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 
Kdward 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, whose devotion 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 1s. 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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