-1 rMMi i' 'i I'l , i!W+ ilil'i 1)1. .Ill 1 1 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GIFT OF Prof. Earl Leslie iri^^cs DA 565.C69A3"l9|T'"-"'"^ ..Hf-jniniscences, Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924028314494 ARTHUR COLERIDGE REMINISCENCES ARTHUR COLERIDGE REMINISCENCES EDITED BY J. A. FULLER-MAITLAND WITH ADDITIONS BY The late F. WARRE CORNISH VICE-PROVOST OF ETON Sir W. RYLAND ADKINS, M.P. AND L. SPENCER HOLLAND NEW YORK E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY PUBLISHERS L^' PEEFACE . [Arthur Duke ColeridqEj born at Ottery St. Mary, Feb. 1, 1830; died in London, Oct. Z9, 1913.] Very few people have had so iBne a gift for friendship as Arthur Coleridge ; at the same time his versatility was so great, and his many sides so delightful, that no memoir written by any one of his friends could possibly give an adequate idea of what he was, unless that person could be supposed to combine the functions of a bishop, an opera singer, and a judge. In any of these capacities Coleridge would have left his mark upon the world, and in any of them he would have paid homage to those who were prominent in the other two. His inexhaust- ible fund of admiration was due to no snobbery of the mind, but was a natural recognition of personal achievement and official dignity. His religious faith was childlike and steadfast, and attendance at a daily service was almost essential to his happiness and well-being. This devotion to the church of his fathers passed on to her vi ARTHUR COLERIDGE human representatives ; he was as incapable as Dr. Johnson of contradicting a bishop, and there is a story of an old friend who, meeting him on the steps of the Athenaeum, and guessing from his expression that some church dignitary was indisposed, hazarded the question, " Well, Arthur, how's the Dean?" receiving a detailed bulletin on the health of some one of whom the questioner had never heard. So great was his admira- tion for the office of organist that he would often maintain that the Athenaeum should confer its highest distinction, that of election under Rule II., upon the organists of the principal London churches, without regard to their musical merits or social standing. Many cathedral organists became his intimate friends, and a friendship once formed was exceedingly difficult to forfeit. He was not given to making friends rapidly, but there was nothing he would not do for a friend once taken to his heart. His official work, which brought him into association with so many judges, is dealt with in the last chapter of these reminiscences by two of his circuit intimates, one of whom often undertook Coleridge's duties towards the end of his life. Mr. L. Spencer Holland PREFACE vii has accomplished the difficult task of filling a very unfortunate gap in these recollections; the chapter of legal stories had been almost completed by Arthur Coleridge, and after his death was revised, with a view to enlarge- ment, by three of his old friends ; in the course of transmission from one to another it disappeared, and what now takes its place as the last chapter of this book is hardly more than a pale reflection of what the section was at first. Coleridge left his Reminiscences complete, all but the chapter on Cambridge, and his recollections of literary and artistic people. These have been filled out with the aid of some bulky volumes, neither wholly journals nor wholly extract books, in which he would put down whatever struck him in books or in life. It is not always easy to disentangle that which has been published before from that which is new in these books, which were used for Eton in the Forties, for the chapter contributed to Tennyson and Ms Friends, and for various articles, as well as for the lectures on musicians delivered in various parts of the country. By means of these an important work was done in helping the musical revival in England. They were viii ARTHUR COLERIDGE in their nature popular, and derived no small part of their value from the musical illustra- tions, which were often chosen from works hardly known in England, even to musicians. Out-of-the-way compositions that possessed inherent or historical interest were brought to light, and while the lectures were mainly intended for country amateurs, a more highly educated circle of friends was accustomed to expect great things from the programme of the annual concert or musical party in wjiich the hospitality of Cromwell Place found its climax. At a time when Wagner's later works were as yet untried in England, large selections from Tristan or the Ring would be given, and many amateur singers will remember, not without amusement, the successive teams that undertook the septet in Tannhduser, or the ensemble of the Huguenots. Occasionally, too, a Bach can- tata would be given entire, for Coleridge was one of the earliest of English Bach enthusiasts. His wide influence and the energy of his admiration had a more im- portant result in the formation of the Bach Choir. For it was he who brought together the body of keen and hard-working ama- teurs who had the distinction of singing the PREFACE ix B minor Mass for the first time in England, under the direction of Otto Goldschmidt and the personal supervision and help of his wife, Jenny Lind-Goldschmidt. Years after his own beautiful tenor voice had "gone to heaven" — to quote one of his oldest friends — ^he helped to form another society for the study of Bach's Church Cantatas in regular order, following the ecclesiastical year for which they were origin- ally composed. In a quiet way these informal meetings did much to stimulate the vogue of some of the supreme things in music. There can be few now alive who heard Arthur Coleridge in the days when Clara Novello and many others accepted him as a worthy musical associate, but certain characteristics remained long after the sonority of the voice had departed. He had learnt from Schira many of the secrets of the bel canto which reigned in his youth, and there was a moment in his life when the career of an opera singer was open to him. But his fastidious purity of soul and his strong insight into character made him only too well aware of the " seamy side " of professional life as it then was, and his marriage put an end to whatever theatrical X ARTHUR COLERIDGE ambitions he had formed. That his ringing notes, strong musical instincts, and dramatic sense would have brought him success on the operatic stage can hardly be doubted even by those who are most unwilling to admit the existence of great powers in an English amateur, but it is equally certain that the work he did for music was at least as important as that which a public career would have offered him. The late Vice-Provost of Eton, who was to have taken an important part in editing these reminiscences, wrote, a little time before his death, a short appreciation of his old friend which may fitly be inserted here. A. D. C. The present volume is due to the fact that Arthur Coleridge had before his death begun and partly finished some autobiographical chapters, which the editors have thought it best to publish, with some omissions and alterations which they hope would have been approved by the author himself. They are the more inclined to believe this, that he submitted to them the greater part of what he had written. The autobiography is an PREFACE xi addition to the recollections of boyhood pub- lished in Eton in the Forties (Macmillan, 1898). It is difficult, if not impossible, to convey in writing an impression of so unique a personality as Arthur Coleridge. For those many friends who survive him it is not needed ; but we should like to give some impression of what he was to others who never came within his influence. Above all, Arthur Coleridge had a capacity for friendship. His heartiness lind affection were irresistible, because they were genuine, an ever-flowing well of loving-kindness, all the more truthful in that his friendships were not indiscriminate, and that he could feel resentment if he thought his impulses of friendship had not met with a friendly response. I have not known in my life a friend more generous, just, and trustworthy. This was the more remarkable because he had many friends who could say the same ; and there was no jealousy among his friends, for he gave to each what belonged to him ; he did not mix up friends and friendships indiscriminately, but had as it were by instinct, not of purpose, a place for each. Something of the same sort might be observed in his daughter Mary's friendships. She xii ARTHUR COLERIDGE was at no pains to make her friends ac- quainted unless she saw that they were well suited to each other. Both father and daughter had a, clear view and a clear purpose in friendship, and both valued their independence. In Arthur's case this was favoured by the circumstances of his life ; at Cambridge and Eton, at Lichfield, Warwick, and at many places which he visited on circuit he had friends who delighted to be his hosts, for his beautiful courtesy as well as his spirit and geniality in conversation made him welcome every- where, so that he had colonies of friends ready to claim him wherever he went, with all of whom he kept up a constant corre- spondence, for his industry in letter-writing was incredible, and he would quote with appreciation Johnson's saying, " Keep your friendships in repair." Besides this large circle of friends in town and country he was never unmindful of his own and his wife's numerous relations. He felt strongly the tie of blood, and nothing in his life vexed him more than the necessity of taking sides in the family troubles which ensued on Lord Chief Justice Coleridge's second marriage. But his benevolence was not confined to PREFACE xiii the large circle of friends in respect of whom he was on some footing of equality ; it flowed in many channels. There were always three or four friends, living in distant parts of London, blind, crippled, or imprisoned by illness, to whom he went weekly to read for an hour. He kept touch with old Sunday school scholars, students of the Royal College of Music, choristers and their children, and delighted in seeing them at Christmas dinners at his house in Cromwell Place. To not a few he gave substantial help in their profession ; he never forgot any one whom he had helped, and was not content with merely not forgetting, but did good actively and effectively. As he never wasted time or money, he had both to give and gave them unsparingly. Few people knew how large his benefactions were, and though he lost money more than once by the fault of his friends, this did not make him less bountiful. His chief season of giving, if I rightly interpret expressions occurring in his diaries and dropped in conversation, was at Christ- mas-time, when he looked into his accoimts and settled what he had to spare ; and his generosity never lagged behind his justice. F. Warre Cornish. xiv ARTHUR COLERIDGE The Editor's thanks are due to the Rev. Gerard H. B. Coleridge for permission to print the letter of S. T. Coleridge (pp. 42-43), to the Rev. G. C. Keble for the Rev. John Keble's letters (pp. 20-37), and to Mrs. Holman Hunt for leave to print her hus- band's letter (pp. 159-160). J. A. FULLER-MAITLAND. CONTENTS CHAPTER I VJlBE Ottehy St. Mary 1 CHAPTER H Eton . 49 CHAPTER III King's College, Cambridge . . * . . .86 CHAPTER IV Musical Recollections 97 CHAPTER V Recollections Artistic, Dramatic, and Literary . 153 CHAPTER VI Circuit Reminiscences .177 (A) By Sir W. Ryland Adkins, M.P. (B) By L. Spencer Holland, Esq. INDEX 201 XV CHAPTER I OTTERY ST. MARY More than one of my friends have suggested to me to record the memories of a common- place life, redressed only by fusion and contact with men head and shoulders above me, without adding a cubit to my own stature. It is of them and not of myself that I would speak. One of the most clamorous of these friends was the late Lord Justice Mathew, who now and again cross-examined me at the Athenaeum and elsewhere with " Well, A. D, C., how's the book getting on ? How many chapters are finished ? " I was born at Ottery St. Mary in Devon- shire^-" him the banks of Otter nourished, fair-haired boy " — and we Coleridges are proud of our birthplace, our Church, our river. None of these three objects " lacks a sacred poet," the last being my own 2 ARTHUR COLERIDGE relative, the present Lord Coleridge, on whose shoulders the ermine worn by his grandfather and father seems to have fallen in triple and perfectly natural folds. I answer for his conservatism in respect of all that is distinctly lovable and venerable in a place dear from associations to John Keble, George Cornish, and other singers whose names the world will not willingly let die. Our Ottery visitors in past ages, such as Oliver Cromwell or Sir Thomas Fairfax, are part of England's history. The Protector did not protect our dear old Collegiate Church, where he stabled his odious horses ; I have some hopes that Fairfax, who discussed in my grandfather's dining-room with Cromwell a plan of campaign against the King's forces in the west, would have disapproved of this sacrilege. Will any one verify for me the story once told me by a verger in York Minster, to the effect that the painted windows were saved in tumultuous days by Fairfax himself? He was a Yorkshireman, and doubtless as proud of his Cathedral as we Devonians are of Exeter. I remember the ipsissima verba of my cicerone at York : " Fairfax, addressing some iconoclast, axe OTTERY ST. MARY 3 in hand, said, ' The first man who touches one of these windows shall be shot.' " I hope this is a true bill. I pass over some famous indigenous names, such as Sir Walter Raleigh, Carew and others ; amongst kings who left their cards, nay more, sojourned at Ottery, were Henry VI. in 1451 and Henry VII. in 1497, at the termination of the insurrection of Perkin Warbeck. In 1688 William III. sampled our town before his fortnight's sojourn at the Exeter Deanery. Long before that time, away had gone rood-screens and images from the Church, on which the pious gaze of generations had been fixed. The history of the " Chanter's House " has been told by Lord Coleridge,^ and I am .dealing with modern days and matters and things belonging to my childhood. As a lad, I was asked on a visit to Up- Ottery, by Lord Sidmouth, son of Addington the Prime Minister. I saw there a table at which Nelson had sat and discussed with his friend the possibilities of his last campaign. Some wine and water was tilted over by the Admiral, and with his finger he mapped out a wet sketch of the where- * The Story of a Devonshire Howe, Chapter VI. 4 ARTHUR COLERIDGE abouts of his probable meeting with the enemy. The fact is duly recorded on a brass covering the table. Lord Sidmouth was a boy of ten years of age on the occasion of Nelson's visit ; he remembered Nelson's impatience for the start of an afternoon drive, and his eager " Now, my boy, man the boat " before the carriage left the door. I have one point of union with Roman Catholics in my worship of relics, and more than once discussed my weakness with Lord Tennyson. Both of us had seen Sir Walter Scott's hat at Abbotsford ; I doffed my own in reverence, but tiie Poet Laureate did not care for it ; still less did he care for a wineglass in the possession of Miss Langton, niece of Dr. Johnson's ~ friend. The lady added that Johnson used to stir the lemonade in it with his fingers ; the incident, Lord Tennyson thought, had better have been suppressed. Once I rashly talked of some personal weakness reported by Eton tradition of Arthur Hallam, and the result was a wholesome snub which took a little time to be forgotten. I have a real regard for the memory of Dr. Cornish, who presided for long years at Ottery School. Its list of alumni who OTTERY ST. MARY 5 became famous in after life is a good school record.* Henry Nelson Coleridge, 1798-1845, was a brilliant scholar, and at his death was well on his way to an Equity Judgeship ; Richard Hurrell Froude, 1803-1836, was a famous leader of thought at Oxford ; William Hart Coleridge, 1789-1849, was the first Bishop of Barbadoes, and during his curacy at St. Andrew's, Holborn, is said to have christened Benjamin Disraeli ; John Coleridge Patteson, 1827-1871, Missionary Bishop of Melanesia, one of the noblest of Eton's sons, Kas the record of his martjnrdom on a wayside memorial near Ottery ; John Taylor Coleridge, 1790-1876, who was a second father to me, was a famous judge ; Sir John Kennaway and others less well knovm were good men and true in their generations. Another Ottery boy who achieved great distinction was Mr. Justice BuUer, the favourite Puisne Judge of Lord Mansfield, who, when about to surrender his high office, did all he could to induce Pitt to make BuUer Chief Justice of the King's Bench, but in vain. BuUer found himself set aside in favour of Lord Kenyon, who was known as " Taffy " ; BuUer, morti- fied by disappointment, retired to the Court 6 ARTHUR COLERIDGE of Common Pleas and died soon afterwards. Lord Campbell, whose Lives of the Chief Justices are a perfect gold-mine of legal traditions, has a specially good story of Kenyon, who was a great lawyer and a notorious screw. After his death, the old- fashioned hatchment was raised over his door ; it was inscribed " Mors janua vita" and EUenborough, asked to explain the patent blunder in the Latin quotation, said, " It was no mistake : Taffy wished to spare his executors the expense of a diphthong." The two Head Masters of Ottery School in whom I am naturally most keenly interested were John Coleridge and his son George, a pious and learned man who sent up his nephew William straight from Ottery School to Christ Church, Oxford, where he won a double first class, an achievement repeated in after years by my cousin Herbert, who was a phenomenon in the way of learning. Herbert died early, and when assured that his life would not last more than eighteen months, solaced himself with the reflection that " it was just long enough to learn Icelandic." He made such progress that the editor of the Dictionary to which OTTERY ST. MARY 7 he had been a chief contributor had to wait long for a properly qualified successor. I am allowed to quote from A Study in Heredity, by T. H. S. Escott, some interesting remarks on members of my family, but with this exception I mean to rely on information I myself have gathered from conversation with my elders and the few who remembered the Coleridge best known on the roll of Fame. " As for the Colerid^es themselves, De Quincey has reminded us that didacticism as a Coleridge trait did not begin with Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself, but formed a portion of his intellectual patrimony. His father. Vicar of Ottery St. Mary, and Head Master of the local Grammar School, had all Parson Adams's erudition, inexperience and guileless simplicity. A Latin Grammar reformer, he inflicted on his pupils a new theory of declension. This included the disuse of the ablative case, and, by way of making things easier, he introduced in its place the ' quale quare quidditive ' case. " In the pulpit the Reverend John Coleridge prided himself not so much on learning or eloquence as on delivering the immediate language of the Holy Ghost. His younger son, the future poet, surpassed 8 ARTHUR COLERIDGE all his eight brothers and four sisters in the unction with which, from the elevation of a parlour chair, he recited, in the family game of church service, the paternal dis- course to the congregation on the preceding Sabbath. When, therefore, Lamb rallied his friend on the sermonising habit, Coleridge had had time to attain some proficiency in it. By him the faculty, with a good deal besides, was transmitted to his son Hartley. . . . The quality thus caricatured in the child survived him in the remarkable line of whose moral and mental inheritance it formed a part. A judge for each of three generations is not often supplied by one and the same family. This notable succes- sion began with Mr. Justice Coleridge, of Anglican as well as legal fame, and was continued by his son, the Lord Chief Justice of the Victorian age, whose ' Would it surprise you to hear ? ' recurred so con- stantly in his interrogatories to the Tichborne claimant. That was not the only occasion on which the Lord Chief Justice may have justified Serjeant Ballantyne's remark that he never could deliver a charge without also preaching a sermon. In the ' eighties ' a libel action in his Court against the World OTTERY ST. MARY 9 gave him a text for a jeremiad against society papers. As the doomed editor, Edmund Yates, disappeared from the place, not a little of a Hebrew prophet's fire flamed forth from the eyes, kindled the scarlet face and lent all the shrillness of inspiration to the passion with which the righteously offended Judge shrieked forth his anathemas upon ' the degrading traffic in utterly attenuated personalities.' The moral and intellectual temper which made a particular evil-doer the text for the homily on the general sins of a system" was not so much the personal characteristic of the judge, as an unconscious reminiscence of the Oxford Schools and Common rooms of his youth." The simple Ottery people believed im- plicitly in their native gentlefolk. Colonel James Coleridge of Heath's Court, well remembered by me, was aide-de-camp to General Simcoe, and old John Reed, head of our Post Office at Ottery, described him as " the finest disciplined man, siPj that ever entered the British Army. Between you and me, sir, I believe he was as good as Napoleon." I wish it were possible to forget the oddities and incongruities that attended the services in the dear old Church where I 10 ARTHUR COLERIDGE worshipped in my earliest days. Vergers and Parish Clerks have had their innings, and are by now pretty well played out. The annual anthem at Christmas or Easter was " awful mirth " indeed, particularly with the double-bass obbligato and a village Lablache for the soloist. Another ofl&cial was Gover tlfe sexton, who must have been old enough to remember John Coleridge's polyglot sermons ; he wore a rusty gown on Sundays and patrolled the Church, cane in hand, rousing from his slumbers any young Eutychus given to snoring. Gover was said to be rather addicted to strong waters, and to have sung at his grave- making. Some local poet wrote of him, Little Gover, brave and bold, He buries young, he buries old, For rich or poor nought careth he. But sips his glass and takes his fee. I read Pendennis for the first time in 1849, the year of its publication. Thackeray, during his Charterhouse days, spent part of his vacations at Larkbeare, then occupied by his stepfather, Major Carmichael Smyth. The scene of many of the incidents is laid in our neighbourhood. Clavering St. Mary is Ottery, Chatteris is Exeter, Baymouth OTTERY ST. MARY 11 is -Sidmouth and the river Brawl is the Otter. In Fraser's Magazine, to which Thackeray contributed for many years, there is in the number for November 1854 an article entitled " Clavering St. Mary and a Talk about Devonshire Worthies," which confirms this identity, where it speaks of " the birthplace of Pendennis, that Little old Town of Clavering St. Mary, past which the rapid river Brawl holds on its shining course, and which boasts a fine old Church with great grey towers, of which the sun illuminates the delicate carving, deepening the shadows of the deep buttresses, and gilding the glittering windows and flaming vane." The writer prefers the pre-Restora- tion days ; I disagree with him in his conclusion : " Things have however changed at Clavering since Mr. Thackeray spent many a pleasant summer holiday there in his boyhood. The old Collegiate Church has been swept and garnished and bedizened with finery until it scarcely knows itself; and the Wapshot boys no longer make a cheerful noise, scuffling with their feet as they march into Church and up the organ loft stairs, but walk demurely to their open seats in the side aisle." 12 ARTHUR COLERIDGE Many years ago I had the good luck to meet the great novehst at Dresden, where in company with J. C. Patteson I spent a long vacation, studying music and German. One day, Coley and I found Thackeray making a copy of the two boy angels at the foot of the Madonna di San Sisto, and Patteson, admiring the sketch, was rather roughly snubbed by the artist : " Sir, I am quite impervious to flattery ; it's my intention to burn that sketch when I get back to my lodgings." Seeing my relative slightly wounded, he added, " I will call on you to-morrow morning," and at 10 a.m. he came and asked for Lager beer, over which we had rare good talk about Ottery and all the people. Many of his old friends were still living, and " Clavering St. Mary " would have preferred him to retain the old name in a work destined to become so famous. The " Brawl " I think is a pretty variation of the Otter, though the latter animal appears in our family coat-of-arms (" I know that's a letter from Uncle Arthur," said a nephew, " for it's sealed with a pig rushing by a cross "). I had rather a memorable meeting with Thackeray at Derby many years afterwards. OTTERY ST. MARY 13 On the Winter Circuit of 1858 he was announced to lecture at the Assembly Rooms ; the Bar Mess invited him to dinner, and the honour of sitting next him was thrust upon me, although Fitzjames Stephen should have been his neighbour. At that most melancholy feast no one spoke above a whisper ; when a fat turkey was placed on the table, Thackeray eclipsed our gaiety by observing, " For twenty - seven days running I have seen nothing but boiled turkey." At last the funereal feast came to an end, and I have since been told that the author, on the night of his public lectures, was overcome by shyness ; directly his task was over he was himself again. He shouted from the platform for Stephen and myself, and walked us off arm in arm to his lodgings, where, after oysters and porter, we heard him in his best vein on' Queen Anne's days. I regret to say that Thomas Hood pub- lished a libel on the dear " Brawl " in The Angler's Farewell : Oh I there is not a one pound prize To be got in this freshwater lottery; What, then, can I deem Of so fishless a stream But that 'tis hke St. Mary's Ottery. 14 ARTHUR COLERIDGE Fishless ! We, Coleridge and Patteson boys, lived our holiday days on the banks of the " Brawl," flogging the river daily, and very seldom without success ; I call to mind more than one " miraculous draught " day. Kingsley talks of pike being maddened by hunger in a north-east wind ; a hail or snow storm in April was our great chance on the Otter, when the most clumsily- constructed fly was, in so abnormal a state of things, good -enough, and the catch all along the banks would have satisfied Izaak Walton himself. My eldest brother, a master in the art of fly-fishing, once brought to the bank seventy-five warrantable trout after a few hours' afternoon fishing. Once in ten or twenty years there appeared a salmon, originally with enough of the acrobat in him to jump over Otterton Weir and go ahead. Caught or hooked and escaped, he became historical. I used reverently to fish in a pool where old George Coleridge played a salmon about the time of the Battle of Waterloo ; as the fish escaped, posterity added to his weight year by year ; there was no one to refute his girth and immensity ; the latter ranged from five to twenty pounds according to the fancy of OT'FERY ST. MARY 15 the narrator. Fishermen, hke the Cretans of old, are what the Psahnist said of all men. Famous men appeared off and on at Ottery for love of its memorable associations. Unfortunately I missed seeing Wordsworth, who once made a pilgrimage to Ottery Church, where he was accidentally discovered by my father, whose duties as Churchwarden were constantly in requisition within the building itself. The old poet took tea at the Manor House, and my eldest sister was present. I never heard of the poet being at Ottery except on this one occasion. He and Coleridge were sworn friends and neigh- bours, and Coleridge's own visits to his native place were few and far between. We know of his walking excursions to Lynton and the Valley of Rocks, but I doubt if Wordsworth felt a lively interest in the Coleridge family apart from the poet him- self. Edward Coleridge, though reported to have been the wit of the family, would have been quite out of it with Samuel and his poetical colleague, and George Coleridge had found his brilliant but erratic brother very trying at times. S. T. Cole- ridge has very good words for his brother George : 16 ARTHUR COLERIDGE " He is a man of reflective mind and elegant talent. He possesses learning in a greater degree than any of the family, excepting myself; his manners are grave, and hued over with a tender sadness. In his moral character he approaches nearer to perfection than any man I ever yet knew. . . . All my brothers are remarkably handsome, but they were as inferior to Francis as I am to them. He went by the name of " the handsome Coleridge." The rural clergy of Devonshire, with notable exceptions, were in my young days of a rather neutral tint. I had a childish faith in the old Vicar of Ottery, and was told that in the great Peninsular days he did good service as a recruiting sergeant, by urging on tradesmen and labourers from the pulpit the obligation to accept the King's shilling. Two or three Devonshire heroes survived to my time. GoUop the postman carried his letter-bags very effectively though he had left an arm in Spain ; and Sam Hall, employed about the garden by my father, was a great favourite with me. He had a legitimate grievance with the War Office, and complained that Waterloo men sported their medals, while those who had served OTTERY ST. MARY I7 in the Peninsular War were still undecorated. I set to work on his account, and laid his case before my old friend Major Bent, who remembered recruiting Hall and marching off with him from Exeter. The Major's services were never forgotten by Sir Thomas Picton, who singled him out in a speech addressed to officers at a dinner given to the old hero before he started on his last memor- able campaign. Anyhow, my statement reached the ears of the Duke of Richmond, and, the information proving correct, the belated medals were duly forwarded ; Sam Hall, in gratitude for my championship, be- queathed his decoration to me, and I value the trophy as the gift of an Otteregian soldier. Another eccentric character was the Vicar of Feniton, a village near Ottery ; he had served in the Peninsular War, and his sermons, headed now and again by some sixteen verses as a text, were the cause of his suspension by the Bishop of Exeter, but his return after three years was a triumph, for he was wonderfully popular with the parishioners. He owned twelve walking- sticks, which he called after the Apostles and used on consecutive days of the week ; but his most memorable achievement was c 18 ARTHUR COLERIDGE a discourse upon Jonah, whose voyage he mapped out with wild infehcity. " Away went the whale, and away went Jonah, down the Persian Gulf, through the Straits of Babel Mandeb, etc.," in fact in any streams, ocean or gulf, that loomed for the moment largest in the preacher's imagination. In my young days the story of Jonah was acted on the French stage in Paris, and at the rising of the curtain a leviathan with a transparent side was seen rolling on the stage ; Jonah dressed as a maitre de danse, inside the body of the fish, holding a frying-pan and catching shoals of herring, which the prophet, after cutting a slice of blubber for cooking purposes, proceeded to dress for dinner. Apropos of the prophets. Lord Bowen, on the awkward situation of a stranger called upon unexpectedly to retttn thanks at a public dinner, has immortalised the position. He says : One of the ancient Rabbinical writers — r I have forgotten which, but I have no doubt it can easily be ascertained — was engaged in compiling a history of the Minor Prophets, and in due course it became his duty to record the history of the prophet Daniel. In speaking of the most striking incident OTTERY ST. MARY 19 of that great man's career — I refer to his critical position in the den of lions — he made a remark which has always appeared to me replete with judgment and observation. He said the Prophet, notwithstanding the trying circumstances in which he was placed, had one consolation which has sometimes been forgotten. He knew that when the dreadful banquet was over, at any rate it wouldn't be he who would be called upon to return thanks. John Keble, in his youth a constant visitor to Ottery when absorbed in collegiate or clerical duties at Oxford and elsewhere, too seldom found time to stay there in after years, but he was a devoted and lifelong friend of my father's, and a correspondent in days when letters, costing over a shilling in transit, were worth much more than the outlay for the transmission by post. I have numbers of these, but the extracts, detached from letters of the most sacred and intimate kind, will, I am persuaded, interest many readers of the Christian Year. He happened to be at Ottery at the time of my father's death in 1854, and at my desire wrote a short poem on the event in my own copy of the famous book. It will be seen that my dear 20 ARTHUR COLERIDGE father, who had become a solicitor, practising at Ottery with steady and uniform success, had such an admiration for the high character and Hfe of his best friend, that he seriously thought of taking Holy Orders and following that friend's profession after changing his own. Sir John Taylor Coleridge, many years afterwards, thought of doing the same thing, as a protest against his son's secession from the Church of England (Henry Coleridge became a Jesuit priest). I had this from my uncle's own lips, and he added that but for Keble's advice, the ex-Judge of the Queen's Bench would have become a humble curate in his old age. Mr. Keble dissuaded both of these brothers from the step they proposed to take,^ arguing that the religion of a pious layman might be the consecration of a lifetime, and that to abide in one's calling may be a primary duty. I give in extenso a letter to my father written in 1817, on Keble's visit to the grave of Richard Hooker, and a Sonnet on the same subject. Temple, July 24, 1817. My dear Frank Coleridge — While John is writing a love-letter, I am boldly taking 1 See Keble's Letters of Spiritual Counsel (1870), p. 14. OTTERY ST. MARY 21 quill in hand to write to you ; for why ? I know that you are a right sound orthodox hearty fellow, and therefore you will be glad to have an account of a pilgrimage which I have just been making to the tomb of Richard Hooker. But in order to imder- stand me thoroughly, you must proceed regularly in form and order. First then take a map of Kent, or in default thereof, a map of all England, into your hand ; spread your map carefully, and look on the road between Canterbury and Dover, a little to the right of Barham Down. There you will behold a winding rivulet, and on the banks of it a village by name Bishopsbourne : " Bourne " quasi rivulet, and " Bishops " quasi Archbishops : being as how the living belongeth, as Master Walton testifieth, to the Primate of all England. In this village and by this rivulet, situated between two hills, which though of chalk are green and highly cultivated, and the more westerly of them well wooded ; let your imagination (a faculty always peculiarly vivid in a lawyer) place a Church rather lowly than small, consisting of a nave, a cross aisle and a chancel, a tower with a sloping roof, and a wooden porch — and in the chancel let her carve out a wooden monument against the wall with the eflfigy of the said Richard, coloured, with dark eyes, and a cap on his 22 ARTHUR COLERIDGE head. N.B. — In this part of her operations Fancy will be much assisted by your looking at the print of the said Richard, which you once shewed me. In the Church, but at some distance from the monument, let her place a very large slab stone with no inscription whatever on it, and under it let her suppose the resting place of the great Saint : over it, two haggard pilgrims, who had hurried from Canterbury unshorn at 5 o'clock in the morning lest they should miss the coach : let Fancy, I say, set before you these two pilgrims, with folded arms, staring eyes, and dingy neckcloths, looking as pitiful as ever did Richard himself as he trembled under the waving Broomstick of his wife Joan, and you will have before you the "vera effigies Reverendi admodum Patris," John Keble of Fairford and John Tucker of C. C. (whom you ought to know if you do not), as they appeared at the aforesaid hour, on Friday the 18th July, Add hereunto a hard-featured blacksmith, standing in the distance, with the keys of the Church in his hand : a very neat Church with sundry texts of Scripture painted against the pillars, amongst which I observed particularly this : " My Son, fear thou the Lord and the King, etc," I will not be persuaded that Richard himself was not the author of this text's being put up ; it is so exactly the motto of OTTERY ST. MARY 23 his Ecclesiastical Polity. Well, but to pro- ceed with this most interesting description. Let Imagination now take you by the pen which you have put in your mouth in your eagerness to read this, and transplant you into the Churchyard, and set you gently down by the side of a horse -pond which forms the boundary between it on one side and a farmyard. There let her shew you, perched in the most picturesque attitudes over against the Church, the two afore- mentioned grim pilgrims, one sketching, the other holding an umbrella : and this by the space of one hour in a goodly Scotch mist. N.B. — In your notion of the sketch, put a couple of beeches and a large chestnut tree, the latter in a corner of a sloping beanfield which is near the Churchyard : this we guess to be about the j)lace where Richard used to feed his sheep with a book in his hand : the two beeches at the S.W. angle of the Church : and observe that the sketch was taken from the N.W. Scene iii. of this wonderful mystery will bring you in front of the Parsonage House, not quite so humble as it was of old time, and with an inmate also a little altered : enter the same two pilgrims in front of the hall-door ; time half-past seven in the morning; they ring, the door is opened by a neat-handed servant : and at the same time, enter to 24 ARTHUR COLERIDGE them the Honourable and Reverend Mr. Chancellor, Prebendary, Rector Percy, look- ing as spruce as an undertaker, just ready to set out for the Duke of Northumberland's funeral. Mr. Percy — " What may your business be ? " Tucker (in a great fright, speaking very quick) — " My name is Tucker, Sir; will you have the kindness to allow us to look at the handwriting of Richard Hooker ? " Mr. Percy (turning sharp round and looking very angry) — " Upon my word. Sir " ; (he turns upon his heel muttering to himself). Tucker (shrugging up his shoulders) — " He's quite in a passion." Keble (pre- tending to look knowing) — " Aye, you should have gone to work more gently, you came upon him too suddenly." Re-enter Mr. P. with a large book in his hand, very gentle- manly. Mr. P. — " Gentlemen, I beg your pardon, but may I ask why you are so desirous to look at this handwriting, whether it is curiosity only ? " Tucker (very meek and submissive) — " No, Sir, it is from a wish to compare the hand with some of which we have a specimen here, in order to find out whether the College has any of it." This, my dear Sir, you will please to observe, was really the case, and Mr. Chancellor had been told of it some time before, only he had forgotten it. But to cut short the story, the Register was examined, and we saw the OTTERY ST. MARY 25 place where the Saint's fingers had been, but found that the writing did not match our specimen. So we trudged away with all speed, though Mr. Percy, having dis- covered us at last through our dingy cloud, very kindly asked us to breakfast with him. We enquired of two or three people, whether the name was at all remembered in the Parish, but none of them had ever heard of it. This mortified me very much, for till the last generation, all the Parish-Clerks have preserved some tradition of his name and goodness and of the trees under which he used to write. J. K. SONNET ON VISITING HOOKER'S GRAVE The grey-eyed morn was saddened with a shower, A silent shower that trickled down so still Scarce drooped beneath its weight the tenderest flower, Scarce could you trace it on the twinkUng rill Or dewy moss-grown arch. It was an hour Most fit for prayer, beside thy lonely grave Most for thanksgiving meet, that heaven such power To thy serene and humble spirit gave, " Who sow good seed with tears, shall reap in joy " So thought I, as I watched that gracious rain And deemed it Hke the silent sad employ, Whence sprang thy glory's harvest to remain For ever. He hath sworn who cannot he The self-abasing soul to lift on high. J. K. July 1817. 26 ARTHUR COLERIDGE April 21, 1814. . . . What a triumph for Exeter, having sent such an actor as Kean on the boards, — pray how many of you have found out, since he went, what a genius he was ? I am sure for one I didn't. . . . We have had a high theatrical treat at Oxford lately ; Mrs. Siddons has been reading to us, and the effect was to me even superior to seeing her on the stage ; for there was none of that intolerable drawback, the inferior actors. ... I have given you materials enough for a long letter — let it be in anything but law-Latin. August 23, 1815. . . . The people are very well disposed, con- sidering they have been a good deal neglected, but they are very ignorant, and you have no idea of the trouble it gives me to make my sermons plain enough for them. They are all ploughboys' wives and daughters, and very few of the old people know anything of reading and writing ; but they come to Church in great crowds of an afternoon. . . . You have the history of my clerical debut, for success in which I shall be old-fashioned enough to hope for your prayers. The Places are not exceeding rich, as you may imagine, when I tell you that from both together, the other day, I collected for the OTTERY ST. MARY 27 Waterloo sufferers the enormous sum of £4, 4s. including my own subscription. May 7th, 1817. . . . George Coleridge told me that he had heard from home that you were not yet settled in your plans, but balancing between Honiton and Sidmouth. I guess that the latter would present the better opening, but the former be more to your taste as a resi- dence ; whichever you choose, I hereby send you the benediction of an unworthy Presbyter, hoping that you may thrive like a rogue, and laugh like a child, keeping your- lielf all the time as honest and manly as Frank Coleridge. What a pretty sentimental speech ! Deer. 1817. ... I am glad to find you keep up your theological pursuits so zealously ; in time you will be quite a Sir Matthew Hale, at least a Judge Bayley. I do not know Wake's Catechism, but mean to read it soon on your recommendation. . . . Jan, Slst, 1819. ... All is going on tolerably well at the mansion of the Kebles. When will you come and see them ? It is the only thing wanted to complete your education, to have been initiated into the polite tea-parties, 28 ARTHUR COLERIDGE etc., of Fairford, and learn a little of our broad brogue, to mix with your own native narrow one. We can promise you some trout-fishing occasionally, if you come at a proper time of year, and you shall have your choice whether you will ride a mare with no legs (at least none that she can stand on) or a horse with no mane or tail ; such being at present the list of Horses that start for the Clerical Race every Sunday from my Daddy's door. I do hope you will, whenever wax, ferret and parchment will allow, come and show us a lawyer's trick or two, and mind you bring an exact account of the dimensions of Judge BuUer's thumb, that being a point which my Mama and Sisters are for special reasons desirous of ascertaining. Trinity Sunday, 1819. After describing minutely his anxieties on the score of Tom Keble's health, he continues : His complaint is not believed to be in the Lungs but in the wind-pipe, and if there be not a previous disposition to decay of that kind, which we have some reason to fear in our family. Dr. Bourne says he should think he would most probably recover. But however that be, we are not, God be thanked, in our own hands, but in the hands of One OTTERY ST. MARY 29 who loves us infinitely better than we do ourselves. If we could but once possess ourselves with that belief (which yet is more certain than anything which we do not see with our eyes) how little compara- tively would such trials appear to us — in comparison, I mean, with the least sin : and yet we commit great sins every day as if they were things of course. Indeed we all need one another's prayers very much, but not always in those respects in which our friends are apt to suppose we need them most. How comfortable to think that there is one Friend from whom none of our necessities can be hid and who cares for them all, if we have not wilfully rejected His care. I am sure I need not apologise for writing in this strain to you, who are so possessed, as I think, with the sincere love of our dear Master, that you would be glad to dedicate yourself entirely to His more especial service and ministry. But persevere with a good heart, my dear fellow, where you are, and do not doubt that Providence will give you opportunities enough of being useful. And, perhaps, to any man who would fain be in the Clerical Profession, but is hindered by circumstances, it may not be amiss to con- sider, that if the chance of doing good is increased, the responsibility is increased 30 ARTHUR COLERIDGE along with it, and it is a fearful thing to think that one owes a heavier debt than one's fellows to the great owner of all ; aye, so fearful that nothing would enable one to support the thought, except it were the same recollection with which I ended the last paragraph, and with which if we brought it in as often as we have occasion, we should end every paragraph and every sentence we write or speak : i.e. that we have one who has redeemed our infinite debt, as well as promised us unfailing supplies for the future. August 23, 1819. ... As to my studies of late, if you want a good book to carry in your pocket on horse- back or at odd times, let me recommend Bishop Wilson's " Maxims." If you want a book to make you hate Whiggism and laugh at King William of glorious memory, let me recommend Bishop Burnet's "Own Times." If you want an ingenious prosy book of Morality without Christianity, I recommend Dr. Adam Smith on Moral Sentiment. If you want to sleep I recommend the Greek Metres, and if you want a headache I re- commend Maclaurin's Account of Newton's. Discoveries. And if you are not contented with all this you can go where you can get better advice. — I am thy true friend, J. K. OTTERY ST. MARY 31 August 2Sth, 1825. . . . I am soon to move upon my permanent station in Hampshire. It is called Hursley, and is a well-wooded and rather long-streeted village of brick, half way between Romsey and Winchester. You will easily guess what agreeable associations I have with it when I tell you that the estate once belonged to that loyal person Protector Cromwell — ^not Oliver, but poor Richard, and the stables built by him are yet extant. ... It is only 5 miles from Winchester, with one of the best choirs, I believe, and certainly one of the most interesting Cathedrals in England ; 9 from South- ampton, which will afford as many balls and routs as ever one could swallow — and that you know is quite in ray way. — Ever more and more affectionately yours, J. K. June 18th, 1827. . . . I wish you many happy returns of this anniversary of the battle of Waterloo. . . . If you knew my father well and his violent objections to locomotion, nothing tortoise - like would astonish you in a Keble. . . . Among other things, having now no Lease, I am become a desperate, I may say a des- perant, Politician, and am of opinion the Church is in more danger just now than she 32 ARTHUR COLERIDGE has been in my time ; but ne sutor, etc. Anglice, Parsons have nothing to do with newspapers ; but I must say, had I much tithe property out at Lease, to fall in the year 1900, I think the late course of events in certain high quarters amply sufficient to lower the biddings for the same full 30 per cent. After such a croak as this you must be rejoiced to see me so near the end; to which said end, and at all times beyond it, believe me ever, dear Frank, Your aff. friend, J. Keble. Every kind wish to all the house of Coleridge in Ottery, London, Eton and Barbadoes. March 27th, 1830. My dear Friend — If you still allow me to call you so, for I am conscious I have quite forfeited the right to such a title from you, as far as inexcusable negligence and procrastination in a correspondent can forfeit it ; further, this deponent does not plead guilty, but when I consider that I have not even thanked you for your kind reception of me (I am ashamed to think how many years ago) nor even answered your letter last year, which was itself a greater favour by far than I deserved, I can hardly tell what to make of myself ; but I will " hope against hope " that I am not too old to mend. OTTERY ST. MARY 33 Somehow or other I have been gradually contracting a violent dislike of pen, ink, and paper, — what it bodes I know not — sometimes I am afraid of sulkiness in my old age ; but I was seriously affected the other day by seeing in the paper the death of an old friend to whom I had long owed a letter, and made some good resolutions of which you now receive some of the fruits, for the world (though I have no cause to grumble at it) is not so overflowing with delights that one should lightly spare one's own friends, and the new, I am sure, are not comparable. I am a&aid to rummage out your letter, for fear the date should be even more frightfully distant than I remember, but I know in general it gave a good accoimt of yourself and the whole furniture of your fireside — which I trust to liear confirmed whenever I hear news of you or from you — ^always hoping that little Zim does not bear malice for the severe nose-bleeding he had inflicted on him by my rude nursing. I have had some practice since, with my own nephew and niece who are mortal agreeable play- things in their way ; but I am not sure I treat them much better than I did him. I remember you did not send me a good account of your Father, but this I hope you will be able to amend. He has no business yet to give way, for I should think he was quite D 34 ARTHUR COLERIDGE ten or fifteen years younger than my Father, who is not so strong, but quite as cheerful as he was ten years ago. I do not perceive that this hard winter has hurt him at all. My Sister is just coming out with the Daffodils, and will, I trust, recover some strength — not that she has been ill, but the long con- finement of such a severe season makes her suffer from heat and languor ; I grudge going to London, where I must be next week to examine at the India House — ^this is not the weather to leave the Hepaticas and Violets with a good grace ; especially my learned friend in Torrington Square will be far at law, but I shall enquire of such of his kith and kin as I can get near. Henry, I believe, is not a Circuit lawyer, is he ? I don't mean to stay beyond Saturday in London, and shall probably be busy most of the time ; I should like to have a good fortnight there ; I could find something to do — ^but it must be : — (1) When your brother John is at home. (2) In Passion Week. (3) When my companions have someone to take care of them. One must have a touch of Politics in these times, and so I must ask you what you Devonshire people are about, petitioning against tithes ? You are surely losing all the little credit you got about the Catholic question — concerning which I wish you joy of being in the same mind as you OTTERY ST. MARY 35 were — I am not like to change ; at any rate I am more and more pleased that my good mother Oxford is well rid of Mr. Peel. I had hopes of him as long as I could after his change ; but now I have given him up. He affronted me so much about the anatomy and silk matters. I do not know how you go on in Devonshire, but surely in our manufacturing districts there is great distress and not much prospect of recovery that I can find. And Jiereabout our Labourers have had less work than usual for the last twelve- month. I suppose I am a bit of a croaker, but from all I see and read I anticipate a radical row before very long. I don't forget I owe you a little book when I have opportunity to send it, and I hope you will accept it as a peace-offering after the ill-breeding I have exhibited towards you, — Believe me, ever affectionately yours, J. Keble. August 7th, 1833. ... As for my friends here, Newman and the rest, we are still more and more of the same mind that we were when I wrote to you about the Tracts. Everything we see, hear, and read convinces us that our only security is in adhering to the old Church of all, and trying modern notions, Protestant and Papist alike, by her standards. It is the 86 ARTHUR COLERIDGE only way I am satisfied, to prevent a fearful reaction in favour of Popery. Nffor. 30(ft, 1836. ... It does one's heart good always to have a letter from you, you are so very much the same hearty fellow that you were at 18 years old or whatever was your age when I first knew you, and moreover your reports are always so cheerful and comfortable. ... As to my works with the pen, they look much grander in Rivington's advertisements than they do in reality ; Pusey and Newman sent my name to the Library of the Catholic Fathers almost without my knowledge, and I am very glad if it is undertaken and hope I shall be able to do some little towards it. If you and such as you support it, it is sure to answer, but I shall be a little anxious about it until we have really made a begin- ning, and I see how we get through the Preface and Introduction and those kind of things. There is much in the Fathers to startle inex- perienced readers, but it is more than ordinary consequence to get things properly explained beforehand, and the reader's mind put in the right train. My father, happy in the opportunity of death in the year 1854, was fortunate in being attended in his last hours by Bishop OTTERY ST. MARY 37 Selwyn ; Keble happened to be at Ottery a short time afterwards. I begged him to write in my own copy of the Christian Year a few words on the death of his hfelong friend. At first he refused on the ground that he had poor claims to be called a poet ; if any such had ever existed he had become rusty and couldn't trust himself, etc. I overruled the modesty and self-depre- ciation ; he gave way at last, and asked me to suggest some one feature of my father's character which I wished to serve for a theme ; I suggested his love and reverence of good men whom he had loyally befriended in his lifetime. The text and lines written by Keble are as follows : " Who shaU dwell upon Thy holy hill ? " " He that is lowly in his own eyes, and maketh much of them that fear the Lord." " Dear friend and father out of sight. How may we muse on thee aright ? For deep the bliss and high the trust. In all thy ways be true and just ; In heart be lowly, meek in word ; Make much of them that fear the Lord." Two very eminent lawyers were connected with Ottery ; these were Sir John Patteson, who married my father's only sister, Frances Duke Coleridge, and my uncle, Sir John 38 ARTHUR COLERIDGE Taylor Coleridge, whose life has been ad- mirably sketched by his own grandson, my dear relative the present Lord Coleridge, the third of the judicial order in my family. The obituary notice of my uncle Patteson was from the pen of Sir J. T. Coleridge. Ottery's chief historical asset is the inspired Charity boy, S. T. Coleridge, con- cerning whom I shaU make but a small and humble contribution to the masses of informa- tion LQ existence, and I shall limit my words to first-hand authorities who have given me their own recollections or interviews with S. T. C. I was but four years old when the poet died at Highgate. From his deathbed he sent a copy of his poems to my yoimger sister, Emma Duke Coleridge, with an auto- graph inscription to the following effect : " To my unseen but dearly loved godchild, S. T. Coleridge." My father told me that at one of his few interviews with his uncle, he was compli- mented by him on his likeness to Francis Coleridge, the poet's brother, who died in 1792 as a Lieutenant, in consequence of a fever brought on by excessive fatigue at and after the Siege of Seringapatam and the storming of a hill fort ; during that period OTTERY ST. MARY 39 his conduct had been so gallant that his Com- manding Officer particularly noticed him and presented him with a gold watch. Samuel had good reasons for appreciating the solid virtues and character of his brother George, the Ottery schoolmaster. The poet said of him, " He is a man of reflective mind and elegant talent. He possesses learning to a greater degree than any of the family, excepting myself. His manners are grave, and hued over with a tender sadness. In his moral character he approaches ever nearer to perfection than any man I ever yet knew. He is worth us all." I fear that this good man was severely tried by the harum-scarum ways of his gifted and erratic brother, especially at the time when the poet accepted the King's shiUing and volun- teered as a private in a Cavalry regiment. He was a poor performer at riding and grooming a horse, but with the private soldiers as well as with the officers he was very popxilar, and they gave him a hearty send-off when he left the regiment at Reading after his brief military experiences. I have seen the correspondence between the Com- manding Officer and the brothers at Ottery who subscribed to buy out " Comberbatch " 40 ARTHUR COLERIDGE from the 15th Hussars. The letters are most creditable to the officers. Apropos of the Cambridge medal and Coleridge's proxime accessit to Dr. Keate in his Greek ode on Astronomy and to Bishop Butler for the Craven Scholarship, we have his own estimate of the fallibility of the Cambridge examiners. Writing to his friend Cottle from Stowey in July 1797, he finishes his letter thus : " Give my love to your brother Amos. I condole with him in the loss of the prize, but it is the fortune of war. The finest Greek poem I ever wrote lost the prize, and that which gained it was contemptible. An ode may sometimes be too bad for the prize but very often too good." Lady Coleridge, mother of the first Lord Coleridge, was now and again in the poet's company ; she told me that in the baby days of the future Chief Justice, " Uncle Sam would roll the child about on the carpet, muttering ' Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven ! ' " The warmest admirers of the brilliant orator, advocate, and judge must admit that the present world was not entirely out of the calculation in his very successful career. The quotation was more nearly true if applied to the first Sir John Coleridge, /' OTTERY ST. MARY 41 integer vitae, scelerisque purus, the bosom friend of Keble and other saintly men. Of his inner Ufe it was my privilege to know a great deal ; he was a second father to me, stern at times, righteous always. For some years my father's cousin, William Hart Coleridge, was a curate at St. Andrew's, Holborn. On one sharp winter's day, the poet walked all the way from Highgate to call on his nephew, wishing, as he said, to hear him read the service ; I fear there may have been a i&ixed motive for this morning's walk. The poet, thinly clad, was observed to be unusually anxious about the top buttons of a double-breasted waistcoat. " Bless my heart, William, I have forgotten my shirt." William disappeared in the upper regions and soon came back with a change of raiment, at once appropriated and never returned to the reverend owner. Lord Houghton once showed me a novel founded on S. T. Coleridge's experiences in the army as a Cavalry soldier, and I asked him to give me an account of the conversation that passed between him, his undergraduate friend, and S. T. Coleridge, when the poet was in extremis at Highgate. He told me that the conversation turned upon the Con- 42 ARTHUR COLERIDGE version of St. Paul on his way to Damascus. " How," said S. T. C, " can anyone believe such a story, told by a tipsy man on horse- back ? " I was staggered by the story, and in after years put the case before Lord Tennyson, who relieved me greatly by saying : " Lord Houghton started a paradox and wanted to give you a shock which might draw you into 'some controversy as to the state of your relative's religious belief. He was quite capable of mystifying younger men who only knew him by his books." With me he was only half successful, for my belief remains unshaken that none but reverential words and thoughts filled the mind of the poet in his last hours. His humour and self- depreciation found vent in a letter, the original of which is in my possession. It runs as follows .: — My dear Mrs. Aders — ^By my illness or oversight I have occasioned a very sweet vignette to have been made in vain — except for its own beauty. Had I sent you the lines that were to be written on the upright tomb, you and our excellent Miss Denman would have, first, seen the dimension requisite for letters of a distinctly visible and legible size ; and secondly, that the homely, plain Church- OTTERY ST. MARY 43 yard Christian verses would not be in keeping with a muse (though a lowUer I never wooed), nor with a lyre or harp or laurel, or aught else Parnassian and allegorical. A rude old yew tree, or a mountain ash, or a grave or two, or any other characteristic of a village church- yard, — such a hint of a landscape was all I meant ; but if any figure, rather that of an elderly man thoughtful, with quiet tears upon his cheek. But I send the lines and you and Miss Denman will form yotir own opinion. Is one of WyviUe's proofs of my face worth Mr. Aders' acceptance ? I wrote under the one I sent to Henry Coleridge the line from Ovid, with the translation, thus : S. T. Coleridge, aetat, suae 63. Not handsome was he, but was eloquent. Non formosus erat, sed erat facundus Ulysses. In truth he's no beauty ! eryed Moll, Poll, and Tab ; But they all of them owned he'd the gift of the Gab. My best love to Mr. Aders, and believe that as I have been, so I ever remain your affectionate and trusty friend, S.T. Coleridge. P.S. — I like the tombstone very much. The lines when printed woidd probably have on the preceding page the advertise- ment — 44 ARTHUR COLERIDGE Epitaph on a Poet little known, yet better KNOWN BY the INITIALS OF HIS NAME THAN BY THE NAME ITSELF. Stop, Christian passer-by ! Stop, child of God ! And read with gentle heart : Beneath this sod A poet lies ; or that which once seemed he. O lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C. That he, who many a year with toilsome breath Found Death in Life, may here find Life in Death, Mercy for Praise, to be forgiven for Fame, He asked and hoped through Christ. Do thou the same. Sir Charles Crompton told me of his one experience of an interview with the poet ; this was at Derby. " My father," he said, " on hearing that Coleridge had some thoughts of keeping a school, was anxious that I should become his pupil. His Bristol sermons and Unitarian views had their many admirers, and Dissenters and Unitarians were not scared by the fact that BuUer, the Bishop of Exeter, had offered to ordain him, the erratic preacher. Happily, as I think, for them, Devonshire or Somersetshire rustics lost the benefit of his parochial ministrations, which, for all their eloquence and learning (for he was a great divine) would have mystified them as completely as his father's had done with the Ottery parishioners in old days. Dr. OTTERY ST. MARY 45 Crompton, thinking it wise to talk over the teaching plan with the poet, asked him to luncheon. There was a large cocoanut on the table, and the Ancient Mariner applied himself so energetically to its contents that the Crompton family grew anxious on their guest's account. The tutor - and - pupil negotiations fell through." The Cromptons, I think, had a lucky escape from a school- master whose visionary schemes squared so imperfectly with the requirements of pre- paratory schools for youn§ gentlemen. Mrs. Coleridge's idea of the commissariat must have been of an elementary kind, and before the plan was to be launched, the young man planned a visit to Germany, and a trip to Jena, where Schiller lived, whose entire works Coleridge seriously thought of trans- lating. As we know, all that came of that dream was a version of Wallenstein, the original of which is now preserved in the Rugby School Library. I recognized the handwriting at once, and my curiosity was aroused as to how the MS. came there. It turned out that the well-known metaphysi- cian, Shadworth Hodgson, had bought it at a sale of De Quincey's library, and presented it to his old school. 46 ARTHUR COLERIDGE Though it recalls sad passages in my early life, I cannot but refer to the disastrous influence of the " Oxford Movement," which led in not a few instances to a break-up in family life and all the discomfort of divided households. From Ottery St. Mary to the Flaminian Gate of Rome is a far cry, but Cardinal Wiseman's famous letter was taken au serieux by some Sunday School teachers who in their excess of zeal interlarded their very thin teaching with exhortations in favour of what soon came to be called the Papal Aggression. The good Vicar of Ottery strenuously objected, and in my judgment wisely, to this very novel form of instruc- tion, but real mischief was in the air and soon spread over large areas throughout England. Disasters might have followed but for the xmflinching loyalty of Keble and Pusey, who never swerved from their lofty ideals of duty to the Church of which they were the foremost champions. Among those who went over to Rome were not a few who, disappointed with their change, returned to the Church they had too hastily abandoned. I know of an English Bishop, one of whose last Episcopal acts before he died was to receive OTTERY ST. MARY 47 three Roman Catholic Priests into our own Communion. / I think the memory of the great Church- men who remained loyal in those dangerous days cannot be sufficiently honoured. Fore- most among such champions was Hugh James Rose, who had a far-reaching influence at both our Universities. Blunt and Mill at Cambridge, Keble and Pusey at Oxford, fought the good fight when " our need was the sorest," and in the generation after them came the great school of Cambridge divines, such as Westcott, Hort, Lightfoot, and Benson. I regard the Oxford Movement as one which has inevitably led to excesses that have rent the Church asunder ; in fact the iconoclasm of a Kensit and the virulence of the Nonconformists are ultimately refer- able to the same cause. I may refer here to a pamphlet called " Questions of Conscience," published at Cambridge over the initials " W. J.," which is printed in full in Letters and Journals of William Cory. Lady Patteson, my father's only sister, passed her early years at Ottery ; two of her infant children lie in Ottery Churchyard ; her eldest son, the martyred Bishop, was buried at sea. His name liveth evermore ; 48 ARTHUR COLERIDGE in years to come, pilgrims will visit the church at Alphington, near Ottery, where he minis- tered for three years, preparing himself for the apostolic life and the martyr's crown which awaited him. The memory of my relative is a very sacred possession to me. I witnessed his two ordinations as Deacon and Priest in Exeter Cathedral ; I heard him preach his first sermon at Alphington. But th^ farthest-reaching and most eloquent of all his sermons were the life he lived and the death he died. CHAPTER II ETON After leaving Ottery School I was sent to Eton, beginning my life there as a pupil of my uncle, the Rev, Edward Coleridge, and boarding at Evans's, where I spent several happy years, until I passed on to the foun- dation as a K.S., and in due time had the good fortune to be elected as a scholar of King's College, Cambridge. My oppidan days have been already summarized in a contribution made by me to The Last of the Eton Dames at the request of the author, Major E. Gambler Parry ; and I have also referred to this time in my own recollections of Eton in the Forties. I managed to be " sent up for good " nine or ten times, I forget which ; I was awarded a Latin declamation prize, and my work, enriched by some " purple patches " by my lifelong friend Bishop Abraham, who 49 E 60 ARTHUR COLERIDGE overhauled the rough draft of my speech, was, strange to say, successful. The passages I have mentioned I gave out ore rotundo in the Upper School ; the real author, if he were present, must have smiled at my sham laurels. The oddity of the recitation by Dr. Hawtrey of " sent up " exercises consisted in the fact that the Head Master conferred his stereotyped form of benediction on verses and themes whether composed by a Goldwin Smith or by Brown, Jones, and Robinson. " Very well ; very good exercise," he said, and with a blush we walked down from the step below the dais of the Head Master's desk and resumed our seats in the crowd. Now and then the Head Master could not refrain from a sneer or a satirical remark on a passage which had passed muster before the Assistant who vouched in the first instance for the correctness of the exercise, prose or verse. One solecism I well remember in a translation of the line. Forgive, blest shade, the tributary tear. This was parodied by Welby, who as a rule had a singular aptitude for writing correct Latin verses : Da veniam lacrjrmae madidi vectigal ocelli. ETON 51 E. C. H : " What on airth do you mean ? Forgive to a tear the property tax of a moist little peeper ? " Welby was mercilessly chaffed for this specimen of Latin poetry. In a copy of Greek Sapphics of which I was guilty, the Head Master discovered two false quantities ; I was forced to give away my tutor, when asked if he had corrected the blunders. I murmured to myself, " O my prophetic soul, my Uncle ! " Holiday tasks, as duties of imperfect obligation, in my time were supposed to keep our lamps of knowledge burning, and especially the art of composition. I doubt their efficacy with the average boy, for mediocre poets spoil reams of paper ; born poets are sure to come to the front without a forcing system. Twice, I think, I was ordered to write a Greek tragedy, and a very piteous tragedy was the result ; a copy of one of these melancholy inventions is still in my desk ; I can cry and laugh over it before consigning it for ever to limbo. My old friend George Brodrick referred to his Greek play (on the subject of Kpoia-o