The verses, etc., are printed in Table Talk and Omniana, Bell, 1888, p. 391. The editor, the late Thomas Ashe, transcribed them from Gillman’s copy of the Omniana, now in the British Museum. I have followed a transcript of the marginal note made by Mrs. H. N. Coleridge before the volume was cut in binding. Her version supplies one or two omissions.
[10] The meaning is that the events which had taken place between March and October, 1797, the composition, for instance, of his tragedy, Osorio, the visit of Charles Lamb to the cottage at Nether Stowey, the settling of Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy at Alfoxden, would hereafter be recorded in his autobiography. He had failed to complete the record of the past, only because he had been too much occupied with the present.
[11] He records his timorous passion for fairy stories in a note to The Friend (ed. 1850, i. 192). Another version of the same story is to be found in some MS. notes (taken by J. Tomalin) of the Lectures of 1811, the only record of this and other lectures:—
Lecture 5th, 1811. “Give me,” cried Coleridge, with enthusiasm, “the works which delighted my youth! Give me the History of St. George, and the Seven Champions of Christendom, which at every leisure moment I used to hide myself in a corner to read! Give me the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, which I used to watch, till the sun shining on the bookcase approached, and, glowing full upon it, gave me the courage to take it from the shelf. I heard of no little Billies, and sought no praise for giving to beggars, and I trust that my heart is not the worse, or the less inclined to feel sympathy for all men, because I first learnt the powers of my nature, and to reverence that nature—for who can feel and reverence the nature of man and not feel deeply for the affliction of others possessing like powers and like nature?” Tomalin’s Shorthand Report of Lecture V.
[12] Compare a MS. note dated July 19, 1803. “Intensely hot day, left off a waistcoat, and for yarn wore silk stockings. Before nine o’clock had unpleasant chillness, heard a noise which I thought Derwent’s in sleep; listened and found it was a calf bellowing. Instantly came on my mind that night I slept out at Ottery, and the calf in the field across the river whose lowing so deeply impressed me. Chill and child and calf lowing.”
[13] Sir Stafford, the seventh baronet, grandfather of the first Lord Iddesleigh, was at that time a youth of eighteen. His name occurs among the list of scholars who were subscribers to the second edition of the Critical Latin Grammar.
[14] Compare a MS. note dated March 5, 1818. “Memory counterfeited by present impressions. One great cause of the coincidence of dreams with the event—ἡ μήτηρ ἐμή.”
[15] The date of admission to Hertford was July 18, 1782. Eight weeks later, September 12, he was sent up to London to the great school.
[16] Compare the autobiographical note of 1832. “I was in a continual low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner and read, read, read; fixing myself on Robinson Crusoe’s Island, finding a mountain of plumb cake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the shapes of tables and chairs—hunger and fancy.” Lamb in his Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago, and Leigh Hunt in his Autobiography, are in the same tale as to the insufficient and ill-cooked meals of their Bluecoat days. Life of Coleridge, by James Gillman, 1838, p. 20; Lamb’s Prose Works, 1836, ii. 27; Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, 1860, p. 60.
[17] Coleridge’s “letters home” were almost invariably addressed to his brother George. It may be gathered from his correspondence that at rare intervals he wrote to his mother as well, but, contrary to her usual practice, she did not, with this one exception, preserve his letters. It was, indeed, a sorrowful consequence of his “long exile” at Christ’s Hospital, that he seems to have passed out of his mother’s ken, that absence led to something like indifference on both sides.