1888.] on S. T. Coleridge. 237 



founders of an Arcadia of i)Gi'fect simi)licity, refinement, and equality. 

 As for tlie Eves of the Paradise, were there not three Miss Frickers ? 

 Coleridge ^repelled for a time the too obvious foreboding that Pan- 

 tisocracy was but a province of dreamland. Dreamland was his 

 reality. For the demands of butchers and bakers he had still a 

 lordly indiiference. He had the voice which could charm even a 

 publisher. The prim and priggish Cottle was at once annexed by 

 Coleridge, and all the natural caution of a tradesman did not with- 

 hold him from promising a guinea for every hundred lines to bo pro- 

 duced by a still untried new poet. What were one hundred lines to 

 the genius which could turn off an act of a tragedy in a morning, 

 and which soon afterwards could build the shady j)alace of Kubla 

 Khan in a dream? Coleridge was justified, in point of bare pru- 

 dence, in marrying at once on the prospect. Somehow the poetry 

 did not come so fast as the bills. But Coleridge had other strings to 

 his bow. He set up as a lecturer and journalist. His marvellous 

 eloquence condescended for the nonce to wile i^romises of subscrip- 

 tion even from dealers in tallow ; and the philosopher — not without a 

 humorous sense of his own absurdity — became a successful commercial 

 traveller. The newspaper of course collapsed almost on the sj^ot. All 

 the arrangements were absurd, and Coleridge's eloquence proved to bo 

 somehow uncongenial to the tallow-dealing interest. But meanwhile, 

 in the co.u'se of his journey, Coleridge had incidentally and, as it 

 were, by the mere side glance of his 9ye, swept up Charles Lloyd, son 

 of a rich banker, who, fascinated and enthralled, left the bank to 

 become an inmate of his teacher's house, and, no doubt, a contributor 

 to its expenses. Poole, a most public-spirited and intelligent man, 

 offered him an asylum at Nether Stowey. The Unitarians, to whom 

 he more or less belonged, were ready to open their pulpit to a preacher 

 whose eloquence promised to rival even the most splendid traditions 

 of the refined age of Leighton and Jeremy Taylor. 



Hazlitt, not yet soured and savage, heard Coleridge preach in 

 1798 ; and tolls us in true Hazlittian style how his voice rose like a 

 storm of rich distilled perfumes ; how he launched into his subject 

 like an eagle dallying with the wind; how, in brief, poetry and 

 philosophy had met together, truth and genius had embraced under 

 the eye and with the sanction of reason. The Unitarian firmament 

 was too cramped for this brilliant meteor ; the philosophy expounded 

 from the jnilpits seemed to him meagre and rigid ; and, while hesi- 

 tating, he received an offer from the generous Wedgwoods, anxious to 

 spend some joart of their wealth in the j^atronage of genius. 



Rumours had reached England by this time that a great intellec- 

 tual light had arisen in Germany. The Wedgwoods gave Coleridge 

 a modest annuity, unfettered (as I can now say) by any condition 

 whatever, a fact which makes the subsequent withdrawal a harsher 

 measure than has been supposed. Coleridge resolved to go to 

 Germany, catch the sacred fire of the Kantian philosoi)hy, and return 

 to England to regenerate the mind of his countrymen. He started 



