Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

That there's on earth a yet auguster thing,
Veil'd though it be, than parliament and king!"—ED.

84

Mr. Coleridge said that the conclusion of this great work was the finest specimen of historic eulogy he had ever read in English;—that it was more than a campaign to the duke's fame.—ED.

85

All the following remarks in this section were made at the exhibition of ancient masters at the British Gallery in Pall Mall. The recollection of those two hours has made the rooms of that Institution a melancholy place for me. Mr. Coleridge was in high spirits, and seemed to kindle in his mind at the contemplation of the splendid pictures before him. He did not examine them all by the catalogue, but anchored himself before some three or four great works, telling me that he saw the rest of the Gallery potentially. I can yet distinctly recall him, half leaning on his old simple stick, and his hat off in one hand, whilst with the fingers of the other he went on, as was his constant wont, figuring in the air a commentary of small diagrams, wherewith, as he fancied, he could translate to the eye those relations of form and space which his words might fail to convey with clearness to the ear. His admiration for Rubens showed itself in a sort of joy and brotherly fondness; he looked as if he would shake hands with his pictures. What the company, which by degrees formed itself round this silver-haired, bright-eyed, music-breathing, old man, took him for, I cannot guess; there was probably not one there who knew him to be that Ancient Mariner, who held people with his glittering eye, and constrained them, like three years' children, to hear his tale. In the midst of his speech, he turned to the right hand, where stood a very lovely young woman, whose attention he had involuntarily arrested;—to her, without apparently any consciousness of her being a stranger to him, he addressed many remarks, although I must acknowledge they were couched in a somewhat softer tone, as if he were soliciting her sympathy. He was, verily, a gentle-hearted man at all times; but I never was in company with him in my life, when the entry of a woman, it mattered not who, did not provoke a dim gush of emotion, which passed like an infant's breath over the mirror of his intellect.—ED.

86

"Figures shooting at a Target," belonging, I believe, to Lord Bandon.—ED.

87

This belongs to Sir Robert Peel.—ED.

88

"Landscape with setting Sun,"—Lord Farnborough's picture.—ED.

89

"Portraits of distinguished Connoisseurs painted at Rome,"—belonging to Lord Burlington.—ED.

90

I almost forget, but have some recollection that the allusion is to Mr. Heneage Finch's picture of a Lady with a Fan.—ED.

91

Sir Robert Peel's.—ED.

92

"The Religion of Protestants a safe Way to Salvation; or, an Answer to a Booke entitled 'Mercy and Truth; or, Charity maintained by Catholicks,' which pretends to prove the contrary."

93

Socinianism, or some inclination that way, is an old and clinging charge against Chillingworth. On the one hand, it is well known that he subscribed the articles of the church of England, in the usual form, on the 20th of July, 1638; and on the other, it is equally certain that within two years immediately previous, he wrote the letter to some unnamed correspondent, beginning "Dear Harry," and printed in all the Lives of Chillingworth, in which letter he sums up his arguments upon the Arian doctrine in this passage:—"In a word, whosoever shall freely and impartially consider of this thing, and how on the other side the ancient fathers' weapons against the Arrians are in a manner only places of Scripture (and these now for the most part discarded as importunate and unconcluding), and how in the argument drawn from the authority of the ancient fathers, they are almost always defendants, and scarse ever opponents, he shall not choose but confesses or at least be very inclinable to beleeve, that the doctrine of Arrius is eyther a truth, or at least no damnable heresy." The truth is, however, that the Socinianism of Chillingworth, such as it may have been, had more reference to the doctrine of the redemption of man than of the being of God.

Edward Knott's real name was Matthias Wilson.—ED.

94

The following anecdote related by Mr. Coleridge, in April, 1811, was preserved and communicated to me by Mr. Justice Coleridge:—"As I was descending from Mount AEtna with a very lively talkative guide, we passed through a village (I think called) Nicolozzi, when the host happened to be passing through the street. Every one was prostrate; my guide became so; and, not to be singular, I went down also. After resuming our journey, I observed in my guide an unusual seriousness and long silence, which, after many hums and hahs, was interrupted by a low bow, and leave requested to ask a question. This was of course granted, and the ensuing dialogue took place. Guide. "Signor, are you then a Christian?" Coleridge. "I hope so." G. "What! are all Englishmen Christians?" C. "I hope and trust they are." G. "What! are you not Turks? Are you not damned eternally?" C. "I trust not, through Christ." G. "What! you believe in Christ then?" C. "Certainly." This answer produced another long silence. At length my guide again spoke, still doubting the grand point of my Christianity. G. "I'm thinking, Signor, what is the difference between you and us, that you are to be certainly damned?" C. "Nothing very material; nothing that can prevent our both going to heaven, I hope. We believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." G. (interrupting me) "Oh those damned priests! what liars they are! But (pausing) we can't do without them; we can't go to heaven without them. But tell me, Signor, what are the differences?" C. "Why, for instance, we do not worship the Virgin." G. "And why not, Signor?" C. "Because, though holy and pure, we think her still a woman, and, therefore, do not pay her the honour due to God." G. "But do you not worship Jesus, who sits on the right hand of God?" C. "We do." G. "Then why not worship the Virgin, who sits on the left?" C. "I did not know she did. If you can show it me in the Scriptures, I shall readily agree to worship her." "Oh," said my man, with uncommon triumph, and cracking his fingers, "sicuro, Signor! sicuro, Signor!""—ED.

95

"An argument proving, that, according to the covenant of eternal life, revealed in the Scriptures, man may be translated from hence, without passing through death, although the human nature of Christ himself could not be thus translated, till he had passed through death." Asgill died in the year 1738, in the King's Bench prison, where he had been a prisoner for debt thirty years.—ED.

96

When the allies were in Paris in 1815, all the Austrian standards were reclaimed. The answer was that they had been burnt by the soldiers at the Hôtel des Invalides. This was untrue. The Marquis de Semonville confessed with pride that he, knowing of the fraud, had concealed these standards, taken from Mack at Ulm in 1805, in a vault under the Luxemburg palace. "An inviolable asylum," said the Marquis in his speech to the peers, "formed in the vault of this hall has protected this treasure from every search. Vainly, during this long space of time, have the most authoritative researches endeavoured to penetrate the secret. It would have been culpable to reveal it, as long as we were liable to the demands of haughty foreigners. No one in this atmosphere of honour is capable of so great a weakness," &c.—ED.

97

This expression needs explanation. It looks as if Mr. Coleridge rated the degree of liberty enjoyed by the English, after that of the citizens of the United States; but he meant no such thing. His meaning was, that the form of government of the latter was more democratic, and formally assigned more power to each individual. The Americans, as a nation, had no better friend in England than Coleridge; he contemplated their growth with interest, and prophesied highly of their destiny, whether under their present or other governments. But he well knew their besetting faults and their peculiar difficulties, and was most deliberately of opinion that the English had, for 130 years last past, possessed a measure of individual freedom and social dignity which had never been equalled, much less surpassed, in any other country ancient or modern. There is a passage in Mr. Coleridge's latest publication (Church and State}, which clearly expresses his opinion upon this subject: "It has been frequently and truly observed that in England, where the ground-plan, the skeleton, as it were, of the government is a monarchy, at once buttressed and limited by the aristocracy (the assertions of its popular character finding a better support in the harangues and theories of popular men, than in state documents, and the records of clear history), afar greater degree of liberty is, and long has been, enjoyed, than ever existed in, the ostensibly freest, that is, most democratic, commonwealths of ancient or modern times; greater, indeed, and with a more decisive predominance of the spirit of freedom, than the wisest and most philanthropic statesmen of antiquity, or than the great commonwealth's men,—the stars of that narrow interspace of blue sky between the black clouds of the first and second Charles's reigns—believed compatible, the one with the safety of the state, the other with the interests of morality. Yes! for little less than a century and a half, Englishmen have, collectively and individually, lived and acted with fewer restraints on their free-agency, than the citizens of any known republic, past or present." (p. 120.) Upon which he subjoins the following note: "It will be thought, perhaps, that the United States of North America should have been excepted. But the identity of stock, language, customs, manners, and laws scarcely allows us to consider this an exception, even though it were quite certain both that it is and that it will continue such. It was at all events a remark worth remembering, which I once heard from a traveller (a prejudiced one, I must admit), that where every man may take, liberties, there is little liberty for any man; or, that where every man takes liberties, no man can enjoy any." (p. 121.) See also a passage to the like effect in the Friend, vol. i. p. 129—ED.

98

Meaning, principally, the whipping, so richly deserved, inflicted on a Frenchman called Bonhomme, for committing a disgusting breach of common decency in the cathedral of Coimbra, during divine service in Passion Week.—ED.

99

"Every thing that I have heard or read of this sovereign has contributed to the impression on my mind, that he is a good and a wise man, and worthy to be the king of a virtuous people, the purest specimen of the Gothic race."—Church and State, p. 125. n.—ED.

100

"It is with nations as with individuals. In tranquil moods and peaceable times we are quite practical; facts only, and cool common sense, are then in fashion. But let the winds of passion swell, and straightway men begin to generalize, to connect by remotest analogies, to express the most universal positions of reason in the most glowing figures of fancy; in short, to feel particular truths and mere facts as poor, cold, narrow, and incommensurate with their feelings."—Statesman's Manual, p. 18.

"It seems a paradox only to the unthinking, and it is a fact that none but the unread in history will deny, that, in periods of popular tumult and innovation, the more abstract a notion is, the more readily has it been found to combine, the closer has appeared its affinity, with the feelings of a people, and with all their immediate impulses to action. At the commencement of the French Revolution, in the remotest villages every tongue was employed in echoing and enforcing the almost geometrical abstractions of the physiocratic politicians and economists. The public roads were crowded with armed enthusiasts, disputing on the inalienable sovereignty of the people, the imprescriptible laws of the pure reason, and the universal constitution, which, as rising out of the nature and rights of man as man, all nations alike were under the obligation of adopting."– Statesman's Manual.

101

Polyol VII.

"He (Drayton) was a poet by nature, and carefully improved his talent; one who sedulously laboured to deserve the approbation of such as were capable of appreciating and cared nothing for the censures which others might pass upon him." 'Like me that list,' he says,

——'my honest rhymes
Nor care for critics, nor regard the times.'

And though he is not a poet virum volitarc per ora, nor one of those whose better fortune it is to live in the hearts of their devoted admirers,—yet what he deemed his greatest work will be preserved by its subject; some of his minor poems have merit enough in their execution to ensure their preservation; and no one who studies poetry as an art will think his time misspent in perusing the whole, if he have any real love for the art he is pursuing. The youth who enters upon that pursuit without a feeling of respect and gratitude for those elder poets, who by their labours have prepared the way for him, is not likely to produce any thing himself that will be held in remembrance by posterity."-The Doctor, &c. c. 36. P.I.

I heartily trust that the author or authors, as the case may be, of this singularly thoughtful and diverting book will in due time continue it. Let some people say what they please, there has not been the fellow of it published for many a long day.—ED.

102

"And this, again, is evolved out of the yet higher idea of person in contradistinction from thing, all social law and justice being grounded on the principle that a person can never, but by his own fault, become a thing, or, without grievous wrong, be treated as such; and the distinction consisting in this, that a thing may be used altogether, and merely as the means to an end; but the person must always be included in the end; his interest must always form a part of the object,—a mean to which he, by consent, that is, by his own act, makes himself. We plant a tree, and we fell it; we breed the sheep, and we shear, or we kill it,—in both cases wholly as means to our ends: for trees and animals are things. The woodcutter and the hind are likewise employed as means; but on agreement, and that too an agreement of reciprocal advantage, which includes them as well as their employer in the end; for they are persons. And the government under which the contrary takes place is not worthy to be called a state, if, as in the kingdom of Dahomey, it be unprogressive; or only by anticipation, where, as in Russia, it is in advance to a better and more manworthy order of things."—Church and State, p. 10.

103

Verse 4.

104

Mark, ch. iii. ver. 35.