July 8. 1854.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



21 



LONDON, SATURDAY, JULYS, 1854. 



0atti. 



COLEBIDGE AND HIS LECTURES. 



It was not unusual, when I was young, to in- 

 vite friends to tea and supper, and it was in this 

 manner that my acquaintance with Coleridge, 

 Wordsworth, Lamb, and others, began at my 

 father's : tea was concluded before eight in the 

 evening, and about eleven a supper, hot and cold, 

 was served up in the dining-room, and the com- 

 pany, without any excess either of eating or 

 drinking, did not separate till one or two in the 

 morning. These parties may have commenced 

 when I was sixteen or seventeen years old, and 

 they continued until I quitted my father's roof, 

 and had a roof of my own. Coleridge was not so 

 frequent a visitor as some others, but when he 

 did come, people were generally content that he 

 should have much of the talk to himself, and I had 

 the merit of being an excellent listener. It was 

 my habit to put down, at least, the heads of what 

 I had heard, and at one time I had a collection of 

 memorandum-books extending over several years. 

 Some of these I destroyed myself, because they 

 contained observations or criticisms, which the 

 speakers had delivered in the confidence of private 

 intercourse, accompanied, perhaps, by remarks of 

 my own, which, as I grew older and knew more, 

 I regretted. A few of these books I retained, 

 but in the course of thirty or forty years most of 

 these have been lost ; and, as I stated in a former 

 communication, only some fragments are now ex- 

 tant, and were found with my notes of Coleridge's 

 lectures delivered in 1812. 



Among these fragments I am rejoiced to meet 

 with extemporaneous commentaries by Coleridge 

 on Sbakspeare, and some rival dramatists. Thus, 

 for instance, I find him maintaining, in the words 

 of my diary, " That Falstaff was no coward, 

 but pretended to be one, merely for the sake of 

 trying experiments on the credulity of mankind ; 

 that he was a liar with the same object, and 

 not because he loved falsehood for itself. He 

 was a man of such pre-eminent abilities as to 

 give him a profound contempt for all those by 

 whom he was usually surrounded, and to lead to 

 a determination on his part, in spite of their own 

 fancied superiority, to make them his tools and 

 dupes. He knew, however low he descended, that 

 his own talents would raise him, and extricate him 

 from any difficulty. While he was thought to be 

 the greatest rogue, thief, and liar, he still had that 

 about him which could render him not only re- 

 spectable, but absolutely necessary to his com- 

 panions. It was in characters of complete moral 

 depravity, but of first-rate wit and talents, that 



Shakspeare delighted ; and Coleridge instanced 

 Richard III., lago, and Falstaff." 



These are the very words in my diary, and, I 

 presume, the very words Coleridge employed, as 

 nearly as my memory served me ; the date is 

 13th October, 1812, and four days afterwards I 

 was again in his company at the chambers of 

 Charles Lamb. He was talking of Shakspeare 

 when I entered the room, and said " that he was 

 almost the only dramatic poet who by his cha- 

 racters represented a class and not an individual : 

 other poets, and in other respects good ones too, 

 had aimed their satire and ridicule at particular 

 foibles and particular persons, while Shakspeare 

 at one blow lashed thousands. Coleridge drew a 

 parallel between Shakspeare and a geometrician ; 

 the latter, in forming a circle had his eye upon the 

 centre as the important point, but included in his 

 vision a wide circumference : so Shakspeare, while 

 his eye rested on an individual character, always 

 embraced a je ide circumference of others, without 

 diminishing the interest he intended to attach to 

 the being he pourtrayed. Othello was a per- 

 sonage of this description." 



From thence he went on to notice Beaumont 

 and Fletcher, and gave high commendation to 

 their comedies, but their tragedies were liable ta 

 great objections. " Their tragedies (he said) 

 always proceed upon something forced and unna- 

 tural ; the reader can never reconcile the plot 

 with probability, and sometimes not with possi- 

 bility. One of their tragedies was founded upon 

 this point : — a lady expresses a wish to possess the 

 heart of her lover, terms which that lover under- 

 stands all the way through in a literal sense, and 

 nothing would satisfy him but tearing out his 

 heart, and having it presented to the heroine, in 

 order to secure her affections after he was past the 

 enjoyment of them. Their comedies, however, 

 were of a much superior cast, and at times, and 

 excepting in the generalisation of humour and 

 application, almost rivalled Shakspeare." 



This is all that I find recorded immediately re- 

 lating to Shakspeare on the 17th October; but 

 Coleridge went on to criticise Kotzebue and 

 Moore's tragedy The Gamester, and from thence 

 diverged to Southey and Scott. As, however, his 

 opinions upon these subjects do not contribute to 

 my purpose, I omit them, in order to subjoin his 

 note to me, which is written, as I before men- 

 tioned, on the blank spaces of the prospectus for 

 his lectures in 1818. I had desired to have a 

 ticket for the course, and he had forwarded one to 

 me neither signed nor sealed, which I returned ; 

 he sent it back properly authenticated, with the 

 subsequent note, in'which I have only left out one 

 or two unimportant names : 



" If you knew but half the perplexities with 

 which (I thank God as one sinned against, not 



