GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



But loyalty, patience, and love, were not expended in vain ; 

 there can be no manner of doubt that the patient, ere the close 

 of his life, was cured, and that no opium except to relieve pain 

 ever entered the doctor's house although a report to the contrary 

 was circulated : a boy employed at the Grove was in the habit 

 of making weekly journeys to town to procure drugs for the doctor, 

 and it was asserted that on these occasions he had often brought 

 laudanum for Coleridge, from a chemist's in the Tottenham Court 

 Road. But this was entirely disproved when the same lad, no 

 longer in Dr. Gillman's service and now grown up, was questioned 

 on the point. He stated emphatically that the little packages he 

 used to bring for Mr. Coleridge from London, contained nothing 

 more noxious than the poet's favourite brand of snuff, of which 

 he took large quantities ; and that moreover he had never heard 

 a whisper of his addiction to laudanum. 



Mrs. Gillman was an excellent manager, and what, in view of 

 Coleridge's passion for self-expression, was almost equally im- 

 portant, she was an admirable and patient listener also. She 

 was proud, her grandson tells us, of so distinguished a guest, and 

 welcomed his friends, and those thinkers and searchers after 

 truth, who flocked to the philosopher-poet as to an oracle. Among 

 these were Frederick Denison Maurice, Arthur H. Hallam, and 

 Edward Irving, together with many others who were leaders or 

 followers of the new schools of thought ; and the Grove soon became 

 famous as a centre of intellectual activity. The Wordsworths 

 came when in London, Charles Lamb, whosfc deyotion to the 

 '' inspired charity boy ' : the friend of his youth, knew no bounds 

 dined at the Gillmans' every Sunday, and frequently came on 

 week-day evenings also, returning to town by the coach that 

 then ran from the " Fox and Crown " to Holborn fares for inside 

 passengers 2s., for outside Is. 6d. Mrs. Coleridge spent the Christ- 

 mas of 1822 at the Grove, and ultimately came to live with her 

 daughter Sara, when she married her cousin, and settled at 

 Hampstead. Mrs. Gillman corresponded with Mrs. Coleridge : 

 and we learn that her letters to her husband used to sadden him 

 no doubt the thought of what might have been, and regrets 

 for what he had missed of domestic happiness in the society 

 of his wife and children, were at such times uppermost in the mind 

 of the too-severely self-accusing man. Perhaps these were the 



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