I will write in a few days again to you. To-morrow is my lecture night, “On the human causes of the spread of Christianity, and its effects after the establishment of Christendom.” Dear Mary! dear Dorothy! dearest Sara! Oh, be assured, no thought relative to myself has half the influence in inspiring the wish and effort to appear and to act what I always in my will and heart have been, as the knowledge that few things could more console you than to see me healthy, and worthy of myself! Again and again, my dearest Wordsworth!!! I am affectionately and truly yours,
S. T. Coleridge.
CXCIII. TO HIS WIFE.
Wednesday afternoon [January 20,] 18[13].
My dear Sara,—Hitherto the “Remorse” has met with unexampled applause, but whether it will continue to fill the house, that is quite another question, and of this, my friends are, in my opinion, far, far too sanguine. I have disposed not of the copyright but of edition by edition to Mr. Pople, on terms advantageous to me as an author and honourable to him as a publisher. The expenses of printing and paper (at the trade-price) advertising, etc., are to be deducted from the total produce, and the net profits to be divided into three equal parts, of which Pople is to have one, and I the other two. And at any future time, I may publish it in any volume of my poems collectively. Mr. Arnold (the manager) has just left me. He called to urge me to exert myself a little with regard to the daily press, and brought with him “The Times”[97] of Monday as a specimen of the infernal lies of which a newspaper scribe can be capable. Not only is not one sentence in it true; but every one is in the direct face of a palpable truth. The misrepresentations must have been wilful. I must now, therefore, write to “The Times,” and if Walter refuses to insert, I will then, recording the circumstance, publish it in the “Morning Post,” “Morning Chronicle,” and “The Courier.” The dirty malice of Antony Pasquin[98] in the “Morning Herald” is below notice. This, however, will explain to you why the shortness of this letter, the main business of which is to desire you to draw upon Brent and Co., No. 103 Bishopsgate Street Within, for an hundred pounds, at a month’s date from the drawing, or, if that be objected to, for three weeks, only let me know which. In the course of a month I have no hesitation in promising you another hundred, and I hope likewise before Midsummer, if God grant me life, to repay you whatever you have expended for the children.
My wishes and purposes concerning Hartley and Derwent I will communicate as soon as this bustle and endless rat-a-tat-tat at our door is somewhat over. I concluded my Lectures last night most triumphantly, with loud, long, and enthusiastic applauses at my entrance, and ditto in yet fuller chorus as, and for some minutes after I had retired. It was lucky that (as I never once thought of the Lecture till I had entered the Lecture Box), the two last were the most impressive and really the best. I suppose that no dramatic author ever had so large a number of unsolicited, unknown yet predetermined plauditors in the theatre, as I had on Saturday night. One of the malignant papers asserted that I had collected all the saints from Mile End turnpike to Tyburn Bar. With so many warm friends, it is impossible, in the present state of human nature, that I should not have many unprovoked and unknown enemies. You will have heard that on my entering the box on Saturday night, I was discovered by the pit, and that they all turned their faces towards our box, and gave a treble cheer of claps.
I mention these things because it will please Southey to hear that there is a large number of persons in London who hail with enthusiasm my prospect of the stage’s being purified and rendered classical. My success, if I succeed (of which I assure you I entertain doubts in my opinion well founded, both from the want of a prominent actor for Ordonio, and from the want of vulgar pathos in the play itself—nay, there is not enough even of true dramatic pathos), but if I succeed, I succeed for others as well as myself....
S. T. Coleridge.
P. S. I pray you, my dear Sara! do take on yourself the charge of instantly sending off by the waggon Mr. Sotheby’s folio edition of all Petrarch’s Works, which I left at Grasmere. (I am ashamed to meet Sotheby till I have returned it.) At the same time my quarto MS. Book with the German Musical Play in it,[99] and the two folio volumes of the Greek Poets may go. For I want them hourly and I must try to imitate W. Scott in making hay while the sun shines.
Kisses and heartfelt loves for my sweet Sara, and scarce less for dear little Herbert and Edith.