REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS.

Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. By Joseph Cottle. New York: Wiley & Putnam. 1 vol. 12mo.

This is quite an important contribution to the literary history of the nineteenth century. To be sure, it is confined to a small space, and a few individuals, but it is full of original and important matter as far as it goes. Cottle, the author, was a bookseller at Bristol, was the early friend of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, and carried his friendship so far as to publish their first unsalable books. Throughout the lives of Coleridge and Southey, he appears to have been their associate or correspondent. He now publishes the letters of both, and his recollections of their character, conduct, and conversation. No lover of Coleridge can read the book without deep pain. It presents him as given over to sloth and self-indulgence, as careless of his word, as indifferent to the happiness and comfort of his wife and children, as a deceitful and unsafe friend, as a kind of sublime charlatan and vagabond. The revelations regarding his use of opium are astounding. About the year 1814 he consumed a pint of laudanum a day. He spent upwards of £2 10s. a week for opium, at the very time his family were suffering, and he himself was living on the charity of a friend. He borrowed money freely of his friends, ostensibly for the necessaries of life, but really to obtain the means of gratifying his debasing habit. He lost all control over himself. The champion of free will was himself the prey of a passion which swayed his volitions. The philosopher who was to reconcile philosophy with Christianity, was daily in the habit of violating both. The poet who celebrated in such exquisite verse the affections, abandoned his own family. Since Rousseau, there has not been his like among men of letters. In a letter to Josiah Wade, in 1814, a letter which he desires to have published after his death, he acknowledges all that his worst enemies could impute to him. “In the one crime of OPIUM,” he says, “what crime have I not made myself guilty of? Ingratitude to my Maker! and to my benefactors—injustice! and unnatural cruelty to my poor children! self-contempt for my repeated promise—breach, nay, too often, actual falsehood!” In the same letter he remarks—“Conceive a poor, miserable wretch, who, for many years, has been attempting to beat off pain by a constant recurrence to the vice that produces it. Conceive a spirit in hell, employed in tracing out for others the road to that heaven, from which his crimes exclude him! In short, conceive whatever is most wretched, helpless, and hopeless, and you will form as tolerable a notion of my state, as it is possible for a good man to have.” The apology for Coleridge’s use of opium has been found in his own assertion, that he acquired the habit originally in an attempt to quiet physical pain. Southey denies this, and, indeed, imputes duplicity to Coleridge in all the apologies he makes for his vices of self-indulgence.

Southey, it seems, from the first, never placed any dependence upon Coleridge. Writing to Cottle, in 1836, he says—“I know that Coleridge, at different times of his life, never let pass an opportunity of speaking ill of me. Both Wordsworth and myself have often lamented the exposure of duplicity which must result from the publication of his letters, and by what he has delivered by word of mouth to the worshipers by whom he was always surrounded. . . . I continued all possible offices of kindness to his children long after I regarded his own conduct with that utter disapprobation which alone it can call forth from all who had any sense of duty and moral obligation.” When Coleridge placed himself under the care of his friend, Morgan, to be cured of his opium insanity, and while he was writing letters to the friends who lent him money, that he had reduced his allowance to twenty drops of laudanum a day, he was secretly taking his enormous doses, obtained by deceiving his benefactor, and by playing the meanest tricks upon his hired attendant. Coleridge’s whole life appears to have been that of a vagabond. He subsisted on the charity of friends whom he continually deceived or outraged. At least so he appears in the representations of Southey and Cottle, and partly in his own confessions. Many of Cottle’s remarks are sufficiently good for nothing; and he occasionally cants and whines distressingly, but we see no reason to doubt his statements of fact. We hope that if any thing can be said in his favor, his relations will promptly do it. In the present book the author is sunk to the level of the Savages and Dermodys of literary history.

If Coleridge, in this book, is deprived of almost every thing but his genius, and is even represented as having that a good deal dashed with charlatanry, Southey appears in his most amiable light. The austerity and spiritual pride of the man are not so prominent as the finer qualities of his heart. His letters are admirable. The earlier ones are especially spirited and graphic. He sketches the external appearance of his acquaintances to the life. “I saw,” he says, “Dr. Gregory to-day; a very brown-looking man, of most pinquescent and full-moon cheeks. There is much tallow in him.” Of Dr. Hunter he draws a very animated portrait. “He has a very red, drinking face, little, good-humored eyes, with the skin drawn up under them, like cunning and short-sightedness united. I saw Dr. Hunter again yesterday. I neither like him, nor his wife, nor his son, nor his daughter, nor any thing that is his.” Gilbert Wakefield is despatched in a few words. “He has a most critic-like voice, as if he had snarled himself hoarse. You see I like the women better than the men. Indeed, they are better animals in general, perhaps because more is left to nature in their education. Nature is very good, but God knows there is very little of it left.” The whole of Southey’s youthful letters are marked by sense, enthusiasm and humor. The collection extends almost to his death. In 1826, while he was editing an edition of John Bunyan, he writes to Cottle, noticing a rumor that the Pilgrim’s Progress was a mere translation from the Dutch. “The charge of plagiarism,” he says, “is utterly false. When you and I meet in the next world, we will go and see John Bunyan, and tell him how I have tinkered the fellow, for tinker him I will, who has endeavored to pick a hole in his reputation.” This is a most perfect specimen of Southey’s peculiar humor. In another letter Cottle tells him that Mackintosh has said his style was founded on Horace Walpole’s. Southey replies, “my style is founded on nobody’s. I say what I have to say as plainly as I can, without thinking of the style, and this is the whole secret. . . In fact, I write, as you may always have remarked, such as I always converse, without effort, and without aiming at display.” This confession from the most fascinating of prose writers, conveys an important truth with authority.