S. T. Coleridge.
I have great affection for Lamb, but I have likewise a perfect Lloyd-and-Lambophobia! Independent of the irritation attending an epistolary controversy with them, their prose comes so damn’d dear! Lloyd especially writes with a woman’s fluency in a large rambling hand, most dull though profuse of feeling. I received from them in last quarter letters so many, that with the postage I might have bought Birch’s Milton.—Sara will write soon. Our love to Edith and your mother.
CII. TO THE SAME.
Keswick,[216] Sunday, November 10, 1799.
My dear Southey,—I am anxious lest so long silence should seem unaffectionate, or I would not, having so little to say, write to you from such a distant corner of the kingdom. I was called up to the North by alarming accounts of Wordsworth’s health, which, thank God! are but little more than alarms. Since I have visited the Lakes and in a pecuniary way have made the trip answer to me. From hence I go to London, having had (by accident here) a sort of offer made to me of a pleasant kind, which, if it turn out well, will enable me and Sara to reside in London for the next four or five months—a thing I wish extremely on many and important accounts. So much for myself. In my last letter I said I would give you my reasons for thinking “Christabel,” were it finished, and finished as spiritedly as it commences, yet still an improper opening poem. My reason is it cannot be expected to please all. Those who dislike it will deem it extravagant ravings, and go on through the rest of the collection with the feeling of disgust, and it is not impossible that were it liked by any it would still not harmonise with the real-life poems that follow. It ought, I think, to be the last. The first ought me judice to be a poem in couplets, didactic or satirical, such a one as the lovers of genuine poetry would call sensible and entertaining, such as the ignoramuses and Pope-admirers would deem genuine poetry. I had planned such a one, and, but for the absolute necessity of scribbling prose, I should have written it. The great and master fault of the last “Anthology” was the want of arrangement. It is called a collection, and meant to be continued annually; yet was distinguished in nothing from any other single volume of poems equally good. Yours ought to have been a cabinet with proper compartments, and papers in them, whereas it was only the papers. Some such arrangement as this should have been adopted: First. Satirical and Didactic. 2. Lyrical. 3. Narrative. 4. Levities.
“Sic positi quoniam suaves miscetis odores,
Neve inter vites corylum sere”—
is, I am convinced, excellent advice of Master Virgil’s. N. B. A good motto! ’Tis from Virgil’s seventh Eclogue.
“Populus Alcidæ gratissima, vitis Iaccho,
Formosæ myrtus Veneri, sua laurea Phœbo;
Phyllis amat corylos.”
But still, my dear Southey! it goes grievously against the grain with me, that you should be editing anthologies. I would to Heaven that you could afford to write nothing, or at least to publish nothing, till the completion and publication of the “Madoc.” I feel as certain, as my mind dare feel on any subject, that it would lift you with a spring into a reputation that would give immediate sale to your after compositions and a license of writing more at ease. Whereas “Thalaba” would gain you (for a time at least) more ridiculers than admirers, and the “Madoc” might in consequence be welcomed with an ecce iterum. Do, do, my dear Southey! publish the “Madoc” quam citissime, not hastily, but yet speedily. I will instantly publish an Essay on Epic Poetry in reference to it. I have been reading the Æneid, and there you will be all victorious, excepting the importance of Æneas and his connection with events existing in Virgil’s time. This cannot be said of “Madoc.” There are other faults in the construction of your poem, but nothing compared to those in the Æneid. Homer I shall read too.
(No signature.)