My dear Friend,
You will think it childish in me, and more savouring of a jealous boarding-school miss than a friend and a philosopher, when I confess that the “with great respect, your obliged and grateful...,” gave me pain. But I did not return from Mr. Cooper’s, at whose house we all dined, till near midnight, and did not open the packet till this morning after getting out of bed; and this you know is the hour in which the cat-organ of an irritable viscerage is substituted for the brain as the mind’s instrument.
The Cobbett is assuredly a strong and battering production throughout, and in the best bad style of this political rhinoceros, with his coat armour of dry and wet mud, and his one horn of brutal strength on the nose of scorn and hate; not to forget the flaying rasp of his tongue! There is one article of his invective, however, from which I cannot withhold my vote of consent: that I mean which respects Mr. Brougham’s hollow complimentary phrases to the ministry and the House of Lords. On expressing my regret that his poor hoaxed and hunted client had been lured or terrified into the nets of the revolutionists, and had taken the topmost perch, as the flaring, screaming maccaw, in the clamorous aviary of faction, Sheriff Williams, who dined with us, premising that his wishes accorded with mine, declared himself, however fully and deeply convinced, that, without this alliance, the Queen must have been overwhelmed, not wholly or even chiefly from the strength of the party itself, but because, without the activity, enthusiasm, and combination, peculiar to the reformists, her case, in all its detail and with all its appendages, would never have had that notoriety so beyond example universal; which (to translate Sheriff Williams into Poet Coleridge), with kettle drum reveillée, had echoed through the mine and the coal-pit, which had lifted the latch of every cottage, and thundered with no run-away knock at Carlton Palace. I could only reply, that I had never yet seen, heard, or read of any advantage in the long run, occurring to a good cause from an unholy alliance with evil passions and incongruous or alien purposes. It was ever heavy on my heart, that the people, alike high and low, do perish for lack of knowledge; that both sheep and shepherd, the Flocks and the Pastors, go astray among swamps and in desolate places, for want of the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth; and that the sacred motto, which I had adopted for my first political publication (The Watchman), would be the aspiration of my death-bed—That all may know the truth; and that the truth may make us free.
I observed farther, that in bodies of men, not accidentally collected nor promiscuously, but such as our House of Lords, the usual effect of terror was, first, self-justification as to the worst of their past violent and unconstitutional measures; and, next, a desperate belief that their safety would be still more endangered by giving way than by plunging onward; that, if they must fall, they would fall in that way in which they might take vengeance on the occasion of the mischief. If the proposition be either ... or ..., and the latter blank is to be filled up by a Civil War, what shall we put for the former, to make our duty to submit to it deniable or even doubtful? A Legislature permitted by us to stand in the eye of the whole civilised World as the representative of our country, corruptly and ruthlessly pandering to an Individual’s Lust and Hate! Open Hostility to Innocence, and the subversion of justice, a shameless trampling under foot of the Laws of God and the Principles of the Constitution, in the name and against the known will of the Nation! Well! if anything, it must be this! It is a decision, compared with which the sentence of the elder Brutus were a grief for which an onion might supply the tears. A dreadful decision! But be it so!—How much more then are we bound to be careful, that no conduct of our own, no assent or countenance given by us to the violence of others, no want of courage and alertness in denouncing the same, should have the least tendency to bring about an act or event, dire enough to justify a civil war for its preventive! I produced, as you may suppose, but small effect; and yet your very note enforces the truth of my reply—for these very answers of the Queen’s conjointly with her plebicolar (or plebicolous) Clap-Trapperies in the live puppet-show of wicked Punch and his wife, that has come back again, and the devil on all sides, make it impossible for me to ask you, as I otherwise should have done,—What proof, proveably independent of the calumny plot, have we of any want of delicacy in the Queen? What act or form of demeanour can be adduced on competent testimony, from which we are forced or entitled to infer innate Coarseness, if not Grossness? The dire disclosure of the extent and extremes to which Calumny may be carried—and perhaps the recent persecution of poor dear ... mixes its workings—makes me credulous in incredulity; so that I am almost prepared to reverse the proverb, and think that “what every one says must be a lie!” They put a body up to the nostrils in the dunghill of reeking slander, and then exclaim: There is no smoke without some fire!
It is my purpose, God willing! to leave this place on Friday, so as to take an afternoon coach, if any such there be, or the Oxford mail, as the dernier resource—and so to be in Oxford by Saturday morning, while my letter, which is unfortunately a very long one (and I could not make it otherwise), will reach Dr. Coplestone, if arrived, on Friday morning; thus giving him a day’s preparation for the personal interview. How long my absence from Highgate may be, I cannot of course predetermine; certainly not an hour beyond what [Hartley]’s interest requires.
God bless you, my dear friend, and your truly affectionate, and—if it did not look like a retort, how truly might I not add—
Your obliged and grateful friend,
S. T. Coleridge
T. Allsop, Esq.
P.S.—Sheriff Williams is apparently a very worthy, and assuredly a very entertaining man. He gave us accounts, on his own evidence, of wonderful things respecting Miss M’Evoy and a Mr. De Vains of Liverpool; so wonderful as to threaten the stoppage even of my Bank of Faith.