MEMORABILIA OF MR. COLERIDGE
The Atlas.] [March 22, 1829.
He said of an old cathedral, that it always appeared to him like a petrified religion.
Hearing some one observe that the religious sentiments introduced in Sheridan’s Pizarro met with great applause on the stage, he replied, that he thought this a sure sign of the decay of religion; for when people began to patronise it as an amiable theatrical sentiment, they had no longer any real faith in it.
He said of a Mr. H——, a friend of Fox’s, who always put himself forward to interpret the great orator’s sentiments, and almost took the words out of his mouth, that it put him in mind of the steeple of St. Thomas, on Ludgate-hill, which is constantly getting in the way when you wish to see the dome of St. Paul’s.
Seeing a little soiled copy of Thomson’s Seasons lying in the window-seat of an obscure inn on the sea-coast of Somersetshire, he said, ‘That is true fame.’
He observed of some friend, that he had thought himself out of a handsome face, and into a fine one.
He said of the French, that they received and gave out sensations too quickly, to be a people of imagination. He thought Moliere’s father must have been an Englishman.
According to Mr. Coleridge, common rhetoricians argued by metaphors; Burke reasoned in them.
He considered acuteness as a shop-boy quality compared with subtlety of mind; and quoted Paine as an example of the first, Berkeley as the perfection of the last.