"Dear Miss Betham,—Not my will, but accident and necessity made me a truant from my promise. I was to have left Merton, in Surrey, at half-past eight on Tuesday morning with a Mr. Hall, who would have driven me in his chaise to town by ten; but having walked an unusual distance on the Monday, and talked and exerted myself in spirits that have been long unknown to me, on my return to my friend's house, being thirsty, I drank at least a quart of lemonade; the consequence was that all Tuesday morning, till indeed two o'clock in the afternoon, I was in exceeding pain, and incapable of quitting my room, or dismissing the hot flannels applied to my body…."
This was no ordinary philosopher; but the chapter is not yet full.
He left Merton, he says, at five, walked stoutly on, was detained an hour and a half on Clapham Common, "in an act of mere humanity," and finally reached Vauxhall.
"At Vauxhall I took a boat for Somerset House: two mere children were my Charons; however, though against tide, we sailed safely to the landing-place, when, as I was getting out, one of the little ones (God Bless him!) moved the boat. On turning halfway round to reprove him, he moved it again, and I fell back on the landing-place. By my exertions I should have saved myself but for a large stone which I struck against just under my crown and unfortunately in the very same place which had been contused at Melton (sic) when I fell backward after learning suddenly and most abruptly of Captain Wordsworth's fate in the Abergavenny, a most dear friend of mine. Since that time any great agitation has occasioned a feeling of, as it were, a shuttle moving from that part of the back of my head horizontally to my forehead, with some pain but more confusion."
The unction of that blessing called down upon his persecutor is truly Coleridgian. "Melton" is the Editor's rendering of Malta, where Coleridge was when he heard of John Wordsworth's drowning in 1805. He had then kept his bed for a fortnight, or so he told Mrs. Coleridge.
Apparently no meeting took place, as yet another letter, dated 7th May, relates how instead of going to New Cavendish Street, where Miss Betham lived, he went to Old Cavendish Street, where she did not. "I knocked at every door in Old Cavendish Street, not unrecompensed for the present pain by the remembrances of the different characters of voice and countenance with which my question was answered in all gradations, from gentle and hospitable kindness to downright brutality." Further promises and assurances are given, and in July, as we learn from a letter of Southey's, the good Matilda was still high in hopes that her sitter would eventually sit. Her hopes could not have come from Southey, who had none. "You would have found him the most wonderful man living in conversation, but the most impracticable one for a painter, and had you begun the picture it is ten thousand to one that you must have finished it from memory." He was right. When his lectures were over, in June, Coleridge went to Bury St. Edmunds, and by the 9th September he was in Cumberland. "Coleridge has arrived at last, about half as big as the house," Southey writes to his brother on that day. There he cogitated and there began The Friend, and there the separation from his wife was finally made.
After the separation, very characteristically, he was less separated from Mrs. Coleridge than he had been for many years. In 1810 he was still in the Lakes, in the summer of which year his wife gives news of him to the poetess. "Coleridge has been with me for some time past, in good health, spirits and humour, but the Friend for some unaccountable reason, or for no reason at all, is utterly silent. This, you will easily believe, is matter of perpetual grief to me, but I am obliged to be silent on the subject, although ever uppermost in my thoughts, but I am obliged to bear about a cheerful countenance, knowing as I do by sad experience that to expostulate, or even to hazard one anxious look, would soon drive him hence." Then comes a sidelight on the Wordsworths. "Coleridge sends you his best thanks for the elegant little book; I shall not, however, let it be carried over to Grasmere, for there it would soon be soiled, for the Wordsworths are woeful destroyers of good books, as our poor library will witness."
But all this was too good to last, and as everybody knows, it did not. In October Coleridge left the Lakes with the Montagues, and almost immediately after that the rupture with the Wordsworths occurred, which involved also the family at Keswick. Southey's letter to Miss Betham giving her an account of the affair has been published by Mr. Dykes Campbell, and is misplaced in A House of Letters. The unfortunate philosopher set up his rest with the Morgans, friends of the Lambs, at Hammersmith; and there he was in February, 1811, when Miss Betham conceived her project of getting him as a lion at the party of her friend Lady Jerningham.
Lady Jerningham, blue mother of a bluer daughter (Lady Bedingfield) and sister-in-law of the "Charming Man" of Walpole's and the Misses Berry's acquaintance, was a friend of Miss Betham's of old standing. Several letters of hers are in A House of Letters, but many more of her daughter's. Whether it was her ladyship's or Miss Betham's proposal there's no telling now; but Miss Betham, at any rate, did not feel equal to the job, and called in Charles and Mary Lamb to help her. Mary, in the first instance, sounded the philosopher, and with success. I quote from Mr. Lucas's edition of the Lamb letters, as the editor of Miss Betham's misreads and misprints his original. "Coleridge," she writes, "has given me a very cheerful promise that he will wait on Lady Jerningham any day you will be pleased to appoint. He offered to write to you, but I found it was to be done to-morrow, and as I am pretty well acquainted with his to-morrows, I thought good to let you know his determination to-day. He is in town to-day, but as he is often going to Hammersmith for a night or two, you had better perhaps send the invitation through me, and I will manage it for you as well as I can. You had better let him have four or five days' previous notice, and you had better send the invitation as soon as you can; for he seems tolerably well just now. I mention all these betters, because I wish to do the best I can for you, perceiving, as I do, it is a thing you have set your heart on."
Charles was next brought in. Mr. Lucas gives his letter (I. 429) to John Morgan, which says, "There—don't read any further, because the letter is not intended for you, but for Coleridge, who might perhaps not have opened it directed to him suo nomine. It is to invite C., to Lady Jerningham's on Sunday."