66

always ill." This may have been true; yet it was during what ought to have been the best years of his life that he wrote for the Papers, and, doubtless, what he did produce helped to exhaust his scanty stock of bodily power, and to prevent him from writing as many books as he might have done, had circumstances permitted him to use his pen, not for procuring the necessities of the week," but in the manner most congenial to his own mind, and ultimately most useful to the public. "Such things as The Morning Post and money," says Mr. S., in the Gentleman's Magazine, never settled upon his mind." I believe that such things unsettled his mind, and made him, as the lampooner said, with a somewhat different allusion, "Like to a man on double business bound, who both neglects." This was a trouble to himself and all connected with him. Le ciel nous vend toujours les biens qu'il nous prodigue, may be applied to my poor father emphatically.

In regard to the remuneration he received, I do not bring forward the particulars given by Mr. Stuart of his liberal dealing with Mr. Coleridge, simply because the rehearsal of them would be tedious, and could answer no end. Such details may be superseded by the general declaration, that I believe my Father to have received from Mr. Stuart far more than the market value of his contributions to the Papers which that gentleman was concerned in. Mr. Stuart says that he "paid at the time as highly as such writings were paid for," and to Mr. Coleridge's satisfaction, which my Father's own letters certainly testify; and concludes the account of sums advanced by him to Mr. C. when he was not writing for the paper, by saying that he had "at least 7007. of him besides many acts of kindness." A considerable part of this was spent on stamps and paper for The Friend; two hundred of it was given after the publication of the Biographia Literaria.

66

Mr. Coleridge expressed his esteem for Mr. Stuart and sense of his kindness very strongly in letters to himself, but not more strongly than to others. He speaks of him in a letter written about the beginning of 1809, addressed to a gentleman of the Quaker persuasion at Leeds, as a man of the most consummate knowledge of the world, managed by a thorough strong and sound judgment, and rendered innocuous by a good heart"'-as a "most wise, disinterested, kind, and constant friend." In a letter to my Mother, written on his return from Malta, he says, "Stuart is a friend, and a friend indeed."

I have thought it right to bring forward these particulars—(I and those equally concerned with myself)—not only out of regard to truth

of compulsion disarmed him. I could name other able literary men in this unfortunate plight." One of the many grounds of argument against the sole profession of literature.

and openness, that the language of this work respecting The Morning Post and The Courier may not be interpreted in any way contrary to fact, which, I think, it need not be; but also in gratitude to a man who was serviceable and friendly to my Father during many years of his life; who appreciated his merits as a prose writer when they were not generally known and acknowledged; and by whose aid his principal prose work, The Friend, was brought before the public. I do not complain in the least of his stating the facts of my Father's newspaper writings; in the manner in which this was done—as was pointed out at the time-there was something to complain of. Let me add that I consider his representation of my Father's feelings on certain occasions altogether incredible, and deeply regret these pieces of bad construing, dictated by resentment, in one who was once so truly his friend.

My Father certainly does not assert, as Mr. Stuart represents him as having asserted in the Literary Biography, that he "made the fortunes of The Morning Post and The Courier, and was inadequately paid.” He speaks of his writings as having been in furtherance of Government. I have no doubt he thought they were serviceable to Government and to his country, and that while they brought upon him the enmity of the anti-ministerial and Buonapartean party, and every possible hindrance to his literary career which the most hostile and contemptuous criticism of a leading journal could effect, they were unrewarded in any other quarter. There was truth in one half of Hazlitt's sarcasm, "his politics turned-but not to account." "From Government, or the friends of Government!" says Mr. Stuart. "Why, Coleridge was attacking Pitt and Lord Grenville in 1800, who were at the head of the Government. In 1801, when the Addingtons came into power, he wrote little or nothing in The Morning Post; in the autumn of 1802 he wrote one or two able essays against Buonaparte in relation to the Peace of Amiens, and he published in that paper, at that time, a letter or two to Judge Fletcher." This last sentence is a double mistake, as I have already shown. that time the newspaper press generally condemned the conduct of Buonaparte in the severest manner; and no part of it more severely than The Morning Post by my own writings. Cobbett attacked Fox, &c., but The Morning Post was the most distinguished on this subject, and the increase of its circulation was great. The qualified opposition to Government was not given to Pitt's ministry, but to Addington's. To Pitt The Morning Post was always, in my time, decidedly opposed. I supported Addington against Buonaparte, during the Peace of Amiens, with all my power, and in the summer of 1803 Mr. Estcourt came to me with a message of thanks from the prime minister, Mr. A. offering anything I wished. I declined the offer. It was not till the summer of

"At

1804, a year after I had left The Morning Post that, in The Courier, I supported Pitt against Buonaparte, on the same grounds I had supported Mr. Addington, Pitt having become again prime minister, to protect Lord Melville against the fifth clause. Coleridge confuses things. The qualified support of the ministry, he alludes to, applies wholly to The Courier," I do not see the material discrepancy between this statement and my Father's, when he says The Morning Post was “ anti-ministerial, indeed, but with far greater earnestness and zeal, both anti-jacobin and anti-gallican," and that it proved a far more useful ally to the Government in its most important objects, in consequence of its being generally considered moderately anti-ministerial, than if it had been the avowed eulogist of Mr. Pitt; "that the rapid increase in the sale of The Morning Post is a pledge that genuine impartiality with a respectable portion of literary talent will secure the success of a newspaper without ministerial patronage," and that from "the commencement of the Addington administration" whatever he himself had written "in The Morning Post or Courier was in defence of Government." In the preceding paragraph he argues that neither Mr. Percival nor "the present administration" pursued the plans of Mr. Pitt.

In what degree my Father's writings contributed to the reputation and success of The Morning Post cannot at this distance of time be precisely settled. It must indeed be difficult to say what occasions success in such enterprises, if Mr. Stuart's own brother could attribute that of The Morning Post to Sir James Mackintosh, "though with less reason even than if he had ascribed it to Coleridge." The long story told to show that booksellers were not aware of Mr. C.'s having produced any effect on the paper, and when they set up a rival journal, never cared to obtain his services, but eagerly secured those of Mr. Stuart's assistant, George Lane, does not quite decide the question; for booksellers, though, as Mr. Stuart says, "knowing men" in such matters, are not omniscient even in what concerns their own business. If the anti-gallican policy of The Morning Post "increased its circulation," I cannot but think that the influence of my Father's writings, though not numerous, and indirectly of his intercourse with the Editor,-who rates his conversational powers as highly as it is usual to rate them-in directing the tone and determining the principles of the paper, must have served it materially. I believe him to have been the anti-gallican spirit that governed The Morning Post, though he may not have performed as much of the letter as he fancied.

I shall conclude this subject with quoting part of a letter of my Father's on the subject of The Courier, to which Mr. Stuart, to whom it was addressed, declares himself to have replied, that " as long as he ac

tively interfered, the paper was conducted on the independent principles alluded to by Coleridge," but that, for reasons which he states, he found it best, from the year 1811, to "leave Street entirely to his own course;" and "so it gradually slid into a mere ministerial journal—an instrument of the Treasury:" "acquired a high character for being the organ of Government, and obtained a great circulation; but became odious to the mob-excited by the falsehoods of the weekly journals."

"MY DEAR STUART.

"Wednesday, 8th May, 1816. "James Gillman's, Esq., Surgeon, Highgate.

"SINCE you left me, I have been reflecting a great deal on the subject of the Catholic question, and somewhat on The Courier in general. With all my weight of faults (and no one is less likely to underrate them than myself), a tendency to be influenced by selfish motives in my friendships, or even in the cultivation of my acquaintance, will not, I am sure, be by you placed among them. When we first knew each other, it was perhaps the most interesting period of both our lives, at the very turn of the flood; and I can never cease to reflect with affectionate delight on the steadiness and independence of your conduct and principles, and how, for so many years, with little assistance from others, and with one main guide, a sympathizing tact for the real sense, feeling, and impulses of the respectable part of the English nation, you went on so auspiciously, and likewise so effectively. It is far, very far, from being a hyperbole to affirm, that you did more against the French scheme of Continental domination than the Duke of Wellington has done; or rather, Wellington could neither have been supplied by the Ministers, nor the Ministers supported by the nation, but for the tone first given, and then constantly kept up by the plain, un-ministerial, anti-opposition, anti-Jacobin, antiGallican, anti-Napoleon spirit of your writings, aided by a colloquial style and evident good sense, in which, as acting on an immense mass of knowledge of existing men and existing circumstances, you are superior to any man I ever met with in my life-time. Indeed you are the only human being, of whom I can say with severe truth, that I never conversed with you for an hour without rememberable instruction; and with the same simplicity I dare affirm my belief, that my greater knowledge of man has been useful to you, though, from the nature of things, not so useful as your knowledge of men has been to me.”

Now, with such convictions, my dear Stuart, how is it possible that I can look back on the conduct of The Courier, from the period of the Duke of York's restoration, without some pain? You cannot be seriously offended or affronted with me, if, in this deep confidence and in a

letter, which, or its contents, can meet no eye but your own, I venture to declare, that though since then much has been done, very much of high utility to the country, by and under Mr. Street, yet The Courier itself has gradually lost that sanctifying spirit which was the life of its life, and without which, even the best and soundest principles lose half their effect on the human mind; I mean, the faith in the faith of the person and paper which brings them forward. They are attributed to the accident of their happening to be for such a side, or for such a party. In short, there is no longer any root in the paper, out of which all the various branches and fruits, and even fluttering leaves, are seen or believed to grow. But it is the old tree, barked round above the root, though the circular decortication is so small and so neatly filled up and colored as to be scarcely visible but in its effects, excellent fruit still hanging on the boughs, but they are tied on by threads and hairs."

"In all this, I am well aware, that you are no otherwise to be blamed than in permitting that which, without disturbance to your heart and tranquillity, you could not, perhaps, have prevented or effectively modified. But the whole plan of Street seems to me to have been motiveless from the beginning, or at least affected by the grossest miscalculations, in respect even of pecuniary interests. For, had the paper maintained and asserted not only its independence, but its appearance of it;—it is true that Mr. Street might not have had Mr. A. to dine with him, or received as many nods and shakes of the hand from Lord this or that; but at least equally true, that the ministry would have been far more effectively served, and that (I speak from facts) both the paper and its conductor would have been held by the adherents of ministers in far higher respect; and after all, ministers do not love newspapers in their hearts, not even those that support them; indeed it seems epidemic among Parliament men in general to affect to look down upon and despise newspapers, to which they owe 222 of their influence and character, and at least 3ths of their knowledge and phraseology. Enough ! burn the letter, and forgive the writer, for the purity and affectionateness of his motive."-Quoted from the Gentleman's Magazine of June, 1838.

999

1000

One other point connected with Mr. C.'s writing for public journals I must advert to before concluding this chapter. Mr. Cottle finds want of memory in some part of the narrative, contained in this work, respecting the publication of The Watchman; it is as well to let him tell the story in his own way, which he does as follows. "The plain fact is, I purchased the whole of the paper for The Watchman, allowing Mr. C. to have it at prime cost, and receiving small sums from Mr. C. occasionally, in liquidation. I became responsible, also, with Mr. B. for printing the work, by which means I reduced the price per sheet, as a bookseller (1000),