peculiar qualities which give force to the newspaper article is for a journalist, of course, a "counsel of perfection;" but it remains to be remarked that Coleridge did make this addition in a most conspicuous manner. Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's three volumes of her father's Essays on his own Times deserve to live as literature apart altogether from their merits as journalism. Indeed among the articles in the Morning Post between 1799 and 1802 may be found some of the finest specimens of Coleridge's maturer prose style. The character of Pitt, which appeared on 19th March 1800, is as remarkable for its literary merits as it is for the almost humorous political perversity which would not allow the Minister any single merit except that which he owed to the sedulous rhetorical training received by him from his father, viz. "a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words."1 The letters to Fox, again, though a little artificialised perhaps by reminiscences of Junius, are full of weight and dignity. But by far the most piquant illustration of Coleridge's peculiar power is to be found in the comparison between his own version of Pitt's speech of 17th February 1800, on the continuance

1 The following passage, too, is curious as showing how polemics, like history, repeat themselves. "As his reasonings were, so is his eloquence. One character pervades his whole being. Words on words, finely arranged, and so dexterously consequent that the whole bears the semblance of argument and still keeps awake a sense of surprise; but, when all is done, nothing rememberable has been said; no one philosophical remark, no one image, not even a pointed aphorism. Not a sentence of Mr. Pitt's has ever been quoted, or formed the favourite phrase of the day--a thing unexampled in any man of equal reputation." With the alteration of one word—the proper name-this passage might have been taken straight from some political diatribe of to-day.

of the war, with the report of it which appeared in the Times of that date. With the exception of a few unwarranted elaborations of the arguments here and there, the two speeches are in substance identical; but the effect of the contrast between the minister's cold state-paper periods and the life and glow of the poetjournalist's style is almost comic. Mr. Gillman records that Canning, calling on business at the editor's, inquired, as others had done, who was the reporter of the speech for the Morning Post, and, on being told, remarked drily that the report "did more credit to his head than to his memory."

On the whole one can well understand Mr. Stuart's anxiety to secure Coleridge's permanent collaboration with him in the business of journalism; and it would be possible to maintain, with less of paradox than may at first sight appear, that it would have been better not only for Coleridge himself but for the world at large if the editor's efforts had been successful. It would indeed have been bowing the neck to the yoke; but there are some natures upon which constraint of that sort exercises not a depressing but a steadying influence. What, after all, would the loss in hours devoted to a comparatively inferior class of literary labour have amounted to when compared with the gain in much-needed habits of method and regularity, and more valuable than all to an intellect like Coleridge's,-in the constant reminder that human life is finite and the materials of human speculation infinite, and that even a world-embracing mind must apportion its labour to its day? There is, however, the great question of health to be considered-the question, as every one knows, of Coleridge's whole career and life. If

health was destined to give way, in any event-if its collapse, in fact, was simply the cause of all the lamentable external results which followed it, while itself due only to predetermined internal conditions over which the sufferer had no control-then to be sure cadit quæstio. At London or at the Lakes, among newspaper files or old folios, Coleridge's life would in that case have run the same sad course; and his rejection of Mr. Stuart's offer becomes a matter of no particular interest to disappointed posterity. But be that as it may, the "old folios" won the day. In the summer of 1800 Coleridge quitted London, and having wound up his affairs at his then place of residence, removed with his wife and children to a new and beautiful home in that English Lake country with which his name was destined, like those of Southey and Wordsworth, to be enduringly associated.

CHAPTER V.

Life at Keswick-Second part of Christabel-Failing health -Resort to opium-The Ode to Dejection-Increasing restlessness-Visit to Malta.

[1800-1804.]

WE are now approaching the turning-point, moral and physical, of Coleridge's career. The next few years determined not only his destiny as a writer but his life as a man. Between his arrival at Keswick in the summer of 1800 and his departure for Malta in the spring of 1804 that fatal change of constitution, temperament, and habits which governed the whole of his subsequent history had fully established itself. Between these two dates he was transformed from the Coleridge of whom his young fellow-students in Germany have left us so pleasing a picture into the Coleridge whom distressed kinsmen, alienated friends, and a disappointed public were to have before them for the remainder of his days. Here, then, at Keswick, and in these first two or three years of the century-here or nowhere is the key to the melancholy mystery to be found.

It is probable that only those who have gone with some minuteness into the facts of this singular life are

aware how great was the change effected during this very short period of time. When Coleridge left London for the Lake country he had not completed his eight-andtwentieth year. Before he was thirty he wrote that Ode to Dejection in which his spiritual and moral losses are so pathetically bewailed. His health and spirits, his will and habits, may not have taken any unalterable bent for the worse until 1804, the year of his departure for Malta-the date which I have thought it safest to assign as the definitive close of the earlier and happier period of his life; but undoubtedly the change had fully manifested itself more than two years before. And a very great and painful one it assuredly was. We know from the recorded evidence of Dr. Carrlyon and others that Coleridge was full of hope and gaiety, full of confidence in himself and of interest in life during his few months' residence in Germany. The annus mirabilis of his poetic life was but two years behind him, and his achievements of 1797-98 seemed to him but a mere earnest of what he was destined to accomplish. His powers of mental concentration were undiminished, as his student days at Göttingen sufficiently proved; his conjugal and family affections, as Dr. Carrlyon notes for us, were still unimpaired; his own verse gives signs of a home-sickness and a yearning for his own fireside which were in melancholy contrast with the restlessness of his later years. Nay, even after his return to England, and during the six months of his regular work on the Morning Post, the vigour of his political articles entirely negatives the idea that any relaxation of intellectual energy had as yet set in. Yet within six months of his leaving London for Keswick there begins a progressive decline in Cole