[37] An unpublished letter from Sir Alexander Ball to His Excellency H. Elliot, Esq. (Minister at the Court of Naples), strongly recommends Coleridge to his favourable notice and consideration. Nothing that Coleridge ever said in favour of “Ball” exceeds what Sir Alexander says of Coleridge, but the Minister, whose hands must have been pretty full at the time, failed to be impressed, and withheld his patronage.
[38] “The Foster-Mother’s Tale,” Poetical Works, 1893, p. 83.
[39] Hartley Coleridge, now in his eleventh year, was under his father’s sole care from the end of December, 1806, to May, 1807. The first three months were spent in the farmhouse near Coleorton, which Sir G. Beaumont had lent to the Wordsworths, and it must have been when that visit was drawing to a close that this letter was written for Hartley’s benefit. The remaining five or six weeks were passed in the company of the Wordsworths at Basil Montagu’s house in London. Then it was that Hartley saw his first play, and was taken by Wordsworth and Walter Scott to the Tower. “The bard’s economy,” says Hartley, “would not allow us to visit the Jewel Office, but Mr. Scott, then no anactolater, took an evident pride in showing me the claymores and bucklers taken from the Loyalists at Culloden.” Whilst he was at Coleorton, Hartley was painted by Sir David Wilkie. It is the portrait of a child “whose fancies from afar are brought,” but the Hartley of this letter is better represented by the grimacing boy in Wilkie’s “Blind Fiddler,” for which, I have been told, he sat as a model. Poems of Hartley Coleridge, 1851, i. ccxxii.
[40] Scott had proposed to Southey that he should use his influence with Jeffrey to get him placed on the staff of the Edinburgh Review. Southey declined the offer alike on the score of political divergence from the editor, and disapproval of “that sort of bitterness [in criticism] which tends directly to wound a man in his feelings, and injure him in his fame and fortune.” Life and Correspondence, iii. 124-128. See, too, Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott, 1837, ii. 130.
[41] Sir John Acland. The property is now in the possession of a descendant in the female line, Sir Alexander Hood, of Fairfield, Dodington.
[42] To receive him and his family at Ottery as had been originally proposed. George Coleridge disapproved of his brother’s intended separation from his wife, and declined to countenance it in any way whatever.
[43] Faulkner: a Tragedy, 1807-1808, 8vo.
[44] I presume that the reference is to the Conciones ad Populum, published at Bristol, November 16, 1795.
[45] Coleridge’s article on Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade was published in the Edinburgh Review, July, 1808. It has never been reprinted. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by J. Dykes Campbell, London, 1894, p. 168; Letters from the Lake Poets, p. 180; Allsop’s Letters, 1836, ii. 112.
[46] Of this pamphlet or the translation of Palm’s Deutschland in seiner tiefsten Erniedrigung, I know nothing. The author, John Philip Palm, a Nuremberg bookseller, was shot August 26, 1806, in consequence of the publication of the work, which reflected unfavorably on the conduct and career of Napoleon.