June, 1817.
My dear Robinson,—I shall never forgive you if you do not try to make some arrangement to bring Mr. L. Tieck and yourself up to Highgate very soon. The day, the dinner-hour, you may appoint yourself; but what I most wish would be, either that Mr. Tieck would come in the first stage, so as either to walk or to be driven in Mr. Gillman’s gig to Caen Wood, and its delicious groves and alleys (the finest in England, a grand cathedral aisle of giant lime-trees, Pope’s favourite composition walk when with the old Earl, a brother-rogue of yours in the law line), or else to come up to dinner, sleep here, and return (if then return he must) in the afternoon four o’clock stage the day after. I should be most happy to make him and that admirable man, Mr. Frere,[144] acquainted—their pursuits have been so similar—and to convince Mr. Tieck that he is the man among us in whom taste at its maximum has vitalized itself into productive power. [For] genius, you need only show him the incomparable translation annexed to Southey’s “Cid” (which, by the bye, would perhaps give Mr. Tieck the most favourable impression of Southey’s own powers); and I would finish the work off by Mr. Frere’s “Aristophanes.” In such GOODNESS, too, as both my Mr. Frere (the Right Hon. J. H. Frere), and his brother George (the lawyer in Brunswick Square), live, move, and have their being, there is genius.
I have read two pages of “Lalla Rookh,” or whatever it is called. Merciful Heaven! I dare read no more, that I may be able to answer at once to any questions, “I have but just looked at the work.” O Robinson! if I could, or if I dared, act and feel as Moore and his set do, what havoc could I not make amongst their crockery-ware! Why, there are not three lines together without some adulteration of common English, and the ever-recurring blunder of using the possessive case, “compassion’s tears,” etc., for the preposition “of”—a blunder of which I have found no instances earlier than Dryden’s slovenly verses written for the trade. The rule is, that the case ’s is always personal; either it marks a person, or a personification, or the relique of some proverbial personification, as “Who for their belly’s sake,” in “Lycidas.” But for A to weep the tears of B puts me in mind of the exquisite passage in Rabelais where Pantagruel gives the page his cup, and begs him to go down into the courtyard, and curse and swear for him about half an hour or so.
God bless you!
S. T. Coleridge.
CCXIV. TO THOMAS POOLE.
[July 22, 1817.]
My dear Poole,—It was a great comfort to me to meet and part from you as I did at Mr. Purkis’s:[145] for, methinks, every true friendship that does not go with us to heaven, must needs be an obstacle to our own going thither,—to one of the parties, at all events.
I entreat your acceptance of a corrected copy of my “Sibylline Leaves” and “Literary Life;” and so wildly have they been printed, that a corrected copy is of some value to those to whom the works themselves are of any. I would that the misprinting had been the worst of the delusions and ill-usage, to which my credulity exposed me, from the said printer. After repeated promises that he took the printing, etc., merely to serve me as an old schoolfellow, and that he should charge “one sixpence profit,” he charged paper, which I myself ordered for him at the paper-mill, at twenty-five to twenty-six shillings per ream, at thirty-five shillings, and, exclusive of this, his bill was £80 beyond the sum assigned by two eminent London printers as the price at which they would be willing to print the same quantity. And yet even this is among the minima of his Bristol honesty.
Fenner,[146] or rather his religious factotum, the Rev. T. Curtis, ci-devant bookseller, and whose affected retirement from business is a humbug, having got out of me a scheme for an Encyclopædia, which is the admiration of all the Trade, flatter themselves that they can carry it on by themselves. They refused to realise their promise to advance me £300 on the pledge of my works (a proposal of their own) unless I would leave Highgate and live at Camberwell. I took the advice of such friends as I had the opportunity of consulting immediately, and after taking into consideration the engagement into which I had entered, it was their unanimous opinion that their breach of their promise was a very fortunate circumstance, that it could not have been kept without the entire sacrifice of all my powers, and, above all, of my health—in short, that I could not in all human probability survive the first year. Mr. Frere yesterday advised me strenuously to finish the “Christabel,” to keep the third volume of “The Friend” within a certain fathom of metaphysical depth, but within that to make it as elevated as the subjects required, and finally to devote myself industriously to the Works I had planned, alternating a poem with a prose volume, and, unterrified by reviews on the immediate sale, to remain confident that I should in some way or other be enabled to live in comfort, above all, not to write any more in any newspaper. He told me both Mr. Canning and Lord Liverpool had spoken in very high terms of me, and advised me to send a copy of all my works with a letter of some weight and length to the Marquis of Wellesley. He offered me all his interest with regard to Derwent,[147] if he was sent to Cambridge. “It is a point” (these were his words) “on which I should feel myself authorised not merely to ask but to require and importune.”