236 Mr. Leslie Sfcplien [March 9, 



bear ; we did nothing for Wordsworth, except, indeed, that we took 

 him to Milton's rooms, and there for once (it must really have done 

 him some good) induced him to take a glass too much ; and we, as 

 nearly as possible, converted Coleridge into a heavy dragoon. We 

 ordered him to bow the knee to Euclid, and to Newton's Principin, 

 the only idols whose merits were altogether beyond his powers of 

 aj^preciation, and by such kindness in disguise induced him to plunge 

 into a precocious breach with the proprieties. A fellowship might 

 have converted him into a solid Church and State don, an oracle of 

 the Combination Eoom, and a sound judge of port wine. We sternly 

 withheld the temptation. A reformer has to start in life as a rebel. 

 Coleridge sympathised with the rebellious William Frcnd, who was 

 being banished from Cambridge for excessive liberalism. He offered 

 his youthful incense to Priestley, the " patriot and saint and sage " — 

 so the young enthusiast called him — who was soon to be expelled by 

 the exuberant loyalty of Birmingham from an ungrateful country. 

 Though never a Jacobin, he became what, in some form or other, a 

 young man ought to become — an enthusiast for the newest lights, a 

 partisan of the ideas struggling to remould the ancient order and 

 raise the aspirations of mankind. The Master of the College shook 

 his reverend hcarl, kindly enough at times, at the lad's vagaries, and 

 forgave him even for that preposterous attempt to become a trooper 

 which never enabled him, with all his subtlety of distinction, to form 

 any clear conception of the ditference between a horse's head and its 

 tail. But he could not run in the regular track. He was thrown 

 into the chaotic world to sink or swim by his unassisted abilities. 

 No man had, in some ways, a better floating apparatus. The poetic 

 vein, soon to manifest itself in his best work, was indeed still turbid 

 with the alloy of didactic twaddle. But already he had the versatility, 

 the inherent vitality of intellect, the power of embodying philosophic 

 thoughts in poetic imagery, which made him unrivalled in monologue. 

 He talked better, I am apt to think, with his chum, Charles Lamb, 

 at the " Cat and Salutation," than he ever talked to his worshippers 

 at Highgate Hill. A man is at his best before he is recognised. 

 Coleridge's early letters and essays show the fulness and intellectual 

 vigour, without the too elaborate and slightly sanctimonious circum- 

 gyrations, of his later effusions. And his genius was such as 

 implied a double portion of the power of making friends, which, with 

 most of us, wanes so lamentably as the years go by. Lamb, his 

 earliest and latest friend, was already devoted to this brilliant school- 

 fellow ; and if Lamb was an easy conquest, men of less conspicuously 

 tender nature were equally attracted. He had only to meet Southcy 

 at Oxford to swear at once an eternal friendship — a friendship to be 

 cemented by a regeneration of the world. 



Coleridge was to be the Plato of a new society to be founded in 

 the wilds of America. There a short and healthy space of daily toil 

 was to provide all that was necessary for a band of poets and j^hilo- 

 sophers, too benevolent to care for separate property, and worthy 



