By “imperfect” duties Coleridge probably means “duties of imperfect obligation.”
[126] This article, a review of “The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton; with a Supplement of Interesting Letters by Distinguished Personages. 2 vols. 8vo. Lovewell and Co. London. 1814,” appeared in No. xxi. of The Quarterly Review, for April, 1814. The attack is mainly directed against Lady Hamilton, but Nelson, with every pretence of reluctance and of general admiration, is also censured on moral grounds, and his letters are held up to ridicule.
[127] A partner in the publishing firm of Ridgeway and Symonds. Letters of R. Southey, iii. 65.
[128] The reference is to Swift’s famous “Drapier” Letters. Swift wrote in the assumed character of a draper, and dated his letters “From my shop in St. Francis Street,” but why he adopted the French instead of the English spelling of the word does not seem to have been satisfactorily explained. Notes and Queries, III. Series, x. 55.
[129] The View of the State of Ireland, first published in 1633.
[130] John Kenyon, 1783-1856, a poet and philanthropist. He settled at Woodlands near Stowey in 1802, and became acquainted with Poole and Poole’s friends. He was on especially intimate terms with Southey, who writes of him (January 11, 1827) to his still older friend Wynne, as “one of the very best and pleasantest men whom I have ever known, one whom every one likes at first sight, and likes better the longer he is known.” With Coleridge himself the tie was less close, but he was, I know, a most kind friend to the poet’s wife during those anxious years, 1814-1819, when her children were growing up, and she had little else to depend upon but Southey’s generous protection and the moiety of the Wedgwood annuity. Kenyon’s friendship with the Brownings belongs to a later chapter of literary history.
[131] Poetical Works, p. 176; Appendix H, pp. 525, 526.
[132] Poetical Works, p. 450.
[133] In 1815 an act was brought in by Mr. Robinson (afterwards Lord Ripon) and passed, permitting the importation of corn when the price of home-grown wheat reached 80s. a quarter. During the spring of the year, January-March, while the bill was being discussed, bread-riots took place in London and Westminster.
[134] It would seem that Coleridge had either overlooked or declined to put faith in Wordsworth’s Apology for The Excursion, which appeared in the Preface to the First Edition of 1814. He was, of course, familiar with the “poem on the growth of your mind,” the hitherto unnamed and unpublished Prelude, and he must have been at least equally familiar with the earlier books of The Excursion. Why then was he disappointed with the poem as a whole, and what had he looked for at Wordsworth’s hands? Not, it would seem, for an “ante-chapel,” but for the sanctuary itself. He had been stirred to the depths by the recitation of The Prelude at Coleorton, and in his lines “To a Gentleman,” which he quotes in this letter, he recapitulates the arguments of the poem. This he considered was The Excursion, “an Orphic song indeed”! and as he listened the melody sank into his soul. But that was but an exordium, a “prelusive strain” to The Recluse, which might indeed include the Grasmere fragment, the story of Margaret and so forth, but which in the form of poetry would convey the substance of divine philosophy. He had looked for a second Milton who would put Lucretius to a double shame, for a “philosophic poem,” which would justify anew “the ways of God to men;” and in lieu of this pageant of the imagination there was Wordsworth prolific of moral discourse, of scenic and personal narrative—a prophet indeed, but “unmindful of the heavenly Vision.”