lxxxviii Corrections welcome to the Editor.

be thankful to any one, who will give me information on the subject, or point out to me any errors, known or supposed, as to matter of fact, (or indeed, if he were so inclined, of reasoning,) in this or other editions of my Father's writings, especially the posthumous ones.

After much inquiry, and availing myself of every clue which has been supplied to me by persons well informed on the subject, I have never been able to discover any file of the Morning Post except one at Peele's Coffee House in Fleet Street, which is beginning to feel the tooth of Time. It struck me indeed that the old man of the scythe had been especially edacious of my Father's compositions, as if he anticipated an attempt to rescue them from his maw for ever. There is an hiatus in one of the Letters to Fox, of which I possessed no separate copy, and still larger ones in other articles, which I was able to repair, by copies possessed independently.*

* Whatever may be thought of these Letters it will at this time be generally felt that they have nothing in them which can be properly called personal: the censure they contain is against a public man on grounds that concerned the Public; it is vehement but not rancorous or even acrimonious. Mr. Lamb however was offended by it, and thus wrote to one of his friends on the subject: "Coleridge has indited a violent philippic against Mr. F. in the M. P., which is a compound of expressions of humility, gentleman-ushering in most arrogant charges. It will do Mr. Fox no real injury among those who know him.”

Now if the act condemned by my Father was devoid of all sense and significance, if it was no sign of sympathy, no tribute of respect, no mark of heart homage, then indeed it was not inconsistent in a friend of peace and liberty and the progress of mankind-then were those Letters a piece of moral parade and a boisterous Much ado about nothing. If the

Mr. C's. papers, how ascertained. lxxxix

For the privilege of examining the Courier of all the years in which my Father wrote for that Journal, I am indebted to the Secretary of the Alfred Club House, and I seize this opportunity of making my acknowledgments for his courtesy in allowing the files of the Paper to remain so long in my hands. Copies of many of the numbers of the Morning Post and the Courier which were aided by my Father's pen, though by no means a complete set of his contributions, had been kept in one of his abodes in the North of England. These passed into his late Editor's hands and thence into mine. I have not printed the whole of what proceeded from him; the mere narrative and report of public events has been for the most part abstracted, as far as this could be detached from the portions of more permanent interest without rendering the comments and reasonings unintelligible. Some articles which I thought probably his, I declined inserting in this collection, because the more certain marks of his authorship seemed wanting to them.* My Father's fine odes, France, Dejection, and I believe that On the De

courtesies and obeisances of a Levee are shadows without relation to substance, the strictures in question were as shadows too, equally vain and empty. But dear Mr. Lamb could never tolerate any censure on principle of those whom he was resolved to go on loving and liking, let them violate principle as they might, without abating a grain of his regard and affection. He felt every such censure to be a piece of arrogance, and gave way to something like arrogance in his arraignment of it.

According to Mr. Stuart, Sir James Mackintosh wrote for the Morning Post during one year after the spring of 1799. My Father did not begin to contribute prose articles to it till the end of that year. He had given twelve poems to the Paper before he went to Germany.

XC Increased sale of the Morning Post.

parting Year, with twenty or thirty other pieces since included in his Poetical Works, among which was Love, one of the most popular poems of this age, were first published in the Morning Post.

SECTION XVI.

Mr. Coleridge's Intercourse with the Editor of the Morning Post.

MR. Coleridge's assertion in his auto-biography re

specting the increased sale of the Paper just mentioned, which he adduces as a " pledge that genuine impartiality, with a respectable portion of literary talent, will secure the success of a newspaper, without the aid of party or ministerial patronage," was corroborated beforehand by the editor, (Mr. Daniel Stuart) himself: for according to his own statement the Journal rose from a sale of only 350 per day in August 1795 to an average of 2090 in April 1802, when he published an account of the numbers sold in a week,-namely from 2991 to 3002, and shewed that it stood higher at that period in point of sale than any other Morning Paper, the order in respect of circulation from high to low being this: Morn. Post, Morn. Herald, Morn. Advertiser, Times, Morn. Herald. When my Father said in conversation that he had raised the sale of the Journal to 7000, a remark which appeared in the first edition of the Table Talk, to the displeasure of Mr. Stuart, he probably confounded the numbers sold with those sold of the Courier some years afterwards, and he may also have been thinking of what took place on the appearance of The Devil's Thoughts and the Character of Pitt, of which Mr. Stuart says in a private letter "Each of these made a sensa

Stuart's offer of a share in the M. Post. xci

tion which any writings unconnected with the events of the day rarely did;” and again," the Paper was in demand for days and weeks afterwards."* The truth is, my Father may have done much to raise the reputation, and enhance the importance, of the Morning Post, while yet its general sale depended in the main on such popular causes as Mr. Stuart enumerated. But that Mr. S. himself had the highest opinion of Mr. Coleridge's power of serving his Paper is evidenced by what is thus mentioned in a communication of the former to Mr. Poole, in March 1800:-" If I had the least love of money I could make almost sure of 2000l. a year, for Stuart has offered me half shares in the two papers, the Morning Post and Courier, if I would devote myself with him to them. But I told him that I would not give up the country, and the lazy reading of old folios for two thousand times two thousand pound-in short that beyond 350l. a year I considered money as a real evil."—

"I think there are but two good ways of writing-one for immediate and wide impression, though transitory— the other for permanence. Newspapers are the first-the best one can do is the second. That middle class of translating books is neither the one nor the other. When I have settled myself clear, I shall write nothing for money but for the newspaper. You of course will not hint a word of Stuart's offer to me. He has behaved with abundant honour and generosity." Mr. Stuart himself said long afterwards in a letter to my husband: "Could Coleridge and I place ourselves thirty years back, and he be so far a man of business as to write three or four hours a

* See the Biographia Literaria, vol. ii. p. 397, with the extracts of letters of Mr. Stuart concerning the sale of the M. P. and Mr. C's. services to the Paper.

xcii Value of Mr. C's. aid to the Paper.

day, there is nothing I would not pay for his assistance. I would take him into partnership and I would enable him to make a large fortune."*

Now it appears that Mr. S. was more generous and confiding, if my Father misunderstood not the nature of his proposition, than he represented himself years afterwards; that in the full view of his contributor's unworldly ways and unbending principles, his indisposition to receive directions or materials from any one, his horror of becoming the organ of a party or tool of a government, in face of his uncertain health and consequent proneness to slip away from any appointed task, of which he had by that time given some inconvenient proofs, the Editor of a successful paper would have given him an interest in its profits, and in the fruits of his own industry and editorial ability. It was honorable to him that he could thus estimate a man of genius before his power had been acknowledged by the world,—could seek to ally himself with a man of principle, who must always, to a certain extent, have been against the world and had the world against him; the more is the pity that he ever displayed any other but this excellent spirit respecting S. T. C. This I can vouch for, as a truth of my own certain knowledge, that every fact of his intercourse with my Father, creditable to his character and calculated to prevent any apprehended misinterpretation, to his disadvantage, of the

* Mr. Wordsworth thus expresses his opinion on the same point in a letter which is cited in the Introduction to the second edition of the Biographia Literaria. "So convinced was I of the great service that your Father rendered Mr. Stuart's paper, that I urged him to put in his claim to be admitted a proprietor; but this he declined, having a great disinclination to any tie of the kind."