[105] Joseph Wright, A. R. A., known as Wright of Derby, 1736-1797. Two of his most celebrated pictures were The Head of Ulleswater, and The Dead Soldier. An excellent specimen of Wright’s work, An Experiment with the Air Pump, was presented to the National Gallery in 1863.
[106] Compare Biographia Literaria, ch. i. “During my first Cambridge vacation I assisted a friend in a contribution for a literary society in Devonshire, and in that I remember to have compared Darwin’s works to the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold, and transitory.” Coleridge’s Works, Harper & Bros., 1853, iii. 155.
[107] Dr. James Hutton, the author of the Plutonian theory. His Theory of the Earth was published at Edinburgh in 1795.
[108] The title of this pamphlet, which was published shortly after the Conciones ad Populum, was “The Plot Discovered; or, an Address to the People against Ministerial Treason. By S. T. Coleridge. Bristol, 1795.” It had an outer wrapper with this half-title: “A Protest against Certain Wills. Bristol: Printed for the Author, November 28, 1795.” It is reprinted in Essays on His Own Times, i. 56-98.
[109] The review of “Burke’s Letter to a Noble Lord,” which appeared in the first number of The Watchman, is reprinted in Essays on His Own Times, i. 107-119.
[110] Ibid. 120-126.
[111] The occasion of this “burst of affectionate feeling” was a communication from Poole that seven or eight friends had undertaken to subscribe a sum of £35 or £40 to be paid annually to the “author of the monody on the death of Chatterton,” as “a trifling mark of their esteem, gratitude, and affection.” The subscriptions were paid in 1796-97, but afterwards discontinued on the receipt of the Wedgwood annuity. See Thomas Poole and his Friends, i. 142.
[112] Mrs. Robert Lovell, whose husband had been carried off by a fever about two years after his marriage with my aunt.—S. C.
[113] Compare Conciones ad Populum, 1795, p. 22. “Such is Joseph Gerrald! Withering in the sickly and tainted gales of a prison, his healthful soul looks down from the citadel of his integrity on his impotent persecutors. I saw him in the foul and naked room of a jail; his cheek was sallow with confinement, his body was emaciated; yet his eye spake the invincible purpose of his soul, and he still sounded with rapture the successes of Freedom, forgetful of his own lingering martyrdom.”
Together with four others, Gerrald was tried for sedition at Edinburgh in March, 1794. He delivered an eloquent speech in his own defence, but with the other prisoners was convicted and sentenced to be transported for fifteen years. “In April Gerrald was removed to London, and committed to Newgate, where Godwin and his other friends were allowed to visit him.... In May, 1795, he was suddenly taken from his prison and placed on board the hulks, and soon afterwards sailed. He survived his arrival in New South Wales only five months. A few hours before he died, he said to the friends around him, ‘I die in the best of causes, and, as you witness, without repining.’” Mrs. Shelley’s Notes, as quoted by Mr. C. Kegan Paul in his William Godwin, i. 125. See, too, “the very noble letter” (January 23, 1794) addressed by Godwin to Gerrald relative to his defence. Ibid. i. 125. Lords Cockburn and Jeffrey considered the conviction of these men a gross miscarriage of justice, and in 1844 a monument was erected at the foot of the Calton Hill, Edinburgh, to their memory.