English Men of Letters: ColeridgeTraill, H. D. (Henry Duff)
General
English Men of Letters: Coleridge
Traill, H. D. (Henry Duff)
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834; Critics -- Great Britain -- Biography; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
In September Coleridge returned to Cambridge, to keep what turned out
to be his last term at Jesus. We may fairly suppose that he had already
made up his mind to bid adieu to the Alma Mater whose bosom he was
about to quit for that of a more venerable and, as he then believed, a
gentler mother on the banks of the Susquehanna; but it is not
impossible that in any case his departure might have been expedited by
the remonstrances of college authority. Dr. Pearce, Master of Jesus,
and afterwards Dean of Ely, did all he could, records a friend of a
somewhat later date, "to keep him within bounds; but his repeated
efforts to reclaim him were to no purpose, and upon one occasion, after
a long discussion on the visionary and ruinous tendency of his later
schemes, Coleridge cut short the argument by bluntly assuring him, his
friend and master, that he mistook the matter altogether. He was
neither Jacobin, [8] he said, nor Democrat, but a Pantisocrat." And,
leaving the good doctor to digest this new and strange epithet,
Coleridge bade farewell to his college and his university, and went
forth into that world with which he was to wage so painful and variable
a struggle.
FOOTNOTES
1. He tells us in the _Biographia Literaria_ that he had translated the
eight hymns of Synesius from the Greek into English anacreontics
"before his fifteenth year." It is reasonable to suppose, therefore,
that he had more scholarship in 1782 than most boys of ten years.
2. Footnote: Gillman, pp. 22, 23.
3. Of this Coleridge afterwards remarked with justice that its "ideas
were better than the language or metre in which they were conveyed."
Porson, with little magnanimity, as De Quincey complains, was severe
upon its Greek, but its main conception--an appeal to Death to come, a
welcome deliverer to the slaves, and to bear them to shores where "they
may tell their beloved ones what horrors they, being men, had endured
from men"--is moving and effective. De Quincey, however, was
undoubtedly right in his opinion that Coleridge's Greek scholarship was
not of the exact order. No exact scholar could, for instance, have died
in the faith (as Coleridge did) that εστησε (S. T. C.) means "he
stood," and not "he placed."
4. Adding "that which gained the prize was contemptible"--an expression
of opinion hardly in accordance with Le Grice's statement
("Recollections" in _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1836) that "no one was
more convinced of the propriety of the decision than Coleridge
himself." Mr. Le Grice, however, bears valuable testimony to
Coleridge's disappointment, though I think he exaggerates its influence
in determining his career.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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