“Thus I passed three weeks at Nether-Stowey and in the neighbourhood, generally devoting the afternoons to a delightful chat in an arbour made of bark by the poet’s friend Tom Poole, sitting under two fine elm trees, and listening to the bees humming round us, while we quaffed our flip. It was agreed, among other things, that we should make a jaunt down the Bristol Channel, as far as Linton. We set off together on foot, Coleridge, John Chester, and I. This Chester was a native of Nether-Stowey, one of those who were attracted to Coleridge’s discourse as flies are to honey, or bees in swarming-time to the sound of a brass pan. He ‘followed in the chace, like a dog who hunts, not like one that made up the cry.’ He had on a brown cloth coat, boots, and corduroy breeches, was low in stature, bow-legged, had a drag in his walk like a drover, which he assisted by a hazel switch, and kept on a sort of trot by the side of Coleridge, like a running footman by a state coach, that he might not lose a syllable or sound that fell from Coleridge’s lips. He

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told me his private opinion, that Coleridge was a wonderful man. He scarcely opened his lips, much less offered an opinion the whole way; yet of the three, had I to choose during that journey, I would be John Chester. He afterwards followed Coleridge into Germany, where the Kantean philosophers were puzzled how to bring him under any of their categories. When he sat down at table with his idol, John’s felicity was complete. . . .

“We passed Dunster on our right, a small town between the brow of a hill and the sea. I remember eyeing it wistfully as it lay below us: contrasted with the woody scene around, it looked as clear, as pure, as embrowned and ideal, as any landscape I have seen since of Gaspar Poussin’s or Domenichino’s. We had a long day’s march—(our feet kept time to the echoes of Coleridge’s tongue)—through Minehead and by the Blue Anchor, and on to Linton, which we did not reach till near midnight, and where we had some difficulty in making a lodgment. We however knocked the people of the house up at last, and we were repaid for our apprehensions and fatigue by some excellent rashers of fried bacon and eggs. The view in coming along had been splendid. We walked for miles and miles on dark-brown heaths overlooking the Channel, with the Welsh hills beyond, and at times descended into little sheltered valleys close by the seaside, with a smuggler’s face scowling by us; and then had to ascend conical hills with a path winding up through a coppice to a barren top, like a monk’s shaven crown, from one of

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which I pointed out to Coleridge’s notice the bare masts of a vessel on the very edge of the horizon and within the red-orbed disk of the setting sun, like his own spectre-ship in the ‘Ancient Mariner.’ At Linton the character of the sea-coast becomes more marked and rugged. There is a place called the Valley of Rocks (I suspect this was only the poetical name for it), bedded among precipices overhanging the sea, with rocky caverns beneath, into which the waves dash, and where the seagull for ever wheels its screaming flight. On the tops of these are huge stones thrown transverse, as if an earthquake had tossed them there, and behind these is a fretwork of perpendicular rocks, something like the Giant’s Causeway. A thunder-storm came on while we were at the inn, and Coleridge was running out bareheaded to enjoy the commotion of the elements in the Valley of Rocks; but as, if in spite, the clouds only muttered a few angry sounds, and let fall a few refreshing drops. Coleridge told me that he and Wordsworth were to have made this place the scene of a prose tale, which was to have been in the manner of, but far superior to, the ‘Death of Abel,’ but they had relinquished the design.

“In the morning of the second day we breakfasted luxuriously in an old-fashioned parlour, on tea, toast, eggs, and honey, in the very sight of the beehives from which it had been taken and a garden full of thyme and wild flowers that had produced it. On this occasion Coleridge spoke of Virgil’s ‘Georgics,’ but not well. I do not think he had much feeling for the classical or

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elegant. It was in this room that we found a little worn-out copy of the ‘Seasons,’ lying in a window-seat, on which Coleridge exclaimed, ‘That is true fame!’ He said Thomson was a great poet rather than a good one; his style was as meretricious as his thoughts were natural. He spoke of Cowper as the best modern poet. He said the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ were an experiment about to be tried by him and Wordsworth, to see how far the public taste would endure poetry written in a more natural and simple style than had hitherto been attempted; totally discarding the artifices of poetical diction, and making use only of such words as had probably been common in the most ordinary language since the days of Henry II. Some comparison was introduced between Shakspeare and Milton. He said ‘he hardly knew which to prefer. Shakspeare seemed to him a mere stripling in the art; he was as tall and as strong, with infinitely more activity than Milton, but he never appeared to have come to man’s estate; or if he had, he would not have been a man, but a monster.’ He spoke with contempt of Gray, and with intolerance of Pope. He did not like the versification of the latter. He observed that ‘the ears of these couplet-writers might be charged with having short memories, that could not retain the harmony of whole passages.’ He thought little of Junius as a writer; he had a dislike of Dr. Johnson; and a much higher opinion of Burke, as an orator and politician, than of Fox or Pitt. He however thought him very inferior in richness of style and imagery to some of our elder prose writers, par-

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ticularly Jeremy Taylor. He liked Richardson, but not Fielding; nor could I get him to enter into the merits of ‘Caleb Williams.’* In short, he was profound and discriminating with respect to those authors whom he liked, and where he gave his judgment fair play; capricious, perverse, and prejudiced in his antipathies and distastes. We loitered on the ‘ribbed sea-sands,’ in such talk as this a whole morning, and I recollect met with a curious seaweed, of which John Chester told us the country name! A fisherman gave Coleridge an account of a boy that had been drowned the day before, and that they had tried to save him at the risk of their own lives. He said ‘he did not know how it was that they ventured, but, sir, we have a nature towards one another.” This expression, Coleridge remarked to me, was a fine illustration of that theory of disinterestedness which I (in common with Butler) had adopted. I broached to him an argument of mine to prove that likeness was not mere association of ideas. I said that the mark in the sand put one in mind of a man’s foot, not because it was part of a former impression of a man’s foot (for it was quite new), but because it was like the shape of a man’s foot. He assented to the justness of this distinction (which I

* He had no idea of pictures, of Claude or Raphael, and at, this time I had as little as he. He somewhere gives a striking account of the Cartoons at Pisa, by Buffamalco and others; of one in particular, where Death is seen in the air, brandishing his scythe, and the great and mighty of the earth shudder at his approach, while the beggars and the wretched kneel to him as their deliverer. He would of course understand so broad and fine a moral as this at any time.

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have explained at length elsewhere, for the benefit of the curious), and John Chester listened; not from any interest in the subject, but because he was astonished that I should be able to suggest anything to Coleridge that he did not already know. We returned on the third morning, and Coleridge remarked the silent cottage-smoke curling up the valleys where, a few evenings before, we had seen the lights gleaming through the dark.

“In a day or two after we arrived at Stowey we set out, I on my return home, and he for Germany. It was a Sunday morning, and he was to preach that day for Dr. Toulmin of Taunton. I asked him if he had prepared anything for the occasion? He said he had not even thought of the text, but should, as soon as we parted. I did not go to hear him—this was a fault—but we met in the evening at Bridgewater. The next day we had a long day’s walk to Bristol, and sat down, I recollect, by a well-side on the road, to cool ourselves and satisfy our thirst, when Coleridge repeated to me some descriptive lines from his tragedy of ‘Remorse:’—

Oh memory! shield me from the world’s poor strife, And give those scenes thine everlasting life.

Coleridge was my grandfather’s earliest literary ac-

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quaintance, as he was Lamb’s. The friendship of Lamb and Coleridge (not reckoning their school-day connexion) dated from 1796; the friendship of my grandfather and Coleridge commenced in 1798. In the case of Lamb the tie was a life-tie, but in my grandfather’s not so. My grandfather was a politician, and Lamb was none. Lamb had no feelings or resentments of party; and Coleridge the Jacobin, and Coleridge the friend of Quarterly Reviewers, was the same “dearest friend” to him. But Coleridge’s secession from Liberalism estranged him from my grandfather, as it also estranged Southey. Perhaps the bond of union between him and Elia was weakened by the Catholicism of Elia’s attachments, irrespectively of political opinions. I suspect strongly that Lamb gained very largely in my grandfather’s estimation by his letter in the ‘London Magazine’ to Robert Southey, Esq., but Lamb was not himself in that letter; he was sorry for it; it was an outburst of indignation, which quickly subsided; and Southey was at Lamb’s side, within a few days, as warm a friend as ever.

My grandfather would have liked Lamb all the better, if he had been a man of stancher mind, a person who had set out with convictions from which there was to be no swerve. Lamb sinned in my grandfather’s eyes in having too much good-fellowship, in shaking everybody round by the hand with a sincerity which a careful study of his correspondence, in its entire and undiluted state, leaves painfully questionable.

Yet my grandfather was fond of reverting to these

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old reminiscences to the very last, of thinking of Coleridge as he knew and saw him in 1798. In one of his latest efforts as an essay-writer, he speaks of “his old friend” Coleridge.

I find these observations of his upon Coleridge elsewhere:—

“Coleridge used to tell me that this pertinacity was owing to a want of sympathy with others. What he calls sympathising with others is their admiring him; and it must be admitted that he varies his battery pretty often, in order to accommodate himself to this sort of mutual understanding.

“I can hardly consider Mr. Coleridge a deserter from the cause he first espoused, unless one could tell what

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cause he ever heartily espoused, or what party he ever belonged to in downright earnest. . .

“I dare not ask his opinion twice, if I have got a favourable sentence once, lest he should belie his own sentiments to stagger mine. I have heard him talk divinely (like one inspired) of Boccaccio, and the story of the ‘Pot of Basil,’ describing ‘how it grew, and it grew, and it grew,’ till you saw it spread its tender leaves in the light of his eye, and wave in the tremulous sound of his voice; and yet, if you asked him about it another time, he would, perhaps, affect to think little of it. or to have forgotten the circumstance.

Coleridge it was who “encouraged him to write a book, which he did, according to the original bent of his mind (these are my grandfather’s own words),” and the result, after eight years’ labour, was the ‘Essay on the Principles of Human Actions,’ which few have read, and fewer have appreciated. The intellectual profit

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from this association with Coleridge and Wordsworth was in other ways very considerable.

Of Mr. Hazlitt’s tour in Wales in 1798, between the time that Coleridge visited his father at Wem and his own journey to Somersetshire in the same Spring, to see Coleridge, he has spoken slightly in the account of his first acquaintance with the poet and philosopher. But what follows will help to cast a little further light on this tour in the Principality, as well as on that into the west.

“I have certainly spent some enviable hours at inns—sometimes when I have been left entirely to myself, and have tried to solve some metaphysical problem; as once at Witham Common, where I found out the proof that likeness is not a case of the association of ideas—at other times, when there have been pictures in the room, as at St. Neots (I think it was), where I first met with Gribelin’s engravings of the Cartoons, into which I entered at once; and at a little inn on the borders of Wales, where there happened to be hanging some of Westall’s drawings, which I compared triumphantly (for a theory that I had, not for the admired artist) with the figure of a girl who had ferried me over the Severn, standing up in the boat between me and the twilight—at other times I might mention luxuriating in books, with a peculiar interest in this way, as I remember sitting up half the night to read ‘Paul and Virginia,’ which I picked up at an inn at Bridgewater, after being drenched in the rain all day; and at the same place I got through two volumes of Madame D’Arblay’s ‘Camilla.’

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RECOLLECTIONS OF 1798.

It was on the 10th of April, 1798, that I sat down to a volume of the ‘New Héloise,’ at the inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken. The letter I chose was that in which St. Preux describes his feelings as he first caught a glimpse from the heights of the Jura of the Pays de Vaud, which I had brought with me as a bonne bouchée to crown the evening with. It was my birthday, and I had for the first time come from a place in the neighbourhood to visit this delightful spot. . . . How proud, how glad I was to walk along the high road that overlooks the delicious prospect, repeating the lines which I have just quoted from Mr. Coleridge’s poems. . . . I would return some time or other to this enchanted spot, but I would return to it alone. What other self could I find to share that influx of thoughts, of regret, and delight, the fragments of which I could hardly conjure up to myself. . . . . . . . . . . I could stand on some tall rock and overlook the precipice of years that separates me from what I then was. I was at that time going shortly to visit the poet I have above named.

“The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come, or in fancying what may have happened, in real or fictitious story, to others. I have had more pleasure in reading the adventures of a novel (and perhaps changing situations with the hero) than I ever had in my own. I do not think any one can feel much happier—a greater degree of heart’s ease—than I used to feel in reading ‘Tristram Shandy,’ and ‘Peregrine Pickle,’ and ‘Tom Jones,’ and the ‘Tatler,’ and

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‘Gil Blas of Santillane,’ and Werter, and Boccaccio. It was some years after that I read the last, but his tales

Dallied with the innocence of love, Like the old time.

The story of Federigo Alberigi affected me as if it had been my own case; and I saw his hawk upon her perch, in the clear, cold air, and ‘how fat and fair a bird she was,’ as plain as ever I saw a picture of Titian’s; and felt that I should have served her up, as he did, as a banquet for his mistress, who came to visit him at his own poor farm. . . . Mrs. Inchbald was always a great favourite with me. There is the true soul of woman breathing from what she writes, as much as if you heard her voice. It is as if Venus had written books. I first read her ‘Simple Story’ (of all places in the world) at Mr. ——’s. No matter where it was, for it transported me out of myself. I recollect walking out to escape from one of the tenderest parts, in order to return to it again with double relish. An old crazy hand-organ was playing ‘Robin Adair,’ a summer shower dropped manna on my head, and slaked my feverish thirst of happiness. Her heroine, Miss Milner, was at my side. My dream has since been verified—how like it was to the reality! . . . I once sat on a sunny bank in a field, in which the green blades of corn waved in the fitful northern breeze, and read the letter in the ‘New Héloise’ in which St. Preux describes the Pays de Vaud. I never felt what Shakspeare calls ‘my glassy essence’ so much as then. My thoughts were pure and free. . . . I wished I could

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THE NEW HELOISE.

have written such a letter. . . . Of all the pictures, prints, or drawings I ever saw, none ever gave me such satisfaction as the rude etchings at the top of Rousseau’s ‘Confessions.’ . . . It is not even said anywhere that such is the case, but I had got it in my head that the rude sketches of old-fashioned houses, stone walls, and stumps of trees, represented the scenes at Annecy and Vevay, where he who relished all more sharply than others, and by his own intense aspirations after good, had nearly delivered mankind from the yoke of evil, first drew the breath of hope.

“The last time I tasted the luxury of an inn in its full perfection was one day after a sultry day’s walk in summer between Farnham and Alton. I was fairly tired out; I walked into an inn-yard (I think at the latter place); I was shown by the waiter to what looked at first like common outhouses at the other end of it, but they turned out to be a suite of rooms, probably a hundred years old. The one I entered opened into an old-fashioned garden, embellished with beds of larkspur and a leaden Mercury; it was wainscoted, and there was a grave-looking, dark-coloured portrait of Charles II. hanging up on the tiled chimney-piece. I had ‘Love for Love’ in my pocket, and began to read. Coffee was brought in in a silver coffee-pot; the cream, the bread and butter, everything was excellent, and the flavour of Congreve’s style prevailed over all.

“I prolonged the entertainment till a late hour, and relished this divine comedy better even than when I used to see it played by Miss Mellon as Miss Prue; Bob

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Palmer as Tattle; and Bannister as honest Ben. This circumstance happened just five years ago, and it seems like yesterday. If I count my life so by lustres, it will soon glide away; yet I shall not have to repine, if, while it lasts, it is enriched with a few such recollections!”

“The person of the most refined and least contracted taste I ever knew was the late Joseph Fawcett, the friend of my youth. He was almost the first literary acquaintance I ever made, and I think the most candid and unsophisticated. He had a masterly perception of all styles and of every kind and degree of excellence, sublime or beautiful, from Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost” to Shenstone’s ‘Pastoral Ballad;’ from Butler’s ‘Analogy’ down to ‘Humphrey Clinker.’ If you had a favourite author, he had read him too, and knew all the best morsels, the subtle traits, the capital touches. ‘Do you like Sterne?’—‘Yes, to be sure,’ he would say, ‘I should deserve to be hanged if I didn’t.’ His repeating some parts of ‘Comus,’ with his fine, deep, mellow-toned voice, particularly the lines,

I have heard my mother Circe with the Sirens three, &c.,

and the enthusiastic comments he made afterwards, were

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THE REV. JOSEPH FAWCETT.

a feast to the ear and to the soul. He read the poetry of Milton with the same fervour and spirit of devotion that I have since heard others read their own. ‘That is the most delicious feeling of all,’ I have heard him exclaim, ‘to like what is excellent, no matter whose it is.’ In this respect he practised what he preached. He was incapable of harbouring a sinister motive, and judged only from what he felt. There was no flaw or mist in the clear mirror of his mind. He was open to impressions as he was strenuous in maintaining them. He did not care a rush whether a writer was old or new, in prose or in verse. ‘What he wanted,’ he said, ‘was something to make him think.’

“Most men’s minds are to me like musical instruments out of tune. Touch a particular key, and it jars and makes harsh discord with your own. They like ‘Gil Blas,’ but can see nothing to laugh at in ‘Don Quixote;’ they adore Richardson, but are disgusted with Fielding.

“Fawcett had a taste accommodated to all these. He was not exceptions. He gave a cordial welcome to all sorts, provided they were the best in their kind. He was not fond of counterfeits or duplicates. His own style was laboured and artificial to a fault, while his character was frank and ingenuous in the extreme. He was not the only individual whom I have known to counteract their natural disposition in coming before the public; and in avoiding what they perhaps thought an inherent infirmity, debar themselves of their real strength and advantages.

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“The writings of Sterne, Fielding, Cervantes, Richardson, Rousseau, Godwin, Goethe, &c., were the usual subjects of our discourse, and the pleasure I had had in reading these authors seemed more than doubled.

“Of all the persons I have ever known, he was the most perfectly free from every taint of jealousy or narrowness. Never did a mean or sinister motive come near his heart. He was one of the most enthusiastic admirers of the French Revolution; and I believe that

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the disappointment of the hopes he had cherished of the freedom and happiness of mankind preyed upon his mind, and hastened his death.

“Fawcett used to say that if Sir Isaac Newton himself had lisped, he could not have thought anything of him. Coleridge, I recollect, once asked me whether I thought that the different members of a family really liked one another so well, or had so much attachment as was generally supposed; and I said that I conceived the regard they had towards each other was expressed by the word interest, rather than by any other; which he said was the true answer.”

Mr. Fawcett was a friend of Godwin’s. My grandfather says:—“Mr. Fawcett (an old friend and fellow-student of our author, and who always spoke of his writings with admiration tinctured with wonder) used to mention a circumstance with respect to his ‘Life of Chatham,’ which may throw some light on the history and progress of Mr. Godwin’s mind.

“He was anxious to make his biographical account as complete as he could, and applied for this purpose to many of his acquaintance to furnish him with anecdotes or to suggest criticisms. Amongst others, Mr. Fawcett repeated to him what he thought a striking passage on general warrants, delivered by Lord Chatham, at which he (Mr. Fawcett) had been present. ‘Every man’s house’ (said this emphatic thinker and speaker) ‘has been called his castle. And why is it called his castle? Is it because it is defended by a wall, because it is sur-

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rounded by a moat. No; it may be nothing more than a straw-built shed. It may be open to all the elements, the wind may enter in, the rain may enter in, but the king cannot enter in.’ His friend thought that the point here was palpable enough; but when he came to read the printed volumes he found it thus transposed. ‘Every man’s house is his castle. And why is it called so? Is it because it is defended by a wall, because it is surrounded with a moat? No, it may be nothing more than a straw-built shed. It may be exposed to all the elements, the rain may enter into it, all the winds of heaven may whistle round it, but the king cannot, &c.’ This was what Fawcett called a defect of natural imagination.”

I have thus gathered into one point of view the notices of Mr. Fawcett scattered through his friend’s works, from a desire that the public should know a little more than they do of a man who stood so high in Mr. Hazlitt’s opinion, and who seems to have fully deserved the place which he held there. There was a report current after Mr. Fawcett’s death that Mr. Hazlitt intended to draw up his life; but whether true or no, the design was never carried out.

Among the books which I trace to him in early days were ‘The New Héloise’ in the English translation, 4 vols, duodecimo, ‘The Sentimental Journey,’ St. John’s Letters (‘The American Farmer’), ‘The Tatler,’ ‘Gil Blas,’ ‘Corinne,’ Mrs. Inchbald and Mrs. Barbauld,* Rich-

* The two Bald women, as Lamb called them.

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EARLY READING.

ardson and Fielding, and Smollett, and the ‘Arabian Nights’—and Shakspeare.

He was a spare reader, and the narrowness of his attainments in this branch of study told against him beyond question. But he had no inclination for the general run of authors, ancient or modern, and he wanted no better or stronger reason for steering clear of them. A little later on he made the acquaintance of the ‘Seasons’ and the ‘Castle of Indolence,’ and still later, of the ‘Waverley Novels.’ He once paid five shillings at a library for the loan of ‘Woodstock.’

“I knew Tom Jones by heart, and was deep in Peregrine Pickle. I was intimately acquainted with all the heroes and heroines of Richardson’s romances, and could turn from one to the other as I pleased. I could con over that single passage in ‘Pamela’ about her ‘lumpish heart,’ and never have done admiring the skill of the author and the truth of nature.

“I am no friend to repeating-watches. The only pleasant association I have with them is the account given by Rousseau of one French lady, who sat up reading the ‘New Héloise,’ when it first came out—and ordering her maid to sound the repeater, found it was too late to go to bed, and continued reading on till morning. . . . . . In general, I have heard repeating

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watches sounded in stage-coaches at night, when some fellow-traveller, suddenly awaking and wondering what was the hour, another has very deliberately taken out his watch, and pressing the spring, it has counted out the time.

“I remember, as long ago as the year 1798, going to a neighbouring town (Shrewsbury, where Farquhar has laid the plot of his ‘Recruiting Officer’), and bringing home with me, ‘at one proud swoop,’ a copy of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ and another of Burke’s ‘Reflections on the French Revolution.’”