"For whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above."
Christobel
Some of these might be well meaning enough to believe, that in giving publicity to what they
erroneously
considered moral infirmities, (not possessing the knowledge to discriminate between moral and physical infirmities), they were performing a religious duty — were displaying a beacon to deter others from the same course. But in the case of Coleridge, this was a sad misconception. Neither morally nor physically was he understood. He did all that in his state duty could exact; and had he been more favoured in his bodily constitution, he would not have been censured for frailties which did not attach to him.
Alas! how little do the many know of the hearts of truly great men! Least of all could such men as Coleridge be known by modern pharisees.
"It is no uncommon thing," says an affectionate and kind-hearted friend, whose genius is rarely equalled, "to see well intentioned men please themselves with the feeling that they are not as others; that they are the favorites of Heaven, and washed clean by special dispensation from the spots of frail mortality; who more-over assume that they possess the most delicate feelings; but then those feelings are under such admirable discipline, that they can, with the most exquisite suffering, cry over their own sentences, shed tears of pity and blood for their duty, make a merit of the hardness which is contrary to their nature, and live in perpetual apprehension of being too tender-hearted. It is wonderful with what ingenuity these people can reconcile their flexible consciences to acts at which their inferiors might blush or shudder, and no less fearful to reflect how many poor wretches, not wholly past hope or reformation, may have been sent to their last account, with all their imperfections on their heads, to satisfy the religious or political fears of these pharisees. The patrons and employers of spies, we may expect to make the greatest sacrifice to expediency, — a word which every man will explain after his own way."
To have written during his life any thing like an eulogy on Coleridge would have been most painful to him, yet he must have felt, that he deserved well of his fellow beings; for fame, and fame only, he observes, is the aim and object of every good and great man, though it is too often confounded with mere reputation. When a youth, he had learnt how to value that bubble reputation, its fleeting character, but the love of which, in some men, is so injurious both to head and heart. Reputation, "the morrow's meal," the "breakfast only," the furnisher of the tinsel ornaments, or at most of some of the worldly agreeables, sown perhaps for future worldly enjoyment.
He
laboured for riches of another kind, and