[82] It is probable that during his stay at Penrith he recovered a number of unbound sheets of the reprint of The Friend. His proposal to Gale and Curtis must have been to conclude the unfinished narrative of the life of Sir Alexander Ball, and to publish the whole as a complete work. A printed slip cut out of a page of publishers’ advertisements and forwarded to “H. N. Coleridge, Esq., from W. Pickering,” contains the following announcement:—
“Mr. Coleridge’s Friend, of which twenty-eight Numbers are published, may now be had, in one Volume, royal 8vo. boards, of Mess. Gale and Curtis, Paternoster Row. And Mr. C. intends to complete the Work, in from eight to ten similar sheets to the foregoing, which will be published together in one part, sewed. The Subscribers to the former part can obtain them through their regular Booksellers. Only 300 copies remain of the 28 numbers, and their being printed on unstamped paper will account to the Subscribers for the difference of price. 23, Paternoster Row, London, 1st February, 1812.”
[83] The full title of this work was The Origin, Nature and Object of the New System of Education. Southey’s Life of Dr. Bell, ii. 409.
[84] The Honourable and Right Reverend John Shute Barrington, 1734-1826, sixth son of the first Lord Barrington, was successively Bishop of Llandaff, Salisbury, and Durham. He was a warm supporter of the Madras system of education. It was no doubt Dr. Bell who helped to interest the Bishop in Coleridge’s Lectures.
[85] Herbert Southey, known in the family as “Dog-Lunus,” and “Lunus,” and “The Moon.” Letters of R. Southey, ii. 399.
[86] Readers of The Doctor will not be at a loss to understand the significance of the references to Dr. Daniel Dove and his horse Nobs. According to Cuthbert Southey, the actual composition of the book began in 1813, but the date of this letter (April, 1812) shows that the myth or legend of the “Doctor,” and his iron-grey, which had taken shape certainly as early as 1805, was fully developed in the spring of 1812, when Coleridge paid his last visit to Greta Hall. It was not till the winter of 1833-1834, that the first two volumes of The Doctor appeared in print, and, as they were published anonymously, they were, probably, by persons familiar with his contribution to Blackwood and the London Magazine, attributed to Hartley Coleridge. “No clue to the author has reached me,” wrote Southey to his friend Wynne. “As for Hartley Coleridge, I wish it were his, but am certain that it is not. He is quite clever enough to have written it—quite odd enough, but his opinions are desperately radical, and he is the last person in the world to disguise them. One report was that his father had assisted him; there is not a page in the book, wise or foolish, which the latter could have written, neither his wisdom nor his folly are of that kind.” There had been a time when Southey would have expressed himself differently, but in 1834 dissociation from Coleridge had become a matter alike of habit and of principle. Southey’s Life and Correspondence, ii. 355, vi. 225-229; Letters of R. Southey, iv. 373.
[87] The first of the series of “Essays upon Epitaphs” was published in No. 25 of the original issue of The Friend (Feb. 22, 1810), and republished by Wordsworth in the notes to The Excursion, 1814. “Two other portions of the ‘Series,’ of which the Bishop of Lincoln gives an outline and some extracts in the Memoirs (i. 434-445), were published in full in Prose Works of Wordsworth, 1876, ii. 41-75.” Life of W. Wordsworth, ii. 152; Poetical Works of Wordsworth, Bibliography, p. 907.
[88] To Miss Sarah Hutchinson, then living in Wales.
[89] That Wordsworth ever used these words, or commissioned Montagu to repeat them to Coleridge, is in itself improbable and was solemnly denied by Wordsworth himself. But Wordsworth did not deny that with the best motives and in a kindly spirit he took Montagu into his confidence and put him on his guard, that he professed “to have no hope” of his old friend, and that with regard to Coleridge’s “habits” he might have described them as a “nuisance” in his family. It was all meant for the best, but much evil and misery might have been avoided if Wordsworth had warned Coleridge that if he should make his home under Montagu’s roof he could not keep silence, or, better still, if he had kept silence and left Montagu to fight his own battles. The cruel words which Montagu put into Wordsworth’s mouth or Coleridge in his agitation and resentment put into Montagu’s, were but the salt which the sufferer rubbed into his own wound. The time, the manner, and the person combined to aggravate his misery and dismay. Judgment had been delivered against him in absentiâ, and the judge was none other than his own “familiar friend.” Henry Crabb Robinson’s Diary, May 3-10, 1812, first published in Life of W. Wordsworth, ii. 168, 187.
[90] The tickets were numbered and signed by the lecturer. Printed cards which were issued by way of advertisement contained the following announcement:—