[16] Coleridge had already attended Davy’s Lectures at the Royal Institution in 1802, and, possibly, in 1803. It is probable that allusions in his correspondence to Davy’s Lectures gave rise to the mistaken supposition that he delivered public lectures in London before 1808.
“He said, and, gliding like a snake,
Where Caradoc lay sleeping made his way.
Sweetly slept he, and pleasant were his dreams
Of Britain, and the blue-eyed maid he loved.
The Azteca stood over him; he knew
His victim, and the power of vengeance gave
Malignant joy. ‘Once hast thou ’scaped my arm:
But what shall save thee now?’ the Tyger thought,
Exulting; and he raised his spear to strike.
That instant, o’er the Briton’s unseen harp
The gale of morning past, and swept its strings
Into so sweet a harmony, that sure
It seem’d no earthly tone. The savage man
Suspends his stroke; he looks astonished round;
No human hand is near: ... and hark! again
The aërial music swells and dies away.
Then first the heart of Tlalala felt fear:
He thought that some protecting spirit watch’d
Beside the Stranger, and, abash’d, withdrew.”
“Madoc in Aztlan,” Book XI. Southey’s Poetical Works, 1838, v. 274, 275.
[18] Mrs. E. Fenwick, author of Secrecy, a novel (1799); a friend of Godwin’s first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft. William Godwin, by C. Kegan Paul, i. 282, 283. See, also, Lamb’s Letters (ed. Ainger), i. 331; and Lamb’s essays, “Two Races of Men,” and “Newspapers Thirty-five Years ago.”
[19] Lamb’s “bad baby”—“a disgusting woman who wears green spectacles.” Letters, passim.
[20] Afterwards Sir John Stoddart, Chief Justice of Malta, 1826-39.
[21] A note dated “Treasury, July 20th, 1805,” gives vent to his feelings on this point. “Saturday morning ½ past nine o’clock, and soon I shall have to brace up my hearing in toto, (for I hear in my brain—I hear, that is, I have an immediate and peculiar feeling instantly co-adunated with the sense of external sound = (exactly) to that which is experienced when one makes a wry face, and putting one’s right hand palm-wise to the right ear, and the left palm pressing hard on the forehead, one says to a bawler, ‘For mercy’s sake, man! don’t split the drum of one’s ear’—sensations analogous to this of various degrees of pain, even to a strange sort of uneasy pleasure. I am obnoxious to pure sound and therefore was saying—[N. B. Tho’ I ramble, I always come back to sense—the sense alive, tho’ sometimes a limb of syntax broken]—was saying that I hear in my brain, and still more hear in my stomach). For this ubiquity, almost (for I might safely add my toes—one or two, at least—and my knees) for this ubiquity of the Tympanum auditorium I am now to wind up my courage, for in a few seconds that accursed Reveille, the horrible crash and persevering malignant torture of the Pare-de-Drum, will attack me, like a party of yelling, drunken North American Indians attacking a crazy fort with a tired garrison, out of an ambush. The noisiness of the Maltese everybody must notice; but I have observed uniformly among them such utter impassiveness to the action of sounds as that I am fearful that the verum will be scarcely verisimile. I have heard screams of the most frightful kind, as of children run over by a cart, and running to the window I have seen two children in a parlour opposite to me (naked, except a kerchief tied round the waist) screaming in their horrid fiendiness—for fun! three adults in the room perfectly unannoyed, and this suffered to continue for twenty minutes, or as long as their lungs enabled them. But it goes thro’ everything, their street-cries, their priests, their advocates, their very pigs yell rather than squeak, or both together, rather, as if they were the true descendants of some half-dozen of the swine into which the Devils went, recovered by the Royal Humane Society. The dogs all night long would draw curses on them, but that the Maltese cats—it surpasses description, for he who has only heard caterwauling on English roofs can have no idea of a cat-serenade in Malta. In England it has often a close and painful resemblance to the distressful cries of young children, but in Malta it is identical with the wide range of screams uttered by imps while they are dragging each other into hotter and still hotter pools of brimstone and fire. It is the discord of Torment and of Rage and of Hate, of paroxysms of Revenge, and every note grumbles away into Despair.”
[22] The first Sicilian tour extended from the middle of August to the 7th of November, 1804. Two or three days, August 19-21, were spent in the neighbourhood of Etna. He slept at Nicolosi and visited the Hospice of St. Nicola dell’ Arena. It is unlikely that he reached the actual summit, but two ascents were made, probably to the limit of the wooded region. A few days later, August 24, he reached Syracuse, where he was hospitably entertained by H. M. Consul G. F. Lecky. The notes which he took of his visit to Etna are fragmentary and imperfect, but the description of Syracuse and its surroundings occupies many pages of his note-book. Under the heading, “Timoleon’s, Oct. 18, 1804, Wednesday, noon,” he writes: “The Gaza and Tree at Tremiglia. Rocks with cactus, pendulous branches, seed-pods black at the same time with the orange-yellow flower, and little daisy-like tufts of silky hair.... Timoleon’s villa, supposed to be in the field above the present house, from which you ascend to fifty stairs. Grand view of the harbour and sea, over that tongue of land which forms the anti-Ortygian embracing arm of the harbour, the point of Plemmyrium where Alcibiades and Nicias landed. I left the aqueduct and walked ascendingly to some ruined cottages, beside a delve, with straight limestone walls of rock, on which there played the shadows of the fig-tree and the olive. I was on part of Epipolæ, and a glorious view indeed! Before me a neck of stony common and fields—Ortygia, the open sea and the ships, and the circular harbour which it embraces, and the sea over that again. To my right that large extent of plain, green, rich, finely wooded; the fields so divided and enclosed that you, as it were, knew at the first view that they are all hedged and enclosed, and yet no hedges nor enclosings obtrude themselves—an effect of the vast number of trees of the same sort. On my left, stony fields, two harbours, Magnisi and its sand isle, and Augusta, and Etna, whose smoke mingles with the clouds even as they rise from the crater.... Still as I walk the lizard gliding darts along the road, and immerges himself under a stone, and the grasshopper leaps and tumbles awkwardly before me.”
It must have been in anticipation of this visit to Sicily, or after some communication with Coleridge, that Wordsworth, after alluding to his friend’s abode,—