God love you and
S. T. Coleridge.
FOOTNOTES:
[115] I cannot remember whether anybody has ever made a list of the books that Coleridge did not write. It would be the catalogue of a most interesting library in Utopia.
ROBERT SOUTHEY (1774-1843)
One of the strangest things met by the present writer in the course of preparing this book was a remark of the late Mr. Scoones—an old acquaintance and a man who has deserved most excellently on the subject—in reference to Southey's letters, that they show the author as "dry and unsympathetic." "They contain too much information to be good as letters." Well: there certainly is information in the specimen that follows: whether it is "dry" or not readers must decide. The fact is that Southey, despite occasional touches of self-righteousness and of over-bookishness, was full of humour, extraordinarily affectionate, and extremely natural. There is moreover a great deal of interest in this skit on poor Mrs. Coleridge: for "lingos" of the kind, though in her case they may have helped to disgust her husband with his "pensive Sara," were in her time and afterwards by no means uncommon, especially—physiologists must say why—with the female sex. The present writer, near the middle of the nineteenth century, knew a lady of family, position and property who was fond of the phrase, "hail-fellow-well-met," but always turned it into "Fellowship Wilmot"—a pretty close parallel to "horsemangander" for "horse-godmother". Extension—with levelling—of education, and such processes as those which have turned "Sissiter" into "Syrencesster" and "Kirton" into "Credd-itt-on", have made the phenomenon rarer: but have also made such a locus classicus of the habit as this all the more valuable and amusing. It may be added that Lamb, in one of his letters, has a sly if good-natured glance at this peculiarity of the elder Sara Coleridge in reference to the aptitude of the younger in her "mother-tongue." Southey has dealt with the matter in several epistles to his friend Grosvenor Bedford. The whole would have been rather long but the following mosaic will, I think, do very well. Dr. Warter, the editor of the supplementary collection of Southey's letters from which it comes, was the husband of Edith May Southey, the heroine of not a little literature, sometimes[116] in connection, not merely as here with Sara Coleridge the younger, but with Dora Wordsworth—the three daughters of the three Lake Poets. She was, as her father says, a very tall girl, while her aunt, Mrs. Coleridge, was little (her husband, writing from Hamburg, speaks with surprise of some German lady as "smaller than you are").
30. To Grosvenor C. Bedford Esq:
Keswick, Sep. 14, 1821