My kindest remembrances to your excellent hosts at Highgate. It is with especial emotion that I look again and again at the Anatomy of Melancholy Lay Sermons, Christabel, and the Biographia Literaria. Herr von Vogelstein, one of the most esteemed historical painters of Germany, brings you this letter from your loving
Ludwig Tieck.
[143] Henry Crabb Robinson, whose admirable diaries, first published in 1869, may, it is hoped, be reëdited and published in full, died at the age of ninety-one in 1867. He was a constant guest at my father’s house in Chelsea during my boyhood. I have, too, a distinct remembrance of his walking over Loughrigg from Rydal Mount, where he was staying with Mrs. Wordsworth, and visiting my parents at High Close, between Grasmere and Langdale, then and now the property of Mr. Wheatley Balme. This must have been in 1857, when he was past eighty years of age. My impression is that his conversation consisted, for the most part, of anecdotes concerning Wieland and Schiller and Goethe. Of Wordsworth and Coleridge he must have had much to say, but his words, as was natural, fell on the unheeding ears of a child.
[144] The Right Hon. John Hookham Frere, 1769-1846, now better known as the translator of Aristophanes than as statesman or diplomatist, was a warm friend to Coleridge in his later years. He figures in the later memoranda and correspondence as ὁ καλοκάγαθος, the ideal Christian gentleman.
[145] Samuel Purkis, of Brentford, tanner and man of letters, was an early friend of Poole’s, and through him became acquainted with Coleridge and Sir Humphry Davy. When Coleridge went up to London in June, 1798, to stay with the Wedgwoods at Stoke House, in the village of Cobham, he stayed a night at Brentford on the way. In a letter to Poole of the same date, he thus describes his host: “Purkis is a gentleman, with the free and cordial and interesting manners of the man of literature. His colloquial diction is uncommonly pleasing, his information various, his own mind elegant and acute.” Thomas Poole and his Friends, i. 271, et passim.
[146] For an account of Coleridge’s relations with his publishers, Fenner and Curtis, see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell, p. 227. See, too, Lippincott’s Mag. for June, 1870, art. “Some Unpublished Correspondence of S. T. Coleridge,” and Brandl’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Romantic School, 1887, pp. 351-353.
[147] J. H. Frere was, I believe, one of those who assisted Coleridge to send his younger son to Cambridge.
[148] John Taylor Coleridge (better known as Mr. Justice Coleridge), and George May Coleridge, Vicar of St. Mary Church, Devon, and Prebendary of Wells. Another cousin who befriended Hartley, when he was an undergraduate at Merton, and again later when he was living with the Montagus, in London, was William Hart Coleridge, afterward Bishop of Barbados. The poet’s own testimony to the good work of his nephews should be set against Allsop’s foolish and uncalled for attack on “the Bishop and the Judge.” Letters, etc., of S. T. Coleridge, 1836, i. 225, note.
[149] Poole’s reply to this letter, dated July 31, 1817, contained an invitation to Hartley to come to Nether Stowey. Mrs. Sandford tells us that it was believed that “the young man spent more than one vacation at Stowey, where he was well-known and very popular, though the young ladies of the place either themselves called him the Black Dwarf, or cherished a conviction that that was his nickname at Oxford.” Thomas Poole and his Friends, ii. 256-258.
[150] The Rev. H. F. Cary, 1772-1844, the well-known translator of the Divina Commedia. His son and biographer, the Rev. Henry Cary, gives the following account of his father’s first introduction to Coleridge, which took place at Littlehampton in the autumn of 1817:—