English Men of Letters: ColeridgeTraill, H. D. (Henry Duff)
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English Men of Letters: Coleridge
Traill, H. D. (Henry Duff)
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834; Critics -- Great Britain -- Biography; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
The following year brought with it no improvement in the embarrassed
circumstances, no reform of the disordered life. Still domiciled with
Mr. Morgan at Calne, the self-made sufferer writes to Cottle: "You will
wish to know something of myself. In health I am not worse than when at
Bristol I was best; yet fluctuating, yet unhappy, in circumstances poor
indeed! I have collected my scattered and my manuscript poems
sufficient to make one volume. Enough I have to make another. But, till
the latter is finished, I cannot, without great loss of character,
publish the former, on account of the arrangement, besides the
necessity of correction. For instance, I earnestly wish to begin the
volumes with what has never been seen by any, however few, such as a
series of odes on the different sentences of the Lord's Prayer, and,
more than all this, to finish my greater work on 'Christianity
considered as philosophy, and as the only philosophy.'" Then follows a
request for a loan of forty pounds on the security of the MSS., an
advance which Cottle declined to make, though he sent Coleridge "some
smaller temporary relief." The letter concludes with a reference to a
project for taking a house and receiving pupils to hoard and instruct,
which Cottle appeared to consider the crowning "degradation and
ignominy of all."
A few days later we find Lord Byron again coming to Coleridge's
assistance with a loan of a hundred pounds and words of counsel and
encouragement. Why should not the author of Remorse repeat his success
I "In Kean," writes Byron, "there is an actor worthy of expressing the
thoughts of the character which you have every power of embodying, and
I cannot but regret that the part of Ordonio was disposed of before his
appearance at Drury Lane. We have had nothing to be mentioned in the
same breath with Remorse for very many years, and I should think that
the reception of that play was sufficient to encourage the highest
hopes of author and audience." The advice was followed, and the drama
of Zapolya was the result. It is a work of even less dramatic strength
than its predecessor, and could scarcely, one thinks, have been as
successful with an audience. It was not, however, destined to see the
footlights. Before it had passed the tribunal of the Drury Lane
Committee it had lost the benefit of Byron's patronage through the
poet's departure from England, and the play was rejected by Mr. Douglas
Kinnaird, the then reader for the theatre, who assigned, according to
Mr. Gillman, "some ludicrous objections to the metaphysics." Before
leaving England, however, Byron rendered a last, and, as the result
proved, a not unimportant service to his brother-poet. He introduced
him to Mr. Murray, who, in the following year, undertook the
publication of _Christabel_--the most successful, in the sense of the
most popular, of all its author's productions in verse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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