TO ONE WHO PUBLISHED IN PRINT WHAT HAD BEEN INTRUSTED TO HIM BY MY FIRESIDE.
Two things hast thou made known to half the nation,
My secrets and my want of penetration:
For oh! far more than all which thou hast penned,
It shames me to have called a wretch, like thee, my friend!
Poetical Works, p. 448.
[188] In a letter dated November 1, 1798, Mrs. Coleridge acquaints her husband with the danger and the disfigurement from smallpox which had befallen her little Berkeley. “The dear child,” she writes, “is getting strength every hour; but ‘when you lost sight of land, and the faces of your children crossed you like a flash of lightning,’ you saw that face for the last time.”
[189] “Fears in Solitude, written in 1798, during the alarm of an invasion. To which are added, France, an Ode; and Frost at Midnight. By S. T. Coleridge. London: Printed for J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Churchyard. 1798.”
[190] According to Burke’s Peerage, Emanuel Scoope, second Viscount Howe, and father of the Admiral, “Our Lord Howe,” married, in 1719, Mary Sophia, daughter of Baron Kielmansegge, Master of the Horse to George I. Coleridge’s countess must have been a great-granddaughter of the baron. In her reply to this letter, dated December 13, 1798, Mrs. Coleridge writes: “I am very proud to hear that you are so forward in the language, and that you are so gay with the ladies. You may give my respects to them, and say that I am not at all jealous, for I know my dear Samuel in her affliction will not forget entirely his most affectionate wife, Sara Coleridge.”
[191] The “Rev. Mr. Roskilly” had been curate-in-charge of the parish of Nether Stowey, and the occasion of the letter was his promotion to the Rectory of Kempsford in Gloucestershire. Mrs. S. T. Coleridge, in a late letter (probably 1843) to her sister, Mrs. Lovell, writes: “In March [1800] I and the child [Hartley] left him [S. T. C.] in London, and proceeded to Kempsford in Gloucestershire, the Rectory of Mr. Roskilly; remained there a month. Papa was to have joined us there, but did not.” See Thomas Poole and his Friends, i. 25-27, and Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 6.
[192] In his letter of January 20, 1799, Josiah Wedgwood acknowledges the receipt of a letter dated November 29, 1798, but adds that an earlier letter from Hamburg had not come to hand. A third letter, dated Göttingen, May 21, 1799, was printed by Cottle in his Reminiscences, 1848, p. 425.
[193] Miss Meteyard, in her Group of Englishmen, 1871, p. 99, gives extracts from the account-current of Messrs. P. and O. Von Axen, the Hamburg agents of the Wedgwoods. According to her figures, Coleridge drew £125 from October 20 to March 29, 1799, and, “conjointly with Wordsworth,” £106 10s. on July 8, 1799. Mr. Dykes Campbell, in a footnote to his Memoir, p. xliv., combats Miss Meteyard’s assertion that these sums were advanced by the Wedgwoods to Coleridge and Wordsworth, and argues that Wordsworth merely drew on the Von Axens for sums already paid in from his own resources. Coleridge, he thinks, had only his annuity to look to, but probably anticipated his income. In a MS. note-book of 1798-99, Coleridge inserted some concise but not very business-like entries as to expenditures and present resources, but says nothing as to receipts.
“March 25th, being Easter Monday, Chester and S. T. C., in a damn’d dirty hole in the Burg Strasse at Göttingen, possessed at that moment eleven Louis d’ors and two dollars. When the money is spent in common expenses S. T. Coleridge will owe Chester 5 pounds 12 shillings.