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PART I

FROM COLERIDGE TO MACAULAY

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA

1817

[This work, extraordinarily discursive even for Coleridge, is represented here by portions of Chapters 10, 14, 17, 18, 21. In connection with the first extract it should be recalled that Coleridge now writes from the standpoint of his later life, when he had become a convert to orthodox Christianity and political conservatism. One must also remember that his memory was treacherously inaccurate; thus of the passage on the financial outcome of The Watchman (p. 9). Cottle, his early friend and publisher, writes: "The fact is Biggs the printer (a worthy man) never threatened or even importuned for the money.... The whole of the paper (which cost more than the printing) was paid for by the writer."j

VARIOUS ANECDOTES OF THE AUTHOR'S LITERARY LIFE, AND THE PROGRESS OF HIS OPINIONS IN RELIGION AND POLITICS

TOWARD the close of the first year from the time that in an inauspicious hour I left the friendly cloisters and the happy grove of quiet, ever honored Jesus College, Cambridge, I was persuaded by sundry philanthropists and anti-polemists 1 to set on foot a periodical work, entitled The Watchman, that (according to the general motto of the work) all might know the truth, and that the truth might make us free! In order to exempt it from the stamp-tax, and likewise to contribute as little as possible to the supposed guilt of a war against freedom, it was to be published on every eighth day, thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely printed, and price only fourpence. Accordingly with a flaming prospectus, "Knowledge is Power," etc., to cry the state of the political atmosphere, and so forth, I set off on a tour to the North, from Bristol to Sheffield, for the purpose of procuring customers, preaching by the way in most of the great towns, as an hireless volunteer, in a blue coat and white waistcoat, that not a rag of the woman of Babylon 2 might be seen on me. For I was at that time and long after, though a 1 Opponents of war.

? Romanism.

Trinitarian (i.e., ad normam Platonis) in philosophy, yet a zealous Unitarian in religion; more accurately, I was a psilanthropist,1 one of those who believe our Lord to have been the real son of Joseph, and who lay the main stress on the resurrection rather than on the crucifixion. O! never can I remember those days with either shame or regret. For I was most sincere, most disinterested! My opinions were indeed in many and most important points erroneous; but my heart was single. Wealth, rank, life itself then seemed cheap to me, compared with the interests of (what I believed to be) the truth, and the will of my Maker. I cannot even accuse myself of having been actuated by vanity; for in the expansion of my enthusiasm I did not think of myself at all.

My campaign commenced at Birmingham; and my first attack was on a rigid Calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. He was a tall dingy man, in whom length was so predominant over breadth, that he might almost have been borrowed for a foundry poker. O that face! a face Kaт' eμpaσiv!? I have it before me at this moment. The lank, black, twine-like hair, pinguinitescent, cut in a straight line along the black stubble of his thin gunpowder eyebrows, that looked like a scorched aftermath from a last week's shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of colour and of lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage, that I suppose he called his hair, and which with a bend inward at the nape of the neck (the only approach to flexure in his whole figure) slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance lank, dark, very hard, and with strong perpendicular furrows, gave me a dim notion of some one looking at me through a used gridiron, all soot, grease, and iron! But he was one of the thorough-bred, a true lover of liberty, and (I was informed) had proved to the satisfaction of many that Mr. Pitt was one of the horns of the second beast in the Revelations, that spoke like a dragon. A person to whom one of my letters of recommendation had been addressed was my introducer. It was a new event in my life, my first stroke in the new business I had undertaken of an author, yea, and of an author

1 Believer in the merely human nature of Jesus.

2 Apparently.

Shining with oil.

trading on his own account. My companion, after some imperfect sentences and a multitude of hums and haas, abandoned the cause to his client; and I commenced an harangue of half an hour to Phileleutheros,1 the tallow-chandler, varying my notes, through the whole gamut of eloquence, from the ratiocinative to the declamatory, and in the latter from the pathetic to the indignant. I argued, I described, I promised, I prophesied; and beginning with the captivity of nations I ended with the near approach of the millennium, finishing the whole with some of my own verses describing that glorious state, out of the "Religious Musings":

Such delights

As float to earth, permitted visitants!
When in some hour of solemn jubilee
The massive gates of Paradise are thrown
Wide open: and forth come in fragments wild
Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies,

And odors snatch'd from beds of amaranth,
And they that from the crystal river of life
Spring up on freshen'd wing, ambrosial gales!

My taper man of lights listened with perseverant and praiseworthy patience, though (as I was afterwards told, on complaining of certain gales that were not altogether ambrosial) it was a melting day with him. "And what, sir," he said, after a short pause, "might the cost be?" "Only fourpence" (O! how I felt the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos of that four pence!), "only fourpence, sir, each number, to be published on every eighth day." "That comes to a deal of money at the end of a year. And how much did you say there was to be for the money?" "Thirty-two pages, sir! large octavo, closely printed." "Thirty and two pages? Bless me! why, except what I does in a family way on the Sabbath, that's more than I ever reads, sir, all the year round. I am as great a one as any man in Brummagem, sir, for liberty and truth and all them sort of things, but as to this (no offence, I hope, sir) I must beg to be excused."

So ended my first canvass: from causes that I shall presently mention, I made but one other application in person. This took

1 Lover of freedom.

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