pourtray the prominent imperfections, as well as excellencies of his hero. But I am at a loss to conceive how this can be deemed an excuse for heaping together a multitude of particulars, which can prove nothing of any man that might not be safely taken for granted of all men. In the present age-emphatically the age of personality—there are more than ordinary motives for withholding all encouragement from the mania of busying ourselves with the names of others, which is still more alarming as a symptom, than it is troublesome as a disease. The reader must be still less acquainted with contemporary literature than myself, if he needs me to inform him that there are men who, trading in the silliest anecdotes, in unprovoked abuse and senseless eulogy, think themselves nevertheless employed both worthily and honorably, if only all this be done in good set terms, and from the press, and of public characters-a class which has increased so rapidly of late, that it becomes difficult to discover what characters are to be considered as private. Alas! if these wretched misusers of language, and the means of giving wings to thought, and of multiplying the presence of an individual mind, had ever known how great a thing the possession of any one simple truth is, and how mean a thing a mere fact is, except as seen in the light of some comprehensive truth-if they had but once experienced the unborrowed complacency, the inward independence, the homebred strength, with which every clear conception of the reason is accompanied they would shrink from their own pages as at the remembrance of a crime. For a crime it is (and the man who hesitates in pronouncing it such, must be ignorant of what mankind owe to books, what he himself owes to them in spite of his ignorance,) thus to introduce the spirit of vulgar scandal and personal inquietude into the closet and the library, environing with evil passions the very sanctuaries to which we should flee for refuge from them. For to what do these publications appeal, whether they present themselves as biography or as anonymous criticism, but to the same feelings which the scandalbearers and time-killers of ordinary life seek to gratify in themselves and their listeners; and both the authors and admirers of such publications, in what respect are they less truants and deserters from their own hearts, and from their appointed task of understanding and amending them, than the most garrulous female chronicler of the goings-on of yesterday in the families of her neighbours and townsfolk? "As to my own attempt to record the life and character of the late Sir Alexander Ball, I consider myself debarred from all circumstances, not appertaining to his conduct or character as a public functionary, that involve the names of the living for good or for evil. Whatever facts and incidents I relate of a private nature, must, for the most part, concern Sir Alexander Ball exclusively, and as an insulated individual. But I needed not this restraint. It will be enough for me, as I write, to recollect the form and character of Sir Alexander Ball himself, to represent to my own feelings the inward contempt with which he would have abstracted his mind from worthless anecdotes and

petty personalities; a contempt rising into indignation, if ever an illustrious name were used as the thread to string them upon. If this recollection be my

Socratic demon, to warn and to check me, I shall, on the other hand, derive encouragement from the remembrance of the tender patience, the sweet gentleness, with which he was wont to tolerate the tediousness of well-meaning men; and the inexhaustible attention, the unfeigned interest, with which he would listen for hours, where the conversation appealed to reason, and, like the bee, made honey while it murmured."

I have transcribed this passage from the original edition of the Friend, No. 21, and not from the reprint, where it stands in Vol. II. pp. 303–307; because in the latter the last paragraph, in itself a beautiful one, and to our present purpose particularly appropriate, is left out. For, if Coleridge could imagine the inward contempt with which Sir Alexander Ball would have abstracted his mind from worthless anecdotes and petty personalities—a contempt rising into indignation, if ever an illustrious name was used as a thread to string them on,"-well may those who knew Coleridge conceive the grief and pity he would have felt, at seeing eminent powers and knowledge employed in ministering to the wretched love of gossip-retailing paltry anecdotes in dispraise of others, intermingled with outflarings of self-praiseand creeping into the secret chambers of great men's houses, to filch out materials for tattle-at seeing great powers wasting and debasing themselves in such an ignoble task-above all, at seeing that the person who thus wasted and debased them was a scholar and a philosopher, whose talents he admired, with whom he had lived familiarly, and whom he had honoured with his friendship. J. C. H.

ANTIQUITIES, ETC.

SELECTIONS FROM EVELYN'S DIARY.

(Continued from vol. vi. p. 501.)

1684. 7 March. Dr. Meggot, Deane of Winchester, preached an incomparable sermon (the King being now gone to Newmarket) on 12 Heb. 15, shewing & pathetically pressing the care we ought to have least we come short of the glory of God.

26 Oct.-Dr. Goodman preach'd before the King, on 2 James 12, concerning the law of liberty, an excellent discourse, & in good method. He is Author of the "Prodigal Son," a treatise worth reading, and another of the Old Religion.

4 Nov.-Dr. Turner, now translated from Rochester to Ely upon the death of Dr. Peter Gunning, preached before the King at Whitehall, on 3 Romans 8, a very excellent sermon, vindicating the Church of England against the pernicious doctrines of the Church of Rome. He challenged the producing but of five Clergymen who forsooke our Church & went over to that of Rome, during all the troubles & rebellion in England, which lasted neare twenty yeares; & this was, to my certaine observation, a greate truth.

1685. 11 Jan.-A young man preached upon 13 Luke 5, after the Presbyterian tedious method & repetition.

15 Feb.-Dr. Tenison preach'd to the Household. The second sermon should have ben before the King, but he, to the greate griefes of his subjects, did now, for the first time, go to masse publickly in the little Oratorie at the Duke's lodgings, the doors being set open.

5 March. To my griefe I saw the new pulpit set up in the Popish Oratorie at Whitehall for the Lent preaching, masse being publickly said, & the Romanists swarming at Court with greater confidence than had ever ben seene in England since the Reformation, so as every body grew jealous to what this would tend.

8 April.-Being now somewhat composed after my greate affliction,* I went to London to hear Dr. Tenison, (it being on a Wednesday in Lent,) at Whitehall. I observed that tho' the King was not in his seate above in the Chapell, the Doctor made his three congées, which they were not used to do when the late King was absent, making then one bowing only. I asked the reason. It was sayd he had a special order so to do. The Princess of Denmark was in the King's Closet, but sat on the left hand of the chaire, the Clearke of the Closet standing by his Ma's chaire as if he had ben present.

23 April.-Was the Coronation of the King & Queene. The solemnity was magnificent, as is set forth in print. The Bp. of Ely preach'd; but, to the greate sorrow of the people, no sacrament, as ought to have ben.

5 Nov.-It being an extraordinary wett morning, & myself indisposed by a very greate rheume, I did not go to Church, to my very greate sorrow, it being the first Gunpowder Conspiracy anniversary that had ben kept now these 80 years under a Prince of the Roman religion. Bonfires were forbidden on this day. What does this portend?

20.-Popish pamphlets & pictures sold publicly; no books nor answers to them appearing till long after.

31 Dec.-Recollecting the passages of the yeare past, & having made up accompts, humbly besought Almighty God to pardon those my sinns which had provoked him to discompose my sorrowful family,† that he would accept of our humiliation, &, in his good time, restore comfort to it. I also blest God for all his undeserved mercies & preservations, & begging the continuance of his grace & preservation.

The

1686. 1 Jan.-Imploring the continuance of God's providential care for the yeare now entered, I went to the publiq devotions. Deane of the Chapell & Clearke of the Closet put out-viz., Bp. of London &....& Rochester & Durhams put in their places; the former had opposed the toleration intended, & shewne a worthy zeale for the Reformed Religion as established.

7 March. Dr. Frampton preach'd on 44 Psalm 17, 18, 19, shewing the several afflictions of the Church of Christ from the primitives to this day, applying exceedingly to the present conjuncture, when many were wavering in their minds, & greate temptations appearing thro' the favour now found by the Papists, so as the people were full of jealousies & discouragement. The Bp. magnified the Church of England, exhorting to constancy & perseverance.

(To be continued.)

The death of his daughter.

By the death of two of his grown up daughters of small-pox.

+ Sprat.

$ Crewe.