[222] “Essay on the New French Constitution,” Essays on His Own Times, i. 183-189.
[223] The Ode appeared in the Morning Post, December 24, 1799. The stanzas in which the Duchess commemorated her passage over Mount St. Gothard appeared in the Morning Post, December 21. They were inscribed to her children, and it was the last stanza, in which she anticipates her return, which suggested to Coleridge the far-fetched conceit that maternal affection enabled the Duchess to overcome her aristocratic prejudices, and “hail Tell’s chapel and the platform wild.” It runs thus:—
Hope of my life! dear children of my heart!
That anxious heart to each fond feeling true,
To you still pants each pleasure to impart,
And soon—oh transport—reach its home and you.
From a transcript in my possession of which the opening lines are in the handwriting of Mrs. H. N. Coleridge.
[224] The libel of which Coleridge justly complained was contained in these words: “Since this time (that is, since leaving Cambridge) he has left his native country, commenced citizen of the world, left his poor children fatherless and his wife destitute. Ex his disce his friends Lamb and Southey.” Biographia Literaria, 1817, vol. i. chapter i. p. 70, n.
[225] Mrs. Robinson (“Perdita”) contributed two poems to the Annual Anthology of 1800, “Jasper” and “The Haunted Beach.” The line which caught Coleridge’s fancy, the first of the twelfth stanza, runs thus:—
“Pale Moon! thou Spectre of the Sky.”
Annual Anthology, 1800, p. 168.
[226] St. Leon was published in 1799. William Godwin, his Friends and Contemporaries, i. 330.
[227] See “Mr. Coleridge’s Report of Mr. Pitt’s Speech in Parliament of February 17, 1800, On the continuance of the War with France.” Morning Post, February 18, 1800; Essays on His Own Times, ii. 293. See, too, Mrs. H. N. Coleridge’s note, and the report of the speech in The Times. Ibid. iii. 1009-1019. The original notes, which Coleridge took in pencil, have been preserved in one of his note-books. They consist, for the most part, of skeleton sentences and fragmentary jottings. How far Coleridge may have reconstructed Pitt’s speech as he went along, it is impossible to say, but the speech as reported follows pretty closely the outlines in the note-book. The remarkable description of Buonaparte as the “child and champion of Jacobinism,” which is not to be found in The Times report, appears in the notes as “the nursling and champion of Jacobinism,” and, if these were the words which Pitt used, in this instance, Coleridge altered for the worse.