And odours snatched from beds of amaranth,
And they that from the chrystal river of life
Spring up on freshen’d wings, ambrosial gales!”
‘My taper man of lights listened with perseverant and praiseworthy patience, though (as I was afterwards told on complaining of certain gales that were not altogether ambrosial) it was a melting day with him. And what, Sir! (he said, after a short pause) might the cost be? Only four-pence, (O! how I felt the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos of that four-pence!) only four-pence, Sir, each Number, to be published on every eighth day. That comes to a deal of money at the end of a year. And how much did you say there was to be for the money? Thirty-two pages, Sir! large octavo, closely printed. Thirty and two pages? Bless me; why, except what I does in a family way on the Sabbath, that’s more than I ever reads, Sir! all the year round. I am as great a one as any man in Brummagem, Sir! for liberty, and truth, and all them sort of things; but as to this, (no offence, I hope, Sir!) I must beg to be excused.
‘So ended my first canvass: from causes that I shall presently mention, I made but one other application in person. This took place at Manchester, to a stately and opulent wholesale dealer in cottons. He took my letter of introduction, and having perused it, measured me from head to foot, and again from foot to head, and then asked if I had any bill or invoice of the thing. I presented my prospectus to him; he rapidly skimmed and hummed over the first side, and still more rapidly the second and concluding page; crushed it within his fingers and the palm of his hand; then most deliberately and significantly rubbed and smoothed one part against the other; and lastly, putting it into his pocket, turned his back on me with an “overrun with these articles!” and so without another syllable retired into his counting-house—and, I can truly say, to my unspeakable amusement.
‘This, I have said, was my second and last attempt. On returning baffled from the first, in which I had vainly essayed to repeat the miracle of Orpheus with the Brummagem patriot, I dined with the tradesman who had introduced me to him. After dinner, he importuned me to smoke a pipe with him, and two or three other illuminati of the same rank. I objected, both because I was engaged to spend the evening with a minister and his friends, and because I had never smoked except once or twice in my lifetime; and then it was herb tobacco, mixed with Oronooko. On the assurance, however, that the tobacco was equally mild, and seeing too that it was of a yellow colour, (not forgetting the lamentable difficulty I have always experienced in saying, No! and in abstaining from what the people about me were doing), I took half a pipe, filling the lower half of the bole with salt. I was soon, however, compelled to resign it, in consequence of a giddiness and distressful feeling in my eyes, which, as I had drank but a single glass of ale, must, I knew, have been the effect of the tobacco. Soon after, deeming myself recovered, I sallied forth to my engagement; but the walk and the fresh air brought on all the symptoms again; and I had scarcely entered the minister’s drawing-room, and opened a small packet of letters which he had received from Bristol for me, ere I sunk back on the sofa, in a sort of swoon rather than sleep. Fortunately I had found just time enough to inform him of the confused state of my feelings, and of the occasion. For here and thus I lay, my face like a wall that is white-washing, deathly pale, and with the cold drops of perspiration running down it from my forehead, while, one after another, there dropt in the different gentlemen, who had been invited to meet and spend the evening with me, to the number of from fifteen to twenty. As the poison of tobacco acts but for a short time, I at length awoke from insensibility, and looked around on the party; my eyes dazzled by the candles which had been lighted in the interim. By way of relieving my embarrassment, one of the gentlemen began the conversation with “Have you seen a paper to-day, Mr. Coleridge?”—“Sir! (I replied, rubbing my eyes), I am far from convinced, that a Christian is permitted[[9]] to read either newspapers or any other works of merely political and temporary interest.” This remark, so ludicrously inapposite to, or rather incongruous with, the purpose for which I was known to have visited Birmingham, and to assist me in which they were all then met, produced an involuntary and general burst of laughter; and seldom, indeed, have I passed so many delightful hours as I enjoyed in that room, from the moment of that laugh to an early hour the next morning. Never, perhaps, in so mixed and numerous a party, have I since heard conversation sustained with such animation, enriched with such variety of information, and enlivened with such a flow of anecdote. Both then and afterwards, they all joined in dissuading me from proceeding with my scheme; assured me, with the most friendly, and yet most flattering expressions, that the employment was neither fit for me, nor I fit for the employment. Yet if I had determined on persevering in it, they promised to exert themselves to the utmost to procure subscribers, and insisted that I should make no more applications in person, but carry on the canvass by proxy. The same hospitable reception, the same dissuasion, and (that failing) the same kind exertions in my behalf, I met with at Manchester, Derby, Nottingham, Sheffield, indeed at every place in which I took up my sojourn. I often recall, with affectionate pleasure, the many respectable men who interested themselves for me, a perfect stranger to them, not a few of whom I can still name among my friends. They will bear witness for me, how opposite, even then, my principles were to those of Jacobinism, or even of Democracy, and can attest the strict accuracy of the statement which I have left on record in the 10th and 11th Numbers of The Friend.’ p. 174.
We shall not stop at present to dispute with Mr. Coleridge, how far the principles of the Watchman, and the Conciones ad Populum were or were not akin to those of the Jacobins. His style, in general, admits of a convenient latitude of interpretation. But we think we are quite safe in asserting, that they were still more opposite to those of the Anti-Jacobins, and the party to which he admits he has gone over.
Our author next gives a somewhat extraordinary account of his having been set upon with his friend Wordsworth, by a Government spy, in his retreat at Nether-Stowey—the most lively thing in which is, that the said spy, who, it seems had a great red nose, and had overheard the friends discoursing about Spinosa, reported to his employers, that he could make out very little of what they said,—only he was sure they were aware of his vicinity, as he heard them very often talking of Spy-nosy! If this is not the very highest vein of wit in the world, it must be admitted at least to be very innocent merriment. Another excellent joke of the same character is his remark on an Earl of Cork not paying for his copy of the Friend—that he might have been an Earl of Bottle for him!—We have then some memorandums of his excursion into Germany, and the conditions on which he agreed, on his return home in 1800, to write for the Morning Post, which was at that time not a very ministerial paper, if we remember right.
A propos of the Morning Post, Mr. C. takes occasion to eulogise the writings of Mr. Burke, and observes, that ‘as our very sign-boards give evidence that there has been a Titian in the world, so the essays and leading paragraphs of our journals are so many remembrancers of Edmund Burke.’ This is modest and natural we suppose for a newspaper editor: But our learned author is desirous of carrying the parallel a little further,—and assures us, that nobody can doubt of Mr. Burke’s consistency. ‘Let the scholar,’ says our biographer, ‘who doubts this assertion, refer only to the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke at the commencement of the American war, and compare them with his speeches and writings at the commencement of the French Revolution. He will find the principles exactly the same, and the deductions the same—but the practical inferences almost opposite in the one case from those drawn in the other, yet in both equally legitimate and confirmed by the results.’
It is not without reluctance that we speak of the vices and infirmities of such a mind as Burke’s: But the poison of high example has by far the widest range of destruction; and, for the sake of public honour and individual integrity, we think it right to say, that however it may be defended upon other grounds, the political career of that eminent individual has no title to the praise of consistency. Mr. Burke, the opponent of the American war—and Mr. Burke, the opponent of the French Revolution, are not the same person, but opposite persons—not opposite persons only, but deadly enemies. In the latter period, he abandoned not only all his practical conclusions, but all the principles on which they were founded. He proscribed all his former sentiments, denounced all his former friends, rejected and reviled all the maxims to which he had formerly appealed as incontestable. In the American war, he constantly spoke of the rights of the people as inherent, and inalienable: After the French Revolution, he began by treating them with the chicanery of a sophist, and ended by raving at them with the fury of a maniac. In the former case, he held out the duty of resistance to oppression, as the palladium, and only ultimate resource, of natural liberty; in the latter, he scouted, prejudged, vilified and nicknamed, all resistance in the abstract, as a foul and unnatural union of rebellion and sacrilege. In the one case, to answer the purposes of faction, he made it out, that the people are always in the right; in the other, to answer different ends, he made it out that they are always in the wrong—lunatics in the hands of their royal keepers, patients in the sick-wards of an hospital, or felons in the condemned cells of a prison. In the one, he considered that there was a constant tendency on the part of the prerogative to encroach on the rights of the people, which ought always to be the object of the most watchful jealousy, and of resistance, when necessary: In the other, he pretended to regard it as the sole occupation and ruling passion of those in power, to watch over the liberties and happiness of their subjects. The burthen of all his speeches on the American war was conciliation, concession, timely reform, as the only practicable or desirable alternative of rebellion: The object of all his writings on the French Revolution was, to deprecate and explode all concession and all reform, as encouraging rebellion, and an irretrievable step to revolution and anarchy. In the one, he insulted kings personally, as among the lowest and worst of mankind; in the other, he held them up to the imagination of his readers as sacred abstractions. In the one case, he was a partisan of the people, to court popularity; in the other, to gain the favour of the Court, he became the apologist of all courtly abuses. In the one case, he took part with those who were actually rebels against his Sovereign; in the other, he denounced, as rebels and traitors, all those of his own countrymen who did not yield sympathetic allegiance to a foreign Sovereign, whom we had always been in the habit of treating as an arbitrary tyrant.