Vexation! and Mrs. Gillman has this moment burnt Mathews’ note. The purport, however, was as follows:—“I have just received a note from Terry, informing me that Sir Walter Scott will call upon me to-morrow morning (i.e. Sunday) at half-past eleven. Will you contrive to be here at the same time? Perhaps the promise of your company may induce Sir Walter to appoint a day on which he will dine with me before he returns to the north.”

Now as Scott had asked Terry for my address on his first arrival in town, it is not impossible, though not very probable, that Terry may have said—“You will meet Coleridge at Mathews’s,” though I was not entitled to presume this. The bottom of all this, my dear friend, is neither more nor less than as follows:—I seem to feel that I ought to feel more desire to see an extraordinary man than I really do feel; and I do not wish to appear to two or three persons (as the Mr. Freres, William Rose, etc.), as if I cherished any dislike to Scott respecting the Christabel, and generally an increasing dislike to appear out of the common and natural mode of thinking and acting. All this is, I own, sad weakness, but I am weary of dyspathy.

It will be seen from the postscript of the last letter that Hartley and Derwent, Coleridge’s sons, were on a visit to Highgate.]

CHAPTER XXIV
SIR WALTER SCOTT

[Coleridge and Sir Walter Scott met at least three times during their lives, once in 1807,[107] once in 1820, and again in 1828. Sir Walter was cognizant of the genius of Coleridge both as the author of Christabel and of the translation of Wallenstein, which he praised highly; and he had on the last occasion of their meeting to acknowledge Coleridge’s extraordinary colloquial power. His tribute to the genius of Coleridge is well known to readers of Lockhart’s Life of Scott. The next letter to Allsop contains Coleridge’s estimate of Scott. No greater contrast than Scott and Coleridge as literary men, the two greatest, with the exception of Goethe, of their generation, could be conceived. Scott, successful, the darling of the hour, reaping thousands of pounds for his literary output and almost unable to keep pace with the demand for his creations; Coleridge, always unable to obtain anything like remuneration for his more profound and original work, and never the possessor in advance of £50 which he could call his own. And yet, both were the victims of a fate which seemed to brood over them; and, after all, it is difficult to say from a worldly point of view which was really the more successful, the creator of a whole gallery of characters known throughout Anglo-Saxondom as household beings, or the other the disseminator of the most fruitful ideas in all departments of human thought.

Letter 180. To Allsop

Highgate, April 8th, 1820.[108]

My dear Friend,

It is not the least advantage of friendship, that by communicating our thoughts to another, we render them distinct to ourselves, and reduce the subjects of our sorrow and anxiety to their just magnitude for our own contemplation.