“Dear Godwin,—Mr Grattan did me the honour of calling on me and leaving his
card on Sunday afternoon, unfortunately a few minutes after I had gone out, and
I am so unwell that I am afraid I shall not be able to return the call to-day,
as I had intended, though it is a grief even for a brace of days to appear
| LETTER FROM COLERIDGE. | 223 |
“‘Ha d’ uopo solo Mendicar dall’ orgoglio, onore e stima Chi senza lui di vilipendio è degno.’ (Chiabrera.) |
“I half caught from Lamb that you had written to Wordsworth with a wish that he should versify some tale or
other, and that he had declined it. I told dear Miss
Lamb that I had formed a complete plan of a poem, with little
plates for children, the first thought, but that alone, taken from Gesner’s ‘First Mariner;’ and this thought I
have reason to believe was not an invention of
Gesner’s. It is this: that in early time, in
some island or part of the continent, the ocean had rushed in, overflowing a
vast plain of twenty or thirty miles, and thereby insulating one small
promontory or cape of high land, on which was a cottage, containing a man and
his wife and an infant daughter. This is the one thought. All that
Gesner has made out of it (for I once translated into
blank verse about half of the poem, but gave it up under the influence of a
double disgust, moral and poetical), I have rejected, and, strictly speaking,
the tale in all its parts, that one idea excepted, would be original. The tale
will contain the cause, the occasions, the process, with all its failures and
ultimate success, of the construction of the first boat, and of the undertaking
of the first naval expedition. Now, supposing you liked the idea—I address you
and Mrs Godwin as commerciants, not you as the philosopher who gave us the first system
in England that ever dared reveal at full that most important of all important
truths, that morality might be built up on its own foundation like a castle
built from the rock, and on the rock, with religion for the ornaments and
completion of its roof and upper storeys—nor as the critic who in the life of Chaucer has given
us, if not principles of aesthetic, or taste, yet more and better data for
principles than had hitherto existed in our language. If we, pulling like two
friendly tradesmen together (for you and your wife must be one flesh, and I
trust are one heart), you approve of the plan, the next
| 224 | WILLIAM GODWIN |
“Another thought has struck me of a school-book in two octavo volumes of ‘Lives’ in the manner of Plutarch’s, but instead of comparing and coupling Greek with Roman, Dion with Brutus, and Cato with Aristides, of placing ancient and modern together, Hume with Alfred, Cicero with Bacon, Hannibal with Gustavus Adolphus, and Julius Cæsar with Buonaparte. Or, which perhaps might be at once more interesting and more instructive, a series of ‘Lives,’ from Moses to Buonaparte, of all those great men who in states, or in the mind of man, had produced great revolutions, the effects of which still remain, and are more or less distant causes of the present state of the world. . . .”
