[1] Pickering, 1838.
[2] The Journal of John Woolman, the Quaker abolitionist, was published in Philadelphia in 1774, and in London in 1775. From a letter of Charles Lamb, dated January 5, 1797, we may conclude that Charles Lloyd had, in the first instance, drawn Coleridge’s attention to the writings of John Woolman. Compare, too, Essays of Elia, “A Quakers’ Meeting.” “Get the writings of John Woolman by heart; and love the early Quakers.” Letters of Charles Lamb, 1888, i. 61; Prose Works, 1836, ii. 106.
[3] I have been unable to trace any connection between the family of Coleridge and the Parish or Hundred of Coleridge in North Devon. Coldridges or Coleridges have been settled for more than two hundred years in Doddiscombsleigh, Ashton, and other villages of the Upper Teign, and to the southwest of Exeter the name is not uncommon. It is probable that at some period before the days of parish registers, strangers from Coleridge who had settled farther south were named after their birthplace.
[4] Probably a mistake for Crediton. It was at Crediton that John Coleridge, the poet’s father, was born (Feb. 21, 1718) and educated; and here, if anywhere, it must have been that the elder John Coleridge “became a respectable woollen-draper.”
[5] John Coleridge, the younger, was in his thirty-first year when he was matriculated as sizar at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, March 18, 1748. He is entered in the college books as filius Johannis textoris. On the 13th of June, 1749, he was appointed to the mastership of Squire’s Endowed Grammar School at South Molton. It is strange that Coleridge forgot or failed to record this incident in his father’s life. His mother came from the neighbourhood, and several of his father’s scholars, among them Francis Buller, afterwards the well-known judge, followed him from South Molton to Ottery St. Mary.
[6] George Coleridge was Chaplain Priest, and Master of the King’s School, but never Vicar of Ottery St. Mary.
[7] Anne (“Nancy”) Coleridge died in her twenty-fifth year. Her illness and early death form the subject of two of Coleridge’s early sonnets. Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Macmillan, 1893, p. 13. See, also, “Lines to a Friend,” p. 37, and “Frost at Midnight,” p. 127.
[8] A mistake for October 21st.
[9] Compare some doggerel verses “On Mrs. Monday’s Beard” which Coleridge wrote on a copy of Southey’s Omniana, under the heading of “Beards” (Omniana, 1812, ii. 54). Southey records the legend of a female saint, St. Vuilgefortis, who in answer to her prayers was rewarded with a beard as a mark of divine favour. The story is told in some Latin elegiacs from the Annus Sacer Poeticus of the Jesuit Sautel which Southey quotes at length. Coleridge comments thus, “Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixere! What! can nothing be one’s own? This is the more vexatious, for at the age of eighteen I lost a legacy of Fifty pounds for the following Epigram on my Godmother’s Beard, which she had the barbarity to revenge by striking me out of her Will.”
The epigram is not worth quoting, but it is curious to observe that, even when scribbling for his own amusement, and without any view to publication, Coleridge could not resist the temptation of devising an “apologetic preface.”