FOOTNOTES:
[951:1] A great, perhaps the greater, number of Coleridge's Epigrams are adaptations from the German of Wernicke, Lessing, and other less known epigrammatists. They were sent to the Morning Post and other periodicals to supply the needs of the moment, and with the rarest exceptions they were deliberately excluded from the collected editions of his poetical works which received his own sanction, and were published in his lifetime. Collected for the first time by Mrs. H. N. Coleridge and reprinted in the third volume of Essays on His Own Times (1850), they have been included, with additions and omissions, in P. and D. W., 1877-1880, P. W., 1885, P. W., 1890, and the Illustrated Edition of Coleridge's Poems, issued in 1907. The adaptations from the German were written and first published between 1799 and 1802. Of the earlier and later epigrams the greater number are original. Four epigrams were published anonymously in The Watchman, in April, 1796. Seventeen epigrams, of which twelve are by Coleridge, two by Southey, and three by Tobin, were published anonymously in the Annual Anthology of 1800. Between January 2, 1798, and October 11, 1802 Coleridge contributed at least thirty-eight epigrams to the Morning Post. Most of these epigrams appeared under the well-known signature ΕΣΤΗΣΕ. Six epigrams, of which five had been published in the Morning Post, were included in The Friend (No. 11, Oct. 26, 1809). Finally, Coleridge contributed six epigrams to the Keepsake, of which four had been published in the Morning Post, and one in the Annual Anthology. Epigrams were altogether excluded from Sibylline Leaves and from the three-volume editions of 1828 and 1829; but in 1834 the rule was relaxed and six epigrams were allowed to appear. Two of these, In An Album ('Parry seeks the Polar Ridge') and On an Insignificant (''Tis Cypher lies beneath this Crust') were published for the first time.
For the discovery of the German originals of some twenty epigrams, now for the first time noted and verified, I am indebted to the generous assistance of Dr. Hermann Georg Fiedler, Taylorian Professor of the German Language and Literature at Oxford, and of my friend Miss Katharine Schlesinger.
[953:1] N.B. Bad in itself, and, as Bob Allen used to say of his puns, looks damned ugly upon paper.
[954:1] Lines 3, 4, with the heading 'On an Insignificant,' were written by S. T. C. in Southey's copy of the Omniana of 1812 [see nos. 9, 11]. See P. W., 1885, ii. 402, Note.
[961:1] The antithesis was, perhaps, borrowed from an Epigram entitled 'Posthumous Fame', included in Elegant Extracts, ii. 260.
If on his spacious marble we rely,
Pity a worth like his should ever die!
If credit to his real life we give,
Pity a wretch like him should ever live.
[962:1] The first and second versions are included in Essays, &c., 1850, iii. 976: the third version was first published in 1893.
In 1830 Coleridge re-wrote (he did not publish) the second version as an Epitaph on Hazlitt. The following apologetic note was affixed:—
'With a sadness at heart, and an earnest hope grounded on his misanthropic sadness, when I first knew him in his twentieth or twenty-first year, that a something existed in his bodily organism that in the sight of the All-Merciful lessened his responsibility, and the moral imputation of his acts and feelings.' MS.
[964:1] The 'One who published' was, perhaps, Charles Lloyd, in his novel, Edmund Oliver, 2 vols. 1798. Compare the following Epigram of Prior's:—
To John I ow'd great obligation,
But John unhappily thought fit
To publish it to all the nation:
Sure John and I are more than quit.
[974:1] Extempore, in reply to a question of Mr. Theodore Hook's—'Look at him, and say what you think: Is not he like a Rose?'
