GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
for nearly two hours, and where “ there seemed to be no dish 
like Coleridge’s conversation to feed upon,” the company listen- 
ing in wonder and delight; ‘‘ he thought a second Johnson had 
visited the earth to make wise the sons of men,’”’ and wished he 
himself could have been his Boswell. But, as is remarked in the 
preface to Coleridge’s ‘“ Table Talk,” ‘‘ Johnson talked with his 
companions, Coleridge talked to them.” He monopolized the 
conversation—and Carlyle (himself an astonishing conversation- 
alist), who did much the same, said that Coleridge’s voice, naturally 
soft and good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle 
and sing-song ... he spoke as if preaching—you would have 
said preaching earnestly and almost hopelessly, the weightiest 
things... .” ; 
‘*T think, Charles,” said Coleridge once to his old school-fellow 
Lamb, referring to the days when he so nearly became a Unitarian 
preacher, ‘‘ you never heard me preach ?”’ 
‘* My dear boy,” replied Lamb, ‘‘ { never heard you do anything 
else!” 
A more sympathetic report of Coleridge’s conversational gifts 
is that of Justice Talfourd. ‘‘ Who that has ever heard him can 
forget him?” he wrote, ‘his mild benignity, the unbounded 
variety of his knowledge, the fast-succeeding products of his 
imagination, the childlike simplicity with which he rises from the 
driest and commonest theme, into the wildest magnificence of 
thought, pouring on the soul a strain of beauty and of wisdom to 
mellow and enrich it for ever.’ It is a description that forcibly 
recalls his own lines : 
“* And now ’twas like all instruments, 
Now like a lonely flute ; 
And now it is an angel’s song, 
That makes the heavens be mute.” 
Even Carlyle could say “no talk in his century or any other 
could be more surprising.” 
Coleridge could more than hold his own on any theme, for the 
variety and extent of his knowledge were extraordinary, and every 
topic under the sun brought some inspiration to him. Yet during 
the Highgate period, his chief interest lay in philosophy and 
religion, and whatever the starting-point of the conversation, he 
always led the talk towards those subjects. The man who, study- 
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