About this period the Scottish Review, a quarterly periodical, was in its glory, and to its pages our Ettrick Shepherd was an occasional contributor: a criticism of his upon the Isle of Palms brought him to the personal knowledge of Professor Wilson.

In 1815 he appeared before the public in the Pilgrims of the Sun, a work of unequal merit. Its success at home was comparatively trifling; but in America two successive reprints were made of it, and ten thousand copies circulated throughout that country. Soon after appeared Mador of the Moor; the success of which not being very satisfactory, Hogg set himself down to collect pieces from the great living bards of Britain. But the refusal of Scott to have his verses so printed, coupled with other circumstances, determined him to change his plan, and to venture on the bold step of writing imitations of the whole himself. Thus originated The Poetic Mirror, a singular work, comprising many pieces of merit, which passed into a second edition, and altogether was highly successful.

Next

Dramatic Tales, in two volumes, succeeded The Mirror; and next came, in prose, The Brownie of Bodsheck, and other tales. were published The Jacobite Relics, among the imitations in which of Jacobite ballads are some of Mr. Hogg's best lyrics. Shortly afterwards Winter Evening Tales made their appearance, comprising all his earlier efforts in prose. The Ettrick Shepherd died on 21st of November, 1835.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
(1772-1834.)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, youngest son of the Rev. John Coleridge, Vicar of St. Mary Ottery, Devonshire, was born in that town, 21st October, 1772. From October 1775 to October 1778, he tells us in the Biographia Literaria, he continued at the reading school, because he was too little to be trusted among his father's schoolboys. He relates, further, how by certain jealousies on his brother Frank's part, he was in earliest childhood huffed away from the enjoyments of muscular activity by play, to take refuge at his mother's side on his little stool, to read his little book, and to listen to the talk of his elders; and thus driven from life in motion, to that life in thought and sensation which he afterwards passed through. His excellent father died on the 10th October, 1781; and in the spring of 1782 the bereaved child became an inmate of the Blue-Coat School, an advantage secured for him by the mediation of Sir Francis Buller. After passing six weeks in the branch establishment at Hertford, young Coleridge, already regarded by his relations as a talking prodigy, came up to the great school in London, September 1782, where he continued for eight years, with Bowyer for his teacher, and Charles Lamb for his friend; Coleridge

being the " poor friendless boy" so exquisitely described in Elia's

Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years ago. His great delight all this time was reading; his talents and superiority, as he tells us, placed him ever at the head of his class in his mere school-studies, without

any desire or ambition on his part, emulation having no meaning for him. "Thank Heaven," he exclaims, "it was not the age for getting up prodigies; but at twelve or fourteen I should have made as pretty a juvenile prodigy as was ever emasculated by fond and idle wonder

ment."

On 5th February, 1791, Coleridge entered Jesus College, Cambridge. He gained Sir William Brown's gold medal for the Greek Ode in the summer of that year. It was on the slave-trade. The poetic force and originality of this ode were, as he said himself, much beyond the language in which they were conveyed. In the winter of 1793, he stood for the University (Craven) Scholarship with Dr. Keate, the late head-master of Eton, Mr. Bethel (of Yorkshire), and Bishop Butler, who was the successful candidate. In 1793 he wrote without success for the Greek Ode on Astronomy, the prize for which was gained by Dr. Keate. The original is not known to exist; but the reader may see what is probably a very free version of it by Mr. Southey in his minor poems. Coleridge," says a schoolfellow of his who followed him to Cambridge in 1792, 66 was very studious; but his reading was desultory and capricious. He took little exercise merely for the sake of exercise; but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind in conversation; and for the sake of this his room (the ground-floor room on the right hand of the staircase facing the great gate) was a constant rendezvous of conversationloving friends. I will not call them loungers; for they did not call to kill time, but to enjoy it. What evenings have I spent in those rooms! What suppers, or sizings, as they were called, have I enjoyed, when Eschylus and Plato and Thucydides were pushed aside, with a pile of lexicons and the like, to discuss the pamphlets of the day! Ever and anon a pamphlet issued from the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book before us;-Coleridge had read it in the morning, and in the evening he would repeat whole pages verbatim.”

In May and June 1793, Frend's trial took place in the Vice-Chancellor's Court, and in the Court of Delegates, at Cambridge. Frend was a fellow of Jesus, and a slight acquaintance had existed between him and Coleridge, who, however, soon became his partisan. The trial was observed by Coleridge to be going against Frend, when some observation or speech was made in his favour; a dying hope thrown out (as it appeared) to Coleridge, who, in the midst of the Senate House, extended his hands and clapped them. The Proctor, in a loud voice, demanded who had committed this indecorum. Silence ensued. The Proctor, in an elevated tone, said to a young man sitting near Coleridge, ""Twas you, sir!" The reply was as prompt as the accusation; for, immediately holding out the stump of his right arm, it appeared that he had lost his hand : "I would, sir," said he, "that I had the power." That no innocent person should incur blame, Coleridge went directly afterwards to the Proctor, who told him that he saw him clap his hands, but fixed on this person, who he knew had not the power. "You have had," said he, " a narrow escape. Coleridge passed the summer of 1793 at Ottery, and whilst there wrote his Songs of the Pixies, and some other little pieces. He returned to Cambridge in October; but in the following month, in a moment of despondency and vexation of spirit, occasioned principally

by some debts, not amounting to 1007., he suddenly left his college and went to London. In a few days he was reduced to want; and observing a recruiting advertisement, he resolved to get bread, and overcome a prejudice at the same time, by becoming a soldier. He accordingly applied to the sergeant, and after some delay was marched down to Reading, where he regularly enlisted as a private in the 15th Light Dragoons, on the 3d December, 1793. He kept his initials under the names of Silas Titus Comberbacke. He continued during four months a dragoon, during which time he saw and suffered much. He rode his horse ill, and groomed him worse; but he made amends by nursing the sick, and writing letters for the sound. His education was detected by one of the officers, who observed the words, Eheu! quam infortunii miserrimum est fuisse felicem! freshly written in pencil on the stable-door, and ascertained that Comberbacke was the writer. But the termination of his military career was brought about by a chance recognition in the street; his family was apprised of his situation, and after some difficulty he was duly discharged on 10th April, 1794, at Hounslow. Coleridge now returned to Cambridge, and remained there till the commencement of the summer vacation. But the adventures of the preceding six months had broken the continuity of his academic life, and given birth to new views of future exertion; besides that, his adoption about this time of Unitarianism— which, however, he afterwards renounced—precluded his entering the Church.

In June 1794, Coleridge went on a visit to an old schoolfellow at Oxford, where an introduction to Southey, then an undergraduate of Balliol College, became the hinge on which a large part of his afterlife was destined to turn. After an excursion in Wales, of which he gives a very characteristic and amusing account in the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge went to Bristol to see Southey, who introduced him to Robert Lovell, then recently married to Mary Fricker; and in whose house he became acquainted with her sister Sarah, whom he afterwards married. Then accompanying Southey to Bath, he remained in that city several weeks, principally engaged in making love, and in maturing with his friends the plan which he had for some time cherished, of a social community to be established in America upon what he termed a pantisocratical basis. The original members of this society—which, it is almost needless to add, never came to any result. were Coleridge, Southey, Lovell, and George Burnet. Towards the beginning of September, Coleridge returned to Cambridge, apparently with the view of taking his degree of B.A. But he took no degree; and all he did was to publish the Fall of Robespierre, a joint composition by himself and Southey. The winter of 1794 he passed with Lamb in London. In the beginning of 1795 he returned with Southey to Bristol.

The whole spring and summer of this year he devoted to public lectures at Bristol, with intervals of excursions in Somersetshire, in one of which he became acquainted with Wordsworth. The first six of his lectures presented a comparative view of the civil war under Charles I. and the French Revolution; the other six were on revealed religion, its corruptions and political views, intended for Christians and for infidels: for the former, that they may be able to

give a reason for the hope that is in them; for the latter, that they might not determine against Christianity from arguments applicable to its corruptions only.

66

On 4th October, 1795, Coleridge was married at St. Mary Redcliff Church to Sarah Fricker, and went to reside in a cottage at Clevedon, on the Bristol Channel, with the immediate view of proceeding thence to Cambridge, there to finish his great work of Imitations, in two volumes, and to publish Proposals for a School. Meantime, in December he issued a prospectus of The Watchman, a miscellany, to be continued every eighth day; and in January departed on a commercial travel through the provinces, to collect subscribers, and incidentally to practise as a Unitarian preacher. His first sermons on this occasion-he had preached twice previously-were at Birmingham; and, as he tells us, were preciously peppered with politics. Coleridge—“ his idea-pot bubbling up so vehemently with fears, doubts, and difficulties," that he feared lest it should "boil over and put out the fire"-returned to Bristol (where his wife was on a visit to her mother), having procured a thousand subscribers for the Watchman, the first number of which made its appearance on the 1st of March, 1796; the last on the 13th of May following. In the interval, Coleridge's first volume of poems was published by Mr. Cottle, whose enduring kindness to the poet is nobly recognised by the latter in various letters, printed in the second edition of the Biographia Literaria. In the same year, negotiations were set on foot for an engagement on the Morning Chronicle; but ere they were completed, Coleridge received an invitation from Mrs. Evans, then of Darley, near Derby, to visit her, with the view to his undertaking the education of her sons. But this project ended in nothing, as did so many others; and among them, much about the same time, an endeavour on the part of the benevolent Mr. Poole to raise a small annuity for the struggling poet and philosopher, and an effort by Roscoe to procure for him some position at Liverpool. Whilst at Birmingham, on the Watchman tour, Coleridge had been introduced to Charles Lloyd, the eldest son of Mr. Lloyd, an eminent banker of that place. At Moseley they met again, and the result of an intercourse for a few days together was an ardent desire on the part of Lloyd to domesticate himself permanently with a man whose conversation seemed to him a revelation from heaven. Just before the birth of Coleridge's eldest son, Hartley (Sept. 1796), Southey, who had returned to Bristol from Portugal, and was in lodgings nearly opposite Coleridge's house in Oxford Street, renewed with him the friendship which had been interrupted by a quarrel, arising out of the abandonment of the American scheme. Circumstances separated the two friends in after-life; but their mutual regard remained unaltered.

In 1797 the poems were reprinted, with some additions and alterations. In the same year he wrote his Osorio, a tragedy. A third edition of the poems was produced in 1798, the exclusion from which of the contributions of Lamb and Lloyd occasioned a temporary coolness between the excluded and the excluder.

Up to this point of time, Coleridge had held, though laxly, the doctrines of Socinus. In Jan. 1798, on the Rev. Mr. Rowe, the

Unitarian minister of Shrewsbury, removing to Bristol, Coleridge was strongly recommended by his friends of that persuasion to offer himself as Mr. Rowe's successor, and he accordingly went on probation to Shrewsbury. The description of this probation-sermon forms the subject of one of Hazlitt's most brilliant writings, My first Acquaintance with Poets. Coleridge was at this time living in a cottage at Nether-Stowey, which he had selected on account of the residence -next door to him-of William Wordsworth, and where he provided for his scanty maintenance by writing verses in the Morning Post.

The Messrs. Wedgewood, who had conceived a great interest in Coleridge, were decidedly averse to his devoting himself to a pastoral charge, which they conceived might operate unfavourably on his literary pursuits; and accordingly made him an offer of an allowance during his life of 1507. per annum. The offer was accepted, and the Shrewsbury ministry declined; and Coleridge, on the strength of this new resource, proceeded with Wordsworth on a visit to Germany, where he spent fourteen months, during which period the sketches called Satyrane's Letters were written. On his return, in Nov. 1799, he formed an engagement with Mr. Stuart, who was then conducting the Morning Post, to contribute literary and political articles to that journal. For this purpose, Mr. Stuart took lodgings for him in King Street, Covent Garden; but he "totally failed,” says Mr. Stuart, “in the plan he proposed of writing daily on the daily occurrences." the end of the first half-year's engagement, Coleridge, who had during that time been frequently incapacitated by illness from writing, quitted London for the north. Mr. Stuart gives us a long letter from him, dated Greta Hall, Keswick, 19th July, 1800, in which he promises a second part of Pitt and Buonaparte; but speaks of it as uncertain whether or no he should be able to continue any regular species of employment for Mr. Stuart's paper. In another letter,

At

May 1801, Coleridge, still writing from Keswick, speaks of ill-health, and "the habits of irresolution which are its worst consequences, forbidding him to rely upon himself for any systematic labour. There is a long controversy in the Biographia Literaria, as to the amount of benefit which Coleridge's writings conferred commercially on the Morning Post. Whatever may have been their value in this respect, they were continued, at intervals, later than 1816, and their aggregate bulk represents several octavo volumes.

In 1804, Coleridge, to recruit his health, made his way out to Malta, where Dr. Stoddart, with whom he had been previously acquainted, and who was then king's advocate there, and afterwards became Chief Justice and Judge of the Admiralty Court, received him with characteristic kindness, and obtained for him the appointment of secretary to the governor, Sir Alexander Ball. Coleridge returned to England in the summer of 1806, still ill, and very poor; the money he had received from Sir Alexander Ball having been all expended on the homeward journey through Italy. From his pecuniary distress he was relieved by the noble conduct of Mr. De Quincey, who anonymously forwarded to him through Mr. Cottle 3007.; a gift doubly acceptable at the moment, the annuity from the Messrs. Wedgewood having just been reduced from 150l. to 75l. per annum.