[186] The three sonnets of “Nehemiah Higginbottom” were published in the Monthly Magazine for November, 1797. Compare his letter to Cottle (E. R. i. 289) which Mr. Dykes Campbell takes to have been written at the same time.
“I sent to the Monthly Magazine, three mock sonnets in ridicule of my own Poems, and Charles Lloyd’s and Charles Lamb’s, etc., etc., exposing that affectation of unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent, in commonplace epithets, flat lines forced into poetry by italics (signifying how well and mouthishly the author would read them), puny pathos, etc., etc. The instances were all taken from myself and Lloyd and Lamb. I signed them ‘Nehemiah Higginbottom.’ I hope they may do good to our young bards.”
The publication of these sonnets in November, 1797, cannot, as Mr. Dykes Campbell points out (Poetical Works, p. 599), have been the immediate cause of the breach between Coleridge and Lamb which took place in the spring or early summer of 1798, but it seems that during the rise and progress of this quarrel the Sonnet on Simplicity was the occasion of bitter and angry words. As Lamb and Lloyd and Southey drew together, they drew away from Coleridge, and Southey, who had only been formally reconciled with his brother-in-law, seems to have regarded this sonnet as an ill-natured parody of his earlier poems. In a letter to Wynn, dated November 20, 1797, he says, “I am aware of the danger of studying simplicity of language,” and he proceeds to quote some lines of blank verse to prove that he could employ the “grand style” when he chose.
A note from Coleridge to Southey, posted December 8, 1797, deals with the question, and would, if it had not been for Lloyd’s “tittle-tattle,” have convinced both Southey and Lamb that in the matter they were entirely mistaken.
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I am sorry, Southey! very sorry that I wrote or published those sonnets—but ‘sorry’ would be a tame word to express my feelings, if I had written them with the motives which you have attributed to me. I have not been in the habit of treating our separation with levity—nor ever since the first moment thought of it without deep emotion—and how could you apply to yourself a sonnet written to ridicule infantine simplicity, vulgar colloquialisms, and lady-like friendships? I have no conception, neither I believe could a passage in your writings have suggested to me or any man the notion of your ‘plainting plaintively.’ I am sorry that I wrote thus, because I am sorry to perceive a disposition in you to believe evil of me, of which your remark to Charles Lloyd was a painful instance. I say this to you, because I shall say it to no other being. I feel myself wounded and hurt and write as such. I believe in my letter to Lloyd I forgot to mention that the Editor of the Morning Post is called Stuart, and that he is the brother-in-law of Mackintosh. Yours sincerely,
S. T. Coleridge.
Thursday morning.
Post-mark, Dec. 8, 1797.
Mr. Southey, No. 23 East Street, Red Lion Square, London.
[187] Charles Lloyd’s novel, Edmund Oliver, was published at Bristol in 1798. It is dedicated to “His friend Charles Lamb of the India House.” He says in the Preface: “The incidents relative to the army were given me by an intimate friend who was himself eye-witness of one of them.” The general resemblance between the events of Coleridge’s earlier history and the story of Edmund Oliver is not very striking, but apart from the description of “his person” in the first letter of the second volume, which is close enough, a single sentence from Edmund Oliver’s journal, i. 245, betrays the malignant nature of the attack. “I have at all times a strange dreaminess about me which makes me indifferent to the future, if I can by any means fill the present with sensations,—with that dreaminess I have gone on here from day to day; if at any time thought-troubled, I have swallowed some spirits, or had recourse to my laudanum.” In the same letter, the account which Edmund Oliver gives of his sensations as a recruit in a regiment of light horse, and the vivid but repulsive picture which he draws of his squalid surroundings in “a pot-house in the Borough,” leaves a like impression that Coleridge confided too much, and that Lloyd remembered “not wisely but too well.” How Coleridge regarded Lloyd’s malfeasance may be guessed from one of his so-called epigrams.