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
And yet, like everything which came from Coleridge's hand, this
immature and unpractical production has an interest of its own. Amid
the curious mixture of actuality and abstract disquisition of which
each number of the _Watchman_ is made up, we are arrested again and
again by some striking metaphor or some weighty sentence which tells us
that the writer is no mere wordy wielder of a facile pen. The paper on
the slave trade in the seventh number is a vigorous and, in places, a
heart-stirring appeal to the humane emotions. There are passages in it
which foreshadow Coleridge's more mature literary manner--the manner of
the great pulpit orators of the seventeenth century--in a very
interesting way. [3] But what was the use of No. IV containing an
effective article like this when No. III. had opened with an
"Historical Sketch of the Manners and Religion of the Ancient Germans,
introductory to a sketch of the Manners, Religion, and Politics of
present Germany"? This to a public who wanted to read about Napoleon
and Mr. Pitt! No. III. in all probability "choked off" a good
proportion of the commonplace readers who might have been well content
to have put up with the humanitarian rhetoric of No. IV., if only for
its connection with so unquestionable an actuality as West Indian
sugar. It was, anyhow, owing to successive alienations of this kind
that on 13th May 1796 the editor of the _Watchman_ was compelled to bid
farewell to his few remaining readers in the tenth number of his
periodical, for the "short and satisfactory" reason that "the work does
not pay its expenses." "Part of my readers," continues Coleridge,
"relinquished it because it did not contain sufficient original
composition, and a still larger part because it contained too much;"
and he then proceeds with that half-humorous simplicity of his to
explain what excellent reasons there were why the first of these
classes should transfer their patronage to Flower's _Cambridge
Intelligencer_, and the second theirs to the _New Monthly Magazine_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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