Last updated 09/07/24: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In October, 1805, in his twentieth year, John Wilson, gentleman commoner of Oxford, purchased some ground on Lake Windermere. Here it was that, after his brilliant graduation in March, 1807, the winner of the first Newdigate prize settled in his cottage of Elleray. Through diffidence he had been unwilling to intrude upon Wordsworth during his early visits to the Lake District; but by 1808 he had made the acquaintance of the poet and his family, and for the next few years he was on most intimate terms with them, as the letters of Dorothy Wordsworth show. Naturally, too, he became acquainted with the other members of the “Lake School.” De Quincey first saw “Wilson of Elleray” at the dances held at Low Brathay, home of Charles Lloyd, and was introduced to his lifelong friend by Wordsworth at Allan Bank, “at the latter end of 1808,” at a time when both De Quincey and Coleridge were on a visit to Wordsworth, the introduction taking place in a room used as a study by Coleridge. Southey likewise dined in Wilson's company at Lloyd's, and breakfasted with him at Keswick shortly after, but whereas Wilson always felt warm regard for the laureate, the latter could not recover from his abhorrence when he learned of the younger man's passion for cockfighting. “I could not tolerate his manner of life enough to accept the advances which he made towards an intimacy,” writes Southey, with entirely unnecessary indignation, in 1819. Precisely when Coleridge met his fellow-laker is uncertain. We know that Coleridge invited Eliza Nevins, Wilson, and Mrs. Wilson to Grasmere in September, 1808, and that, together with the Wordsworths and De Quincey, he paid Wilson a visit at Christmas, 1809, during which, Dorothy Wordsworth informs us, “we enjoyed ourselves very much, in a pleasant mixture of merriment and thoughtful discourse.” We know that in the seventeenth number of Coleridge's The Friend, on December 14, 1809, appeared that splendid tribute to Wordsworth, the letter of Mathetes, joint production of Wilson and his friend, Alexander Blair.
1 See Dorothy Wordsworth's letter of December 28, 1809: Letters of the Wordsworth Family, ed. by William Knight (1907), i, 487.
2 In her Christopher North (1866), p. 81, Mrs. Gordon says 1807; but see Dorothy Wordsworth's letters in Knight, i, 346 and 487.
3 “H. A. Page” (A. H. Japp), De Quincey's Life and Writings (1877), i, 156.
4 D. Masson, Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey (1896), v, 262. From the Edinburgh Literary Gazette, June 6, 1829.
For an account of Wilson and De Quincey, see Fräulein Maria Cramer's Thomas De Quincey und John Wilson (Münster, 1929).
5 See Southey's letter to James Hogg, December 1, 1814: Mrs. Garden, Memorials of James Hogg (1884), pp. 75–76.
6 John Wood Wärter, Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey (1856), iii, 124.
7 See Coleridge's letter “to Miss Eliza Nevins, Mr. J. Wilson's, Kendal,” September 16, 1808: Earl Leslie Griggs, Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1932), i, 427.
7a See Note 1.
8 Mrs. Gordon, p. 85 note. The title was De Quincey's. “I remember that De Quincey was with us at the time. He may have given some suggestions besides, but we certainly owed to him our signature”: Blair's letter, Mrs. Gordon, p. 85.
9 Volume third, part second (published in 1812), cvii–cxiv.
* This image is from an unpublished poem of Mr. Coleridge.
10 Blackwood's Magazine, xxxvi, 551.
11 Knight, Letters of the Wordsworth Family, i, 433.
12 “In the autumn of 1810, Coleridge left the Lakes; and, so far as I am aware, for ever”: De Quincey, Masson, ii, 203. For once, J. D. Campbell agrees with the Opium-Eater; he sets the date of Coleridge's departure as about October 20, 1810. The same authority states that Coleridge returned to the Lake Country only once thereafter, in March and April, 1812: The Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge (1914), Introduction, lxxxi, lxxxiv-lxxxv.
13 Samuel Smiles, Memoirs and Correspondence of John Murray (1891), i, 300.
14 Mrs. Gordon, 135. I am somewhat puzzled by this passage as Coleridge appears to have been at Calne, Wiltshire, at this time. Yet H. D. Rawnsley, in his Literary Associations of the English Lakes (1894), ii, 45, refers to this visit of Wilson upon Coleridge at Pooley Bridge. Possibly the poet had a favorite visiting place near Ullswater, which came to be referred to as his:—could it have been, for example, Clarkson's residence, Playford Hall?
15 Mrs. Oliphant, William Blackwood and his Sons (1897), i, 262–264.
16 Ibid., i, 265. (But the review of the Lament of Tasso is kindly enough.)
17 See, for example, Albert Mordell's Notorious Literary Attacks (1926), p. xxvi.—Actually Scott's remonstrance prevented Maturin from retorting upon Coleridge. Sir Walter's letter to Maturin, February 26, 1818, appears in Lockhart's Life.
18 Wilson assails Coleridge for his “gross injustice, and, we fear, envious persecution” of Maturin: Blackwood's Magazine, ii, 17–18; but he twice refers to Jeffrey, blaming Coleridge severely for his treatment of the Edinburgh Reviewer after the latter's visit to Keswick: Ibid., ii, 14–15; see also ii, 9. In the same number of October, in a review of Marlow's Edward II, Wilson praises Jeffrey's essay in the Edinburgh on Ford's Works. “This, we believe, is the Essay which roused the blind and blundering wrath of Coleridge,” etc.; Ibid., ii, 30 note.
Undoubtedly Wilson's friendship for Jeffrey had something to do, also, with his early attacks on Wordsworth in Maga, as I hope to show at a future time.
19 See Jeffrey's letter to Wilson, October 17, 1817: Mrs. Gordon, p. 157.—Apparently the editor of the Edinburgh had thought that the review would be favorable, for he declines it on the ground that “the discrepancy of our opinions as to that style of poetry” would be “too glaring.”
20 Peter's Letters, second edition, ii, 218. (This “second edition” was, actually, the first.)
21 Lang, i, 148 note.
21a Frank Henderson, George Gilfillan's Sketches Literary and Theological (1881), pp. 29–30. I give the above anecdote for what it is worth. In an article on Wilson in The Critic, April 15, 1854, Gilfillan writes: “From this gifted man [Coleridge], however, he [Wilson] became estranged,” and when he carries this article over into his A Third Gallery of Literary Portraits (1854), he again writes, p. 435, “A misunderstanding, however, arose between them, and they became estranged for a season.” Then, two years later, in his half autobiographic, half romantic The History of a Man (1856), pp. 109–111, he amplifies these hints, building up a highly colored discussion of Wilson's half-contemptuous admiration for Coleridge. The following account, real or imaginary, of Wilson's conversation with Gilfillan in 1831 or 1832, may be included, if only as a contrast to the passage from Viscount Cranbrook about to be quoted (compare Note 113):
“His [Coleridge's] character,” Wilson remarks, “was soft, weak, and yielding; his bodily system healthy, but flabby, and drowned in fat; while his genius was swift, winged, ethereal, almost universal in its range. I have often thought that he should be painted as a composite figure, such as we find in heraldry—a large luxuriant sloth, with an eagle perched upon its back. …”
To Gilfillan's question as to whether Coleridge plagiarized, Wilson answers in the affirmative: “De Quincey makes him out a thief; but I think he stole in his sleep, too. I don't believe he was aware that he had been pilfering, till he was challenged with it; and then he got first confused, and then angry, and then hated you bitterly all his life long for charging him with theft. …”
Asked what he thinks of Coleridge's works, Wilson answers: “Towers of Babel every one of them, promising to scale the clouds, and yet all stopped through the indolence or caprice of the builder. …”
22 Blackwood's Magazine, ii, 40.—In this article the slur at Coleridge for having compared his eyes with Lessing's curiously resembles a similar slur in Wilson's attack on the Biographia: compare ii, 16 and ii, 40.
23 A. Brandi, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School (1887), pp. 355–356. (Brandi unaccountably connects this letter with Hazlitt's attack on Coleridge's Lay-Sermon in the Edinburgh of December, 1816, xxvii, 444. It can refer only to the present article in Maga.)
24 Mrs. Oliphant states that this article “no doubt … was written by one of the brotherhood, if not by the original culprit himself”: i, 406 note. I shall in a future paper prove that Wilson both attacked and praised Wordsworth in the early pages of Maga. The same procedure as regards Coleridge seems possible. On the other hand, “J. S.” writes in one passage: “You have indeed imitated … the worst manner of the Edinburgh Review critics” (Blackwood's Magazine, ii, 287), and Lockhart in Peter's Letters (ii, 218) two years later makes the same point: the attack on the Biographia he calls “a total departure from the principles of the Magazine itself, and almost, I think, a specimen of the very worst kind of spirit, which the Magazine professed to be fighting against, in the Edinburgh Review.”
25 Blackwood's Magazine, ii, 287.
26 “Tickler” shows at any rate a perfect acquaintance with the inns of the Lake District (iii, 76) and a perfect acquaintance with the letters of Jeffrey:
“My dear fellow—God bless you—good bye—Pray do let me hear from you. You seem to have given up letter writing entirely. What immense sheets I used to have from you long ago! …” (iii, 77).
For the parody of Jeffrey's correspondence, see the various letters from that gentleman to Wilson included in Mrs. Gordon's Christopher North.
27 It is always amusing when the pot lectures the kettle; but only a John Wilson could demolish Hazlitt for his attack on Coleridge, as he does in this article of April, 1818, after having himself written the review of the Biographia of October, 1817. Jeffrey, it appears, instead of reviewing Christabel himself, “committed the task to a savage and truculent jacobin, the very twitching of whose countenance is enough to frighten the boldest muse into hysterics. That person was not ashamed to confess in his critique that he despised Mr. Coleridge's poetry, because he hated his politics,” etc. (Blackwood's Magazine, iii, 77).
(Hazlitt had written bitterly against Christabel in the Edinburgh Review of September, 1816, as he wrote against Coleridge's Lay-Sermon in December of the same year: for his authorship, see Waller and Glover, The Collected Works of William Hazlitt (1902–4), X, 411. Coleridge in Biographia Liter aria accused Jeffrey of having, after a friendly visit upon him in the Lakes, attacked him in these articles. Jeffrey replied in a note to Hazlitt's review of the Biographia in the Edinburgh, August, 1817, describing his visit to the Lakes with Coleridge, but denying authorship of these attacks: see the Edinburgh Review, xxviii, 510 note, and 512 note. All this is of interest in connection with Note 18.)
Other later sympathetic references to Coleridge against the supposed brutalities of Jeffrey or Hazlitt, occur in Maga: viii, 673; xi, 333; xiv, 233; xv, 368, 559, 676; xviii, 136. See also xiii, 97; xiv, 224; and xix, 376.
28 In a note to Cruickshank on Time, Essays: Critical and Imaginative (1855–56), i, 157 note, Ferrier refers to this article as being the work of Wilson.
29 Blackwood's Magazine, iii, 602.
This is the first of a long series of similar compliments, the most important of which is Wilson's high tribute of October, 1834, xxxvi, 560–562. Compare iv, 445; v, 312; x, 731; xiv, 557; xviii, 119; xix, 342. See also xi, 447; xvi, 167; xxxix, 267.
30 Ibid., iii, 610.
31 “In that rambling, confused, and inconclusive work, Mr. Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, there is, nevertheless, to be found a vast quantity of singularly acute metaphysical disquisition; and there occur many very amusing illustrations and anecdotes. …” David Hume charged by Mr. Coleridge with Plagiarism from St. Thomas Aquinas, Blackwood's Magazine, iii, 653–654.
32 Blackwood's Magazine, iii, 649.
33 Basil Champneys, Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore (1900), ii, 432–433.
34 Ibid., ii, 434.
35 Ibid., ii, 442.
36 See, for example, Blackwood's Magazine, vii, 187 note (article by Maginn); viii, 4–5 (probably by Lockhart); ix, 132 and 135–6; (Maginn); ix, 442–443; x, 269; xi, 160 (Maginn); and especially xii, 80, Maginn's Metricum Symposium Ambrosianum:
37 Blackwood's Magazine, iv, 564.
38 Ibid., iv, 564 note.
39 Ibid., iv, 742. (Lockhart's authorship of both articles appears from the bibliography of Miss M. Clive Hildyard's Lockhart's Literary Criticism (1931), 153, 154.)
Whoever reviewed Ballantyne's Novelists' Library in Maga of April, 1824, has a high compliment for Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare: “Would to Heaven he would print them!” (xv, 407). See also Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (April, 1829), xxv, 541; passing mention by an unidentified critic in February, 1838, (xliii, 138); and especially Wilson's Dies Boreales of April, 1850, (lxvii, 482), where he differs with Coleridge's conception of Iago's “motiveless malignity.”
40 Campbell, cvi.
41 Ibid., cvi.
42 “If, in your opinion, you do not find yourself able to hazard any deviation of consequence from your common price, it will be better to let it drop at once, for I use the words in their literal sense when I say that I could not assist you on such terms”: Mrs. Oliphant, i, 410. (This letter, without the omissions in Mrs. Oliphant, appears also in E. L. Griggs' Unpublished Letters of S. T. Coleridge, ii, 248–251.)
Blackwood replied, “With regard to the payment, you may rest assured it will be liberal. I have it not in my power to say more than ten guineas per sheet; but as I mentioned to you, the Editor has it in his power to add to this allowance according to the value of the articles”: Mrs. Oliphant, i, 411. (The “Editor” was an innocent fiction, useful for such occasions.)
43 Blackwood's letter, quoted from above, is reprinted in Mrs. Oliphant, i, 410–411. Lockhart, the same authority says, “also replied anonymously, in the guise of the editor of the Magazine,” i, 411.
44 Most of this letter appears in The Poetry of S. T. Coleridge, ed. by Richard Garnett (1898), pp. 316–317; it is reprinted in full in Griggs' Unpublished Letters of S. T. Coleridge, ii, 260–261.
45 “As the only criticisms on my book to which I have paid any considerable attention, are those contained in your two very interesting letters of last month, I know not to whom I could with so much propriety address the very short explanation which I have judged necessary upon the present occasion”: Peter's Letters, third edition, iii, 355.
(I do not know whether the two letters mentioned above exist or not. It may be worth adding that Thomas Allsop notes these remarks of Coleridge on Peter's Letters: “Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk seem to have originated in a sort of familiar conversation between two clever men, who have said, ‘Let us write a book that will sell; you write this, and I will write that,‘ and in a sort of laughing humour set to work. This was the way that Southey and myself wrote many things together”: Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge (1836), i, 95–96. See also Early Years and Late Reflections of Clement Carlyon (1858), i, 181–182 note.)
46 Peter's Letters, second edition, ii, 218. See also ii, 144–145.
47 Ibid., ii, 218.
48 See Thomas Aird's Memoir prefixed to the first volume of the Poetical Works of D. M. Moir (1860), i, 11. See also Note 49.
49 In Blackwood's Magazine (June, 1819), v, 286, appeared a Letter from Mr. Odoherty, enclosing the Third Part of Christabel. Edward (not Edmund) V. H. Kenealy in the Dublin University Magazine (January, 1844), xxiii, 77, considers this article Maginn's. “… His third part of Christabel … [has] a more spirited and weirdlike conclusion than the author himself might have drawn, and perhaps it was a consciousness that he could not exceed this finale of the Doctor, which prevented Coleridge from attempting the completion” (!)
This parody, and others, commonly attributed to Maginn and indeed published in his works, are specifically claimed by D. M. Moir.
Allsop records an undated conversation of Coleridge. Speaking of Christabel its author says: “I laughed heartily at the continuation in Blackwood, which I have been told is by Maginn; it is in appearance, and in appearance only, a good imitation; I do not doubt but that it gave more pleasure, and to a greater number, than a continuation by myself in the spirit of the two first cantos”: Allsop, i, 95. Moir, modestly alluding to his own articles in Maga, writes: “In one of his conversations, I see, Mr. Coleridge imputes some imitations of his more remarkable compositions (to which I plead guilty) to Dr. Maginn, a much abler man. They were dashed off, twenty years ago, in no unkind spirit; and it is pleasing to know, that the author of Kubla Khan and the Ancient Mariner felt this”: Life of Dr. Macnish, prefixed to the first volume of Tales, Essays and Sketches by the late Robert Macnish (1844), i, 392 note. Aird also reprints this passage (see Note 48), i, 28. Nor is Aird alone. “Some of his contributions to Blackwood show that he [Moir] had other kinds of humour besides this [quiet Scotch variety]; for many of the rattling, rollicking papers, full of travesties, imitations, extravagances, and all sorts of drollery, ascribed to the illustrious O'Doherty, and generally supposed to have been written by Dr. Maginn, were from the pen of Moir”: W. Lindsay Alexander, Delta and his Writings, Hogg's Instructor, third series (January–June, 1855), iv, 176. (Moir's claim seems to settle his authorship conclusively. According to “Delta,” Maginn's first contribution to Maga appeared in November, 1819: Dublin University Magazine, xxiii, 80. One of the notes “To Correspondents” in Maga of November, 1819, substantiates “Delta's” statement: “Our Cork correspondent's letter, though dated 1st. October, did not reach us till the eighth of November. We hope to hear from him frequently—and if he wishes to hear from us, he can tell us so.” See also Note 52. On the other hand, it is interesting that one of the pieces claimed by Aird for Moir, the “Lyrical Ballad” Billy Routing, Maga, (July, 1819), v, 434, has Hebrew characters printed after the title. Maginn was an excellent Hebrew scholar.)
50 In the introductory remarks prefixed to the third part of Christabel, “Odoherty” had spoken of other incomplete works he has himself finished: the Excursion, Don Juan, and “a thick octavo of Plays on the Passions”: Blackwood's Magazine, v, 286.
51 Mrs. Oliphant, i, 412–413.
52 Blackwood's Magazine, v, 433.—The fact that “Odoherty” so promptly answers Coleridge's letter seems to indicate that Maginn, who was in. Ireland at this time, could not have been the author of these parodies.
53 Ibid., vi, 72. Compare Maginn's Letter from Dr. Petre, May, 1821, ix, 142.
54 This article had been promised a year previously, in the Notices to Correspondents of October, 1818.
55 In his Coleridge's Poetical Works, October, 1834, Wilson writes: “We have a dim remembrance either of having read or written something to this effect—twenty years, or less, or more ago …,” and a long passage follows from this article: compare Blackwood's Magazine, xxxvi, 567 and vi, 7. Again he writes: “We answered them [the critics] then as now,” and another long passage follows from this article: compare xxxvi, 568 and vi, 6. Compare, also, the discussion of the poet's delineation of Geraldine in the two articles: xxxvi, 565 and vi, 10.
56 The style is Lockhart's, the compression is Lockhart's, and the compliments resemble those in Peter's Letters at this time. Also the moral earnestness of the jibe at the Dictionnaire Philosophique at the beginning (Blackwood's Magazine, vi, 3), the promise, at the end, of a future article on Wallenstein (vi, 12), and, very significantly, a passage which runs, “… men who have (like ourselves) been constrained to gather their only idea of him [Coleridge] from the printed productions of his genius” (vi, 4)—all these to me give convincing proof of Lockhart's authorship. Moreover in January, 1821, Lockhart wrote Christie. “In a postscript,” Andrew Lang tells us, “he repeats that he did not attack Coleridge, and is only said to have done so, because he is known to have written eulogies on him”: Lang's Lockhart, i, 258.
57 Hypocrisy Unveiled and Calumny Detected: in a Review of Blackwood's Magazine, fourth edition (1818), p. 50.
(I do not know who the author of this pamphlet is. In the first edition of Halkett and Laing's Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature (1882–85), it is ascribed to James Grahame. In the new and enlarged edition of 1926–29, it is ascribed to Macvey Napier.
Apparently Napier and John Ramsay M'Culloch, rather than Grahame, fit the following quotation: “A copy in the British Museum, formerly in possession of Lord Cockburn, bears the following manuscript note: ‘I have been told, on something like good authority, that this most efficacious castigation was the work of two excellent persons, who are now professors in two Universities‘”: P. P. Howe, Life of William Eazlitt (1922), p. 269 note. But in a letter to Walter Scott, October 20, 1818, Lockhart writes of Napier and this pamphlet: “… I have now before me an entire disavowal of all concern in this matter upon his honor [italics in the original]: Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott (1894), ii, 28. A letter of Wilson's to the Rev. Robert Morehead at this time likewise indicates Napier's innocence: see Mrs. Gordon, 195. See also Lang's Lockhart, i, 184 ff.
I may add that the copy of the pamphlet in the New York Public Library has the name James Graham written on the title-page, that several British libraries ascribe the authorship to Grahame; that Archibald Constable replied to Henry Mackenzie from London, November 3, 1818, stating with finality that he had nothing to do with the publication: T. Constable, Archibald Constable and his Literary Correspondents (1873), ii, 341. On the whole, Grahame rather than Napier appears to me more likely to have written the attack.)
In a letter to Southey of February, 1819, Coleridge notes the reference to Christabel in Hypocrisy Unveiled: “Some genius in a pamphlet entitled Hypocrisy Unveiled written against Mr. Wilson has pronounced poor Christabel 'the most obscene Poem in the English Language'”: Griggs' Unpublished Letters of S. T. Coleridge, ii, 247.
58 Blackwood's Magazine, vi, 7.
59 Ibid., vi, 9.
60 Ibid., vi, 5.
61 Ibid., vi, 4.—Compare, also, “His powers indeed—to judge from what of them that [sic] has been put forth and exhibited—may not be of the widest—or even of the very highest kind. So far as they go, surely, they are the most exquisite of powers. In his mixture of all the awful and all the gentle graces of conception—in his sway of wild—solitary—dreamy phantasies—in his music of words—and magic of numbers—we think he stands absolutely alone among all the poets of the most poetical age”: vi, 11.
62 Ibid., vi, 11.
63 In the PMLA of 1923 Mr. Walter Graham refers to the present article in his Contemporary Critics of Coleridge, the Poet. He considers it “an excessively flattering review, written in such language as to make one suspect the motives of the writer. Whatever the motives that prompted it, Blackwood's criticism was general and indiscriminative …”: xxxviii, 283. One may agree with Mr. Graham's thesis that Sterling's review of 1828 marks a change in critical attitude towards Coleridge, and that H. N. Coleridge's review of 1834 best presents the poet's originality and other virtues, commonplaces of to-day. Yet, considering that he wrote in 1819, is not Lockhart's tribute remarkable?
64 The Letters of Charles Lamb, ed. by A. Ainger (1904), ii, 32, 33. (I have corrected an error in this quotation from Lamb: see Campbell, p. 639.) The “marine sonnet,” or Fancy in Nubibus, was first published in Felix Farley's Bristol Journal (February, 1818): see E. H. Coleridge, The Complete Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge (1912), i, 435 note. It also appeared as published “for the first time” in Sharpe's London Magazine of 1829: W. Graham, English Literary Periodicals (1930), p. 289.
65 Amy Lowell, John Keats (1925), ii, 349.
66 Blackwood's Magazine, vi, 122. (For Lockhart's authorship see Miss Hildyard, p. 154.)
67 High praise for Coleridge appears also in Lockhart's fifth number of the series, on Goethe's Faust, June, 1820, vii, 233–234, 239. The sixteenth number, the leading article for October, 1823, deals with Schiller's Wallenstein, translated by Coleridge. Though the translation is not so magnificent as the original, “it is, however, by far the best translation of a foreign tragic drama which our English literature possesses,” xiv, 377. After a digression on Coleridge's and Wordsworth's importance as poets at the time of general apathy around 1800, Lockhart reviews the work and ends the article by the fact that Coleridge's version places him “in the very first rank of poetical translators …,” xiv, 396. In October, 1834, Wilson says of Wallenstein, too, “It is the best translation ever made,” xxxvi, 562. See, also, xin, 3; xiv, 39; xv, 623; and xlvii, 235–236.
68 Blackwood's Magazine, vii, 419.
69 Ibid., viii, 95.
70 Ibid., viii, 182.
71 Campbell cvii note. But see the very interesting letter from Coleridge to Lockhart in which he denies that the letter was confidential or that Lockhart was blameworthy: E. L. Griggs, Unpublished Letters of S. T. Coleridge, iv, 273–277.
72 The Mohock Magazine by John Scott in the London Magazine, December, 1820, ii, 669. Later too mention is made of the “unauthorized publication of his [Coleridge's] private letter,” ii, 676. Italics in both extracts in the original. (Unimportant but amusing is the following bit of bathos from Wilson's Preface to Maga of January, 1826: “Coleridge, he [John Scott] assured the public, was quite indignant at our Magazine, at the very time that C. was corresponding with us by every post,” xix, xvii.)
73 Allsop, i, 160.
74 Campbell, cx. “I have a copy of the real letter, which is very unlike the print. Coleridge promised ‘within ten days’ several papers, which, in their turn, would be followed by ‘the substance of his Lectures on Shakspeare,‘ etc. He further promised to devote six weeks undividedly to the magazine, and requests an advance of fifty pounds to go to Ramsgate …” cx note. The original letter appears in Griggs, ii, 296–297. (It is interesting that in a letter to Allsop, December 26, 1822, Coleridge speaks of his Shakspearean lectures as if they might appear in Maga: Allsop, ii, 152.)
75 Blackwood's Magazine, x, 253.
76 Campbell, cx note. See also Coleridge's letter to De Quincey, August 9, 1821: Griggs, ii, 296. One of the poems included in this article was taken from a MS. notebook dated August 28, 1800: see Campbell, p. 460, and E. H. Coleridge, i, 345 note.
77 Mrs. Oliphant, i, 218–219. (References in the letter date it as of October, 1821.)
78 Letters of the Wordsworth Family, ii, 162.
79 Ibid., ii, 166.
80 Thus in a letter of October, 1829, about to be quoted, he mentions five articles he could send if desired: Mrs. Oliphant, i, 415.—Turnbull thinks the fourth item, “a Lyrical Tale, 250 lines,” to have been Alice Du Clos: A. Turnbull, Coleridge's Biographia Epistolaris (1911), ii, 293–294.
81 A letter of February 24, 1826, included in Mrs. Oliphant, i, 413, shows that Coleridge had at least two volumes of a book with the Blackwood firm. Early in 1832, too, apparently through the good offices of Lockhart, Coleridge considered having William Blackwood republish his essays: see his letter to H. N. Coleridge, February 24, 1832, Letters of S. T. Coleridge, ed. by Ernest Hartley Coleridge (1895), ii, 756.
82 Mrs. Oliphant, i, 415.
83 Ibid., i 417–418. See Coleridge's On the Constitution; or, Church and State according to the Idea, etc., an essay dealing with the recent Catholic Bill, first and second editions, 1830. In a note to page 133 (not 147) of an edition of 1830 (London: Hurst, Chance, and Co., 1830), he incidentally recommends to his readers Lessing's Ernst und Folk. “I am not aware of a translation. Mr. Blackwood, or I should say Christopher North, would add one of the very many obligations he has already conferred on his readers, (among whom he has few more constant or more thankful than myself) by suggesting the task to some of his contributors. …” A sentence or two later he again refers to Maga, “which, in a deliberate and conscientious adoption of a very common-place compliment, I profess to think, as a magazine, and considering the number of years it has kept on the wing—incomparable—but at the same time I crave the venerable Christopher's permission to avow myself a sturdy dissentient as on some other points, so especially from the Anti-Huskissonian part of his Toryism. S. T. C.” (It is singular that this complimentary passage on Maga has been omitted from the note, though the rest of the note has been retained, in later editions of the essay. Compare On the Constitution etc., 1839, Pickering; 1852, Moxon; 1854, Harper; 1871–78, Harper.)
84 Mrs. Oliphant, i, 420.
85 The Table Talk and Omniana of S. T. Coleridge, arranged and ed. by T. Ashe (1923), p. 221.
86 Blackwood's Magazine, xi, 462.
87 Ibid., xi, 462.
88 Ibid., xvii, 142.
89 Mrs. Gordon, p. 270.
90 Blackwood's Magazine, xxi, 488.
91 Ibid., xliii, 728–729. Compare Wilson's tribute in An Hour's Talk About Poetry, September, 1831: “While he [Coleridge] is discoursing, the world loses all its commonplaces, and you and your wife imagine yourself Adam and Eve listening to the affable archangel Raphael in the Garden of Eden,” xxx, 478. Also see xviii, 384 and xxxvi, 543. Other less important references are the following: xxi, 479; xxiv, 648; xxvii, 274, 436; xxviii, 893; xxx, 479; xxxv, 803–804; xli, 439; xlii, 127; xliii, 685.
92 Ibid., xxii, 386.
93 Ibid., xxiii, 12. Compare, also, the following passages, all by Wilson. June, 1828, Old North and Young North, xxiii, 820–821: “Coleridge, that rich-freighted Argosie tilting in sunshine over Imagination's Seas, feared not—why should he have feared?—in a poem of his youth—to declare to all men,
94 Ibid., xxx, 478–479.
95 Ibid., xxxi, 960–962.
95a In two or three days, following Blackwood's death, Wilson wrote more than one third of the number for October, 1834; Mrs. Gordon, 378. See also Mrs. Oliphant, ii, 133.
96 Hall Caine, Cobwebs of Criticism (1908), p. 82.
97 Blackwood's Magazine, xxxvi, 543.
98 Ibid., xxxvi, 548.
99 Ibid., xxxvi, 545.
100 Ibid., xxxvi, 568.
101 Ibid., xxxvi, 565. See also Note 55. (An interesting commentary on Wilson's whole review may be found in an article entitled The Lights of “Maga,” Blackwood's Magazine (June, 1882), cxxxi, 765–766.)
102 See the Edinburgh Review (September, 1816), xxvii, 60 ff. For Hazlitt's authorship, see Waller and Glover, x, 411; T. Hutchinson, Notes and Queries, ninth series, x, 388, 429, and xi, 170, 269; and W. Graham, PMLA, xxxviii, 283, Note 13. In “The Authorship of a Review of Christabel Attributed to Hazlitt,” JEGP, xxix, 562 ff., Mr. P. L. Carver contends that this article is by Brougham.
103 Thus he speaks of one of Stoddart's poems (The Mythologist) in Watts' last Souvenir—“which though nearly unintelligible as a whole to us, and we venture to say, entirely so to himself, has some stanzas quite Coleridgean, full of the imagery of old Egypt”: Maga, xxxviii, 121.
104 Wilson refers to Willis's A Child's First Impression of a Star: “We are somewhat doubtful about the following picture—yet we know not why we should be—unless it be that it reminds us of one who is inimitable—dear S. T. Coleridge”: Ibid., xxxvin, 263.
105 Blackwood's Magazine, xxiv, 836.
106 Ibid., xliv, 838.
107 Ibid., xliv, 836.
108 Ibid., xliv, 835.
109 Curiously, Wilson does not discuss Coleridge the philosopher in the pages of Maga. As Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, he would certainly be expected to have something to say of value; yet aside from a humorous admission of complete mental fog in such matters put into the mouth of the Ettrick Shepherd in a Noctes of April, 1824 (Blackwood's Magazine, xv, 372) and a single disagreement with Coleridge on a philosophic point (Ibid., xliv, 135 ff.), Wilson is strangely silent.
110 Thomas Carlyle, Christopher North (1868); Nineteenth Century (January, 1920), LXXXVII, 112.
111 Leisure Hour (1872), xxi, 695.
112 Eclectic Review (January, 1854), xcix, 8.—In Gilfillan's A Third Gallery of Portraits (1855), p. 377, the second sentence becomes, “To Coleridge as a man, his feelings were less cordial.”
113 Viscount Cranbrook, Christopher North, National Review (April, 1884), iii, 156–157.
114 New Thoughts on Old Subjects. … No. I. The Improvisatore; or “John Anderson, my Jo, John,” printed in The Amulet (London, 1828), pp. 37–47. Reprinted under the second title, The Improvisatore, etc., in Campbell, pp. 200 ff., with the date 1827. (Lines 5–8 of the poem are recopied in To Mary Pridham, lines 7–10, written October 15, 1827: Campbell, 643, Note 215.) E. H. Coleridge dates the poem 1827 also: The Complete Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge (1912), p. 468.
115 Thus Coleridge's Brocken letter, written 1799, appeared in The Amulet of 1829. If this letter was not printed for thirty years, there is no reason why The Improvisatore too should not have been written earlier: the “yet, Lady!” even suggests the Ode to Dejection (1802), and the whole poem is a less intense expression of the last couplet of the Pains of Sleep (1803):
116 See T. M. Raysor, Coleridge and “Asra,” Stud. in Phil., xxvi (July, 1929), 305 ff. Mr. Raysor gives quotations from Coleridge's notebooks of 1807 and 1810: these passages, he says, “are the key to most of Coleridge's poetry between 1802 and 1810,” p. 323. A list of the poems concerning “Asra” occurs in Note 19, p. 324.
117 I base this statement on the excerpts from Coleridge's notebooks of 1807 and 1810, alluded to in Note 116, and on Coleridge's letters to Thomas Allsop of December 2, 1818, and October, 1821: Allsop, i, 5–7 and ii, 28–29.
118 If The Improvisatore reproaches Wordsworth, as Wilson claims, at least the friendship between the authors of the Lyrical Ballads had been renewed immediately after the appearance of the poem. In June, 1828, Coleridge spent six weeks on the Rhine in company with Wordsworth and Dora Wordsworth: Campbell, p. cxvi.
119 Blackwood's Magazine, xiv, 500.
120 “One of De Quincey's favorite hobbies was a pretence—it may have been a belief—that Coleridge stole ideas from German authors. So often did he charge the poet with this (it is republished in the Boston edition of his works, brought out with his authority, and to a certain extent under his supervision) that when Coleridge's family brought out an edition of the Biographia Literaria, a large space of the introduction was dedicated to a defence of the author from the Opium-Eater's accusations. …” R. Shelton Mackenzie, Noctes Ambrosianae (1867), i, 383 note. See also Campbell, pp. 616–617. The accusations referred to above first appeared not in Maga but in Tait's Magazine of September, 1834; see D. Masson, The Collected Writings of T. De Quincey (1896), ii, 138 note and 143 ff.
