“I really would have attended the Grub’s Canonization in St. Paul’s, under the impression that it would gratify his sister, Mrs. Wright; but Mr. G. interposed a conditional but sufficiently decorous negative. ‘No! Unless you wish to follow his Grubship still further down.’ So I pleaded ill health. But the very Thursday morning I went to Town to see my daughter, for the first time, as Mrs. Henry Coleridge, in Gower Street, and, odd enough, the stage was stopped by the Pompous Funeral of the unchangeable and predestinated Grub, and I extemporised:—
As Grub Dawe pass’d beneath the Hearse’s Lid,
On which a large RESURGAM met the eye,
Col, who well knew the Grub, cried, Lord forbid!
I trust, he’s only telling us a lie!
S. T. Coleridge.”
Dawe, it may be remembered, is immortalised by Lamb in his amusing Recollections of a Late Royal Academician.
[76] This portrait, begun at Rome, was not finished when Coleridge left. It is now in the possession of Allston’s niece, Miss Charlotte Dana, of Boston, Mass., U. S. A. The portrait by Allston, now in the National Portrait Gallery, was taken at Bristol in 1814. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, 1894, p. 150, footnote 5.
[77] The lectures were delivered at the rooms of “The London Philosophical Society, Scotch Corporation Hall, Crane Court, Fleet Street (entrance from Fetter Lane).” Of the lecture on “Love and the Female Character,” which was delivered on December 9, 1811, H. C. Robinson writes: “Accompanied Mrs. Rough to Coleridge’s seventh and incomparably best Lecture. He declaimed with great eloquence about love, without wandering from his subject, Romeo and Juliet.” Among the friends who took notes were John Payne Collier, and a Mr. Tomalin. Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakespeare, London, 1856, p. viii.; H. C. Robinson’s Diary, ii. 348, MS. notes by J. Tomalin.
[78] The visit to Greta Hall, the last he ever paid to the Lake Country, lasted about a month, from February 23 to March 26. On his journey southward he remained in Penrith for a little over a fortnight, rejoining the Morgans towards the middle of April.
[79] The Reverend John Dawes, who kept a day-school at Ambleside. Hartley and Derwent Coleridge, Robert Jameson, Owen Lloyd and his three brothers (sons of Charles Lloyd), and the late Edward Jefferies, afterwards Curate and Rector of Grasmere, were among his pupils. In the Memoir of Hartley Coleridge, his brother Derwent describes at some length the character of his “worthy master,” and adds: “We were among his earliest scholars, and deeming it, as he said, an honour to be entrusted with the education of Mr. Coleridge’s sons, he refused, first for the elder, and afterwards for the younger brother, any pecuniary remuneration.” Poems of Hartley Coleridge, 1851, i. liii.
[80] In an unpublished letter from Mrs. Coleridge to Poole, dated October 30, 1812, she tells her old friend that when “the boys” perceived that their father did not intend to turn aside to visit the Wordsworths at the Rectory opposite Grasmere Church, they turned pale and were visibly affected. No doubt they knew all about the quarrel and were mightily concerned, but their agitation was a reflex of the grief and passion “writ large” in their father’s face. One can imagine with what ecstasy of self-torture he would pass through Grasmere and leave Wordsworth unvisited.
[81] Sir Thomas Bernard, 1750-1818, the well-known philanthropist and promoter of national education, was one of the founders of the Royal Institution.