C. TO THOMAS POOLE.
Exeter, Southey’s Lodgings, Mr. Tucker’s, Fore Street Hill,
September 16, 1799.[206]
My dear Poole,—Here I am just returned from a little tour[207] of five days, having seen rocks and waterfalls, and a pretty river or two; some wide landscapes, and a multitude of ash-tree dells, and the blue waters of the “roaring sea,” as little Hartley says, who on Friday fell down stairs and injured his arm. ’Tis swelled and sprained, but, God be praised, not broken. The views of Totness and Dartmouth are among the most impressive things I have ever seen; but in general what of Devonshire I have lately seen is tame to Quantock, Porlock, Culbone, and Linton. So much for the country! Now as to the inhabitants thereof, they are bigots, unalphabeted in the first feelings of liberality; of course in all they speak and all they do not speak, they give good reasons for the opinions which they hold, viz. they hold the propriety of slavery, an opinion which, being generally assented to by Englishmen, makes Pitt and Paul the first among the moral fitnesses of things. I have three brothers, that is to say, relations by gore. Two are parsons and one is a colonel. George and the colonel, good men as times go—very good men—but alas! we have neither tastes nor feelings in common. This I wisely learnt from their conversation, and did not suffer them to learn it from mine. What occasion for it? Hunger and thirst—roast fowls, mealy potatoes, pies, and clouted cream! bless the inventors of them! An honest philosopher may find therewith preoccupation for his mouth, keeping his heart and brain, the latter in his scull, the former in the pericardium some five or six inches from the roots of his tongue! Church and King! Why I drink Church and King, mere cutaneous scabs of loyalty which only ape the king’s evil, but affect not the interior of one’s health. Mendicant sores! it requires some little caution to keep them open, but they heal of their own accord. Who (such a friend as I am to the system of fraternity) could refuse such a toast at the table of a clergyman and a colonel, his brother? So, my dear Poole! I live in peace. Of the other party, I have dined with a Mr. Northmore, a pupil of Wakefield, who possesses a fine house half a mile from Exeter. In his boyhood he was at my father’s school.... But Southey and self called upon him as authors—he having edited a Tryphiodorus and part of Plutarch, and being a notorious anti-ministerialist and free-thinker. He welcomed us as he ought, and we met at dinner Hucks (at whose house I dine Wednesday), the man who toured with me in Wales and afterwards published his “Tour,” Kendall, a poet, who really looks like a man of genius, pale and gnostic, has the merit of being a Jacobin or so, but is a shallowist—and finally a Mr. Banfill, a man of sense, information, and various literature, and most perfectly a gentleman—in short a pleasant man. At his house we dine to-morrow. Northmore himself is an honest, vehement sort of a fellow who splutters out all his opinions like a fiz-gig, made of gunpowder not thoroughly dry, sudden and explosive, yet ever with a certain adhesive blubberliness of elocution. Shallow! shallow! A man who can read Greek well, but shallow! Yet honest, too, and who ardently wishes the well-being of his fellowmen, and believes that without more liberty and more equality this well-being is not possible. He possesses a most noble library. The victory at Novi![208] If I were a good caricaturist I would sketch off Suwarrow in a car of conquest drawn by huge crabs!! With what retrograde majesty the vehicle advances! He may truly say he came off with éclat, that is, a claw! I shall be back at Stowey in less than three weeks....
We hope your dear mother remains well. Give my filial love to her. God bless her! I beg my kind love to Ward. God bless you and
S. T. Coleridge.
Monday night.