A STRAY NOTEBOOK OF MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS BY

HILTON KELLIHER

THE passing of on 25 July 1834 was deeply felt among the circle of his friends, but nowhere more keenly perhaps than in the household of Dr and Mrs James Gillman at No. 3 The Grove, Highgate. For the last eighteen years of his life the Gillmans had acted not merely as his hosts but as his closest companions, friends, confidants and staunch admirers, providing him with the stable and comfortable home life that had till then so conspicuously been wanting (fig. i). Following the death of Gillman himself in June 1839 it was the chief consolation of his widow Anne to dwell on earlier days and to display her memorabilia of the sage of Highgate to visitors from as far afield as America. Amongst the rest were some appreciative notices that included an autograph sonnet on Coleridge composed by the painter Washington Allston, whose well-known portrait was one of the family's treasured possessions.^ Another seems to have been the following set of verses: Think stranger of some being from above Full of high genius, eloquence and love. Yet as an infant humble; thou mayst so. What Coleridge was, conjecture, canst not know. A copy of this epigram is inscribed on the first flyleaf of an oblong black leather- bound notebook that recently came to light among a miscellaneous lot of items purchased in a auction-house.^ The simple attribution to 'Carey' suggests that the author of these lines was the Reverend Henry Francis Cary, the translator of Dante, who had been a close friend of the poet ever since they met and fell to discussion of Homer on the beach at Littlehampton in 1822. It serves to introduce a collection of Coleridge's prose writings, some of which are apparently unknown from any other source, that runs to 90 pages and is copied in a hand not recognisable as that of any member of his immediate circle. The same page carries a later statement of provenance in pencil that reads T S Colenso / nee Bunyon / to S D C. This anonymous jotting suflices to identify an early owner as Frances Sarah Bunyon (1816-93), wife from 1846 of John William Colenso (1814 83), later Bishop of Natal, who was to be in equal measure acclaimed and execrated both as a historical critic of the Pentateuch and as a champion of the Zulu people. From comparison of the main hand in the notebook with some 136 C/D

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U bo O items of correspondence that are to be found in the Library of RhodesHouse, Oxford, Frances Bunyon proves also to have been the transcriber.^ Who the eventual recipient of such a valuable gift may have been it is not so far possible to say, and even the date of presentation is unknown. Some member of the Colenso or Coleridge families would naturally seem the likeliest candidate, but unfortunately no one from the right period who bore the initials S.D.C. has yet come to light in either. At any rate, whoever received it was probably responsible for the statement of provenance noted above, and seems to have studied the contents attentively, marking passages in pencil and adding a few observations at various points. At some subsequent date it passed through the hands of a bookseller who wrote 'Coleridge', with the price one guinea, on the same flyleaf. The best published source for details concerning Frances Bunyon, the compiler of this small but interesting collection, is the introduction to Wyn Rees's Colenso Letters from Natal (Pietermaritzburg, 1958), an edition of letters that she wrote between 1865 and 1893, compiled from the Colenso papers housed in the Campbell Library of Africana at Durban and in the Natal Archives. She was the eldest child of Robert John Bunyon who had started his business career in 1811 by entering the family wine- business in Tower Street, London."*^ In 1831 he and his brother William entertained a merger, and under the name of Bunyon and Lynch diversified into the supply of coal. Presumably the total disappearance of this new firm from the Post Office London Directory after 1834 indicates that it had by then ceased trading, though the reasons for this can only be guessed at. Bunyon himself eventually secured a new position through his father-in-law Thomas Bignold, founder and head of the Norwich Union Insurance Company, for by 1836 he was acting as its Secretary at the head office in London. From this time he is said to have resided for the greater part of each year at No. 6 The Crescent, New Bridge Street in Blackfriars, with his wife Frances, son and three daughters. All the Bunyon children received sound, not to say expensive, educations, Charles passing eventually from Harrow to Cambridge while the daughters attended an academy for young ladies in Cheltenham. Here due attention was paid to their accomplishments: Frances was tutored in the piano and her sister Harriette in the harp by Gustavus Valentin(e) Hoist, grandfather of the famous composer, while Harriette, at least, studied watercolour drawing under Cornelius Varley and Henry Gastineau. The religious ethos of the Bunyon family was, in common with that of their Norwich relatives, evangelical; though like many another child in the first flush of discovering herself and her powers Frances came at the age of fourteen to express doubts about some of the basic theological tenets of Christianity: 'I cannot love the Saviour or feel that he is my Saviour nor even feel the weight of my sins.' The fact that she felt able to confide these doubts to her mother shows just how great a strength of love and understanding existed within the family. The parental finances were, however, of a somewhat shakier order, and much money was lost in unsuccessful ventures in South Wales iron and in mines. All the same, when Frances's father died in 1844 at the age of fifty-six her mother, her sister Ellen and she, though doubtless

138 somewhat reduced in circumstances, were by no means destitute. Her brother Charles had already begun a legal career by entering the Inner Temple, and Harriette had become the wife of Francis Thomas McDougall, the future Bishop of Labuan, in July 1843. At about the same time Frances became engaged to the brilliant but impecunious young Cornish fellow of St John's, Cambridge, whose presentation to the college living of Forncett St Mary in Norfolk finally enabled them to marry on 8 January 1846 at St George's, Bloomsbury. In addition to considerable prowess as a mathematician, Colenso's talents as a preacher were noted by his Cambridge contemporaries: it is said, however, that at the time of their first meeting his future wife was the better metaphysician of the two. Her early inclination this way is amply documented; and although it is not known exactly when she first became familiar with the writings of Coleridge, in 1837, at the age of twenty-one, she wrote to her brother in Cambridge that Lay Sermons and The Constitution of the Church and State were 'really quite necessary for a young man to possess'. Her close acquaintance with the writings of F. D. Maurice also predated her first encounter with her future husband, who came to share her admiration for them. As she later recalled:^

... it is true enough that I first turned his attention to the study of Coleridge and then of Maurice. I shall never forget finding him one morning, an hour before breakfast time . . . with a volume of Maurice in his hands, and his whole soul in his face, as it often was, with a wrapt assent and consent to what he had been reading, and a full conviction that he would find perfect sympathy on this point in mt—the foundation indeed of all our sympathy and love.

It was through Frances also that he became personally acquainted with Maurice, joining the band of friends and disciples that included and Tom Hughes, and striking up a lifelong friendship with Arthur Stanley, later Dean of Westminster. Sadly, the publication in 1862-3 of The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua critically examined was to cost him that of his old mentor.^ Frances's own friendship with Maurice came about through her admiration for Coleridge. During the summer months of each year it was the custom of the Bunyon family to obtain some respite from the scurry of the business district by renting houses in the country or in the suburbs, and this habit seems to have extended to other seasons also. By March 1842 they were occupying one of the dozen or so large houses in Hornsey Lane, Highgate, that were becoming increasingly sought after as retreats for city merchants.'' It was from here that, following the appearance of a new edition of Maurice's The Kingdom of Christ, in which he acknowledged his debts to Coleridge, she had summoned up the courage to write to the author.^ In this letter she expressed the hope that he might see fit to write a little tract as 'an answer to the sickening ques- tions, "What has Coleridge done.^" "Why do you look on him with such love and reverence?" '—criticisms that were clearly all too familiar to early admirers of the sage. In particular she may have had in mind here the unenchanted view of his metaphysical speculations as *a thrice-refined pabulum of transcendental moonshine' that was 139 entertained by Thomas Carlyle, another of her personal acquaintances.^ Maurice's belated reply elicited, probably in the late spring or summer of that year, an invitation to visit the Bunyons in Highgate, employing as bait something that may have proved an irresistible temptation to him:

Since I came to Highgate I have had the privilege of making Mrs. Gillman's acquaintance, and knowing her seemed a sort of distant approach to having known Mr. Coleridge, especially as she has lent me many MSS of his which have not yet been published, and some of which, being records of his daily life and personal feelings, are not perhaps for publication. But surely you would have every right to see them. . . .

Maurice's sense of gratitude to Coleridge may, incidentally, have been sharpened by the fact that his novel Eustace Conway had, in May 1834, been one of the very last books to engage Coleridge's attention and win his critical approval. ^° At any rate Frances's letter to him provides us not only with an independent argument for confirming the statement of provenance made on the front flyleaf of the notebook, but also with a clear date for its transcription. What is more, in view of the fact that this little collection includes extracts from writings seemingly otherwise unknown it is more than a little tantalising to find the designation 'N" IT at the head of the same leaf One wonders if other extracts from Coleridge's work may have been preserved in the previous volume, and whether there were any later ones in the same series. Possibly the phrase 'not yet been published' implies some knowledge on Frances's part of the future plans of Coleridge's literary executors; and she would no doubt have welcomed the initiative that has led to the publication of Coleridge's remains with such exemplary care in the continuing Bollingen edition.

Whatever their importance in the broadly literary sense, the contents of this notebook are interesting also as throwing some light on just what books, manuscripts and other memorabilia of Coleridge were still in the possession of the widowed Mrs Gillman in 1842. The fullest statement concerning the fate of Coleridge's library after his death is that given by the late George Whalley in the first volume of the Bollingen Marginalia., and the notes that follow are largely based on this, along with information found in Coleridge at Highgate (1925) by Lucy Eleanor Watson, eldest daughter of the Gillmans' elder son James.^^ By the terms of Coleridge's will his friend Joseph Henry Green, the surgeon and anatomist, had been appointed as the poet's hterary executor and to that end had been granted 'all my Books, manuscripts, and personal Estates and Effects whatsoever', with instruction to sell them and apply the money to the benefit of Coleridge's heirs.^^ He was to have discretion, if he 'should think it expedient', to publish any notes made in these books, or any other writings, including letters, provided that any financial gain arising from this be dedicated to the same purpose. Almost at once he began to search out whatever books Coleridge had left behind in his previous homes and haunts, the Wordsworth household at Rydal Mount being second only to

140 The Grove as a key source. His policy was to permit the poet's friends to take copies of any manuscript materials that they wished to preserve. In the case of the marginaha the Gillmans, in whose house the greater part of the books and working papers still remained, reportedly accomplished this by buying copies of the same or other editions and transcribing Coleridge's notes into them, a process almost to be equated with facsimile. Henry Crabb Robinson's exemplar of the 1791 reprint of Luther's Colloquia Mensaha in Henry Bell's translation, which incorporates, on inserted slips watermarked 1832, transcripts of annotations found in the poet's own copy of the edition of 1652, is a similar case in point. ^^ In 1837 Green exercised the option allowed him in the will of buying up books formerly owned by Coleridge. As to his editorial function he had, sensibly enough, agreed early on with members of Coleridge's family to divide up what he rightly recognised as a mammoth task, allotting the theological papers to Derwent Coleridge, the literary ones to and reserving the philosophical part to himself ^''" Much evidently remained at The Grove even after Green had removed the bulk of the publishable material. Mrs Watson, who had been born in 1838 and whose close contact with her grandmother had lasted 'from the winter of 1852 till the close of her life in the summer of i860', seems by 1895 to have inherited her collection of Coleridgeana. In 1925 she recalled the circumstances somewhat breathlessly

From the manuscripts that came into his possession he allowed my grandmother to copy anything that she might wish to preserve for herself. These copies she bequeathed to me, including some original MSS. in her own possession, also original letters from her husband (my grandfather) and to her eldest son (my father), besides other interesting memoranda concerning the Poet, also her Bible containing Coleridge's marginal notes in his own handwriting.

The principal omission here is of course some 43 books belonging to the Gillmans that contained notes or other markings made by Coleridge. Frances Bunyon's notebook incorporates annotations from two of these, namely Lucy Hutchinson's Memoir of Colonel Hutchinson, the Civil War Governor of Nottingham, in Longman's large-paper edition of 1806, and the Memoir of Bishop Sandford written by his son and published in 1832.1^ The Gillmans' copy of the latter, reputedly the last work that Coleridge ever read and annotated, is not now known to survive. This important class of material was supplemented by letters and other memoranda that the poet had addressed to his hosts or to other members of the family. Amongst these was the autograph of Coleridge's eulogy of Anne Gillman, written in 1832 as a note to his poem entitled 'Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath', and beginning 'This fountain is an exact emblem . . .'.^"^ It was copied into the present notebook and independently published from the autograph in 1895 in Alexander W. Gillman's Searches into the History of the Gillman or Gtlman Family.^^ Those 'records of his daily life and personal feelings' which Frances saw and which, she wrote to Maurice, 'are not perhaps for publication', seem most likely to have been Coleridge's private notebooks. They were still largely regarded as confidential, and she 141 must surely have evinced considerable devotion to his work for Mrs Gillman to let her consult, let alone to borrow, any of them. One of those that remained at Highgate was the notebook, now designated 'Q^, that had been partly transcribed by Coleridge's friend John Watson of Mill EUers, Carlisle. ^^ With some exceptions, including the latter, the greater part of the series is now divided between the British Library and the Library of Victoria College, Toronto.^*^ To these 'primary' materials that Green had not removed must be added copies made by the Gillmans from letters that Coleridge had written to various individuals, along with their transcripts of other miscellaneous items. Finally there were, as we have seen, some letters of condolence and posthumous memorials of Coleridge by his friends. Following James Gillman's death in 1839, Anne Gillman, on leaving The Grove in the spring of 1843, offered the bulk of their library of printed books for sale through the bookseller Southgate.^^ The 229 lots in this sale included 32 books that were noted in the catalogue as having Coleridge's annotations in them. However, twelve other such volumes, presumably of associative or sentimental value to Mrs Gillman or her children, were retained by the family and eventually passed to Lucy Watson, whose memoir includes extracts from several of the texts that had been transcribed by Frances Bunyon in 1842. It was from Mrs Watson, apparently following the publication of her book, that T. J. Wise acquired those annotated books— mostly religious in character—that are now preserved among the Ashley Collection in the British Library.^-^

Any intending editor of the Coleridge remains as they are preserved in this notebook must attempt first of all to verify the authentic nature of Frances Bunyon's copy-texts and then to evaluate the accuracy of her transcripts by comparison with surviving originals. Her letter to Maurice is, like many such statements, less than specific, and need not be taken as implying that all her copy-texts were authorial autographs and derived from the same source. Mrs Gillman could scarcely have been in a position to loan original manuscripts in all cases. It seems unlikely, for instance, that the entry dated February 1832 derived directly from the autograph album for which it had been written, unless of course it was communicated by the young lady concerned. The same applies to the texts of several letters that are preserved here, and that probably derive from copies that Coleridge had given to the Gillmans, or allowed them to make. Accordingly one must be prepared to try to estabhsh the source of each extract individually. The Coleridge notebooks are an interesting case in point. In view of the dispersal of materials after Coleridge's death, these are generally assumed to have been partly in the possession of Green (who in 1837 had retired to Hadley near Barnet) and partly in that of the other editors. Some of them were certainly in Henry Nelson Coleridge's hands when he edited his uncle's Table Talk in 1835 and Literary Remains in the following year: by the spring of 1842, however, he had been seized by progressive paralysis and would have been in no state to receive an eager young visitor at his Regents Park home.^^ By rights the twenty-three notebooks that Coleridge called his 'Fly-catchers', now numbered

142 33 to 55 in the series and largely comprising theological notes, ought by this time to have been in the hands of Derwent Coleridge, then principal of St Mark's College, Chelsea.^ Nevertheless, Frances evidently gained a sight of at least some of them, and was moreover able to conclude the transcripts in her second volume (fols. 38^ 45^) with part of a commentary on St John's Gospel that is to be found in no. 36.^^ A 'large volume on the LOGOS, or the communicative intelligence in nature and in man, together with, and as preliminary to, a Commentary on the Gospel of St. John', first announced in August 1814, was Coleridge's great unfinished scheme, to which he made frequent references throughout his later years.^^ It is, of course, not possible to be certain that she was working directly from the original notebook; yet although it is known that Mrs Gillman herself went through Coleridge's papers after his death it is difficult to see why she might particularly have wished to single out for preservation these unrelated passages. In the circumstances, therefore—unless we assume that Miss Bunyon's second volume drew on more heterogeneous sources than the first—it seems likely that some of Coleridge's notebooks were still with Mrs Gillman at Highgate. As regards the verbal accuracy of Miss Bunyon's transcripts there can, of course, be no guarantee, though comparison of her copies with the autograph originals, where these are available, reveals a moderate to high degree of fidelity. At the lower end of the scale her transcript from notebook no. 36 is a rather untidy affair, which omits some of Coleridge's Greek quotations while adding a word or two not found in the original entries, most probably by mere accident. Surprisingly enough they open not with the entry dated 16 January 1828 in which Coleridge 'Began St John's Gospel anew', but with his annotations on chapter 4, verse 22; and they end abruptly in the middle of an unrelated passage, dated 28 January 1828, that concerns 'the place in which we feel, whether in the part affected or in the Brain', which just happens to follow in the original.^'' The transcript of the latter breaks off at a point corresponding with the foot of a page in Coleridge's notebook, though some lines before the end of the entry; and this also resulted in a blank space on the last page of the Bunyon notebook. By comparison her copies of the annotations from the Hutchinson volume are rather more consistent and accurate. Here her transcript follows the sequence of notes as they occur in the volume, omitting to record only a few trivial remarks or corrections to the text and, quite understandably, the many passages on the first 69 pages that are marked by Coleridge in pencil. Frances was clearly satisfied if she succeeded in preserving the substantival content of the annotations and unlike modern editors she did not feel compelled to worry unduly over Coleridge's accidentals. While therefore she has respected at least some of Coleridge's characteristic habits' of presentation, such as underlinings for emphasis, his marks of punctuation, especially the commas, are frequently omitted. His sporadic ampersands are now beyond retrieval because in copying she so frequently has recourse to these herself. However, for the sake of speed she invariably employed the abbreviations 'y^' and 'wh', and in reproducing her versions one may expand these with confidence throughout. The fact that the items chosen for transcription mostly relate to the choice of an

143 appropriate partner for life and the establishment of a loving relationship, is entirely natural given that the copyist, then a mature woman of twenty-six years of age, was still single. If anything, the wonder is that Mrs Gillman should herself have thought fit to preserve so many of Coleridge's pronouncements on the topic. That she did so is only partly to be explained by the fact that at least one piece of advice was intended for her elder son, for it seems likely that Coleridge was in the habit of giving her, as he wrote them, copies of items that he knew would be of interest. Texts of the three letters on this subject that survive in the notebook have all been printed by Griggs in the Collected Letters^ though mostly from transcripts as the originals are unknown. One of them is the letter that Coleridge wrote to the younger James Gillman concerning his urgent but premature desire to become engaged to Sarah Steel, and is tentatively dated by Griggs to July 1829.^^ Griggs's source was an imperfect version surviving in the Library of Cornell University: the present text is further truncated by the omission of the final surviving paragraph of Coleridge's argument. The fact that the Bunyon transcript (fols. 27-28''') occasionally omits words and phrases, or reverses their order, seems to indicate that the underlying copy-text was not identical with the Cornell manuscript. The same situation obtains with regard to the letter addressed in January 1819 to an unidentified correspondent that was printed by Griggs from a transcript then in the possession of Henry Hutchins.^^ The original of this enormously long letter of advice concerning marriage, which runs to six and a half pages in the Oxford edition, is not known to survive. The presence of several substantival variants between the two extant texts offers sufficient grounds for supposing that here too the copy-text was not the same in both cases. From various references in Griggs's text to 'my dear L ' —the initial missing or replaced with 'young friend' in the Bunyon transcript (fols. 8^- 20)—and to 'your excellent Father & ... your best Friend next to your Father' it seems not unreasonable to suppose that this letter was addressed to Lancelot Wade (c.1796- r.1830), son of Josiah Wade, a long-time friend of Coleridge who had acted as a witness at his wedding in 1795. The younger Wade, who was mentioned along with his father in Coleridge's will, is said to have been responsible for the transcript of from which the American edition was published late in 1817.^*' In a letter to Thomas Allsop of 22 October 1821 Coleridge writes that Mrs Gillman 'thought, felt and wrote under the strong . . . influence ... of my Letter to Laurence Wade', a statement that at once conveniently confirms the existence of such a letter and suggests that Mrs Gillman had been permitted at the time to retain a copy, or possibly a draft, of it.^^ The variations between the two copies might therefore be explained by the supposition that Frances Bunyon's derives from the version preserved by Mrs Gillman, while the Hutchins one may have been taken from the actual letter sent to Wade. The third of these letters that concern the choice of a marriage-partner was written to a young lady who cannot as yet be identified with any certainty. Thomas Allsop himself printed a fuller text of it, apparently from a transcript that is now at Cornell, immediately following one dated 4 March 1822, presumably implying that it was the 'enclosed Defence' mentioned there.^^ ^^]^\\Q the present copy (fols. 22^-24) preserves 144 only a severely abbreviated version of a text that runs to six and a half pages in the Recollections., several important passages survive here that are not found in the Cornell exemplar. For example, the opening sentence in the latter runs 'If there be any one subject, which it especially concerns a young Woman to understand both in itself generally and in it's application to her own particular habits and circumstances, IT IS THAT OF MARRIAGE.' The Bunyon version agrees as far as 'understand' but continues 'and which an affectionate brother would be most anxious that she should understand thoroughly and on principle, and yet find it most difficult to treat of, even in generals, it is that of marriage'. Griggs tentatively dated the letter to June 1821, suggesting that it may have been written on behalf of Allsop to the latter's sister, who seems to have been contemplating an 'ill-assorted' marriage. His dating comes from a reference made by Mrs Gillman on the 23rd of that month to Coleridge's hoping to finish 'that fragment' and convey it to Allsop in two days' time.^^ Whatever the date, such an identification is strengthened by the circumstance that the recurrent blank after 'my dear ' in the Allsop text is supplied in Frances Bunyon's transcript by the word 'Sister', while the writer, whose 'attempt may seem authorized by Intimacy and nearness of kindred' in the former, calls himself an 'affectionate brother' here. That the recipient was a young woman, and that she and the writer were 'of no [sic added by Griggs incredulously] marked inequality in respect of age . . .', appears to rule out Coleridge's having written in propria persona. We may, however, find some difficulty in crediting him with such a thoroughgoing forgery as is implied by the following sentence which survives only in the notebook: For I think of you in all moods, and in writing to you as long as I take care to exclude the doleful and ordinarily prefer the mirthful or cheerful, you will not object to my now and then troubling you with the offspring of the thoughtful— Three other passages in the notebook relate to marriage and to the nature of love as distinct from friendship. Two of these lack a context that would tell us for whom or for what purpose they were intended. Both are highly philosophical in character and rather put one in mind of Sydney Smith's humorous account of the protracted metaphysical argument that passed for courtship among Scots ladies.^ One notable feature of the first (fols. 2-4) is the sudden intrusion of a passage of direct speech: Hence it is (said Jacob) that tho' in several periods of my life I have been affectionately regarded by amiable women, no woman has ever felt the passion of love for me. It is true, I have few personal attractions; but how many have I known who possess still fewer, men of right homely forms and faces, who have nevertheless been fondly beloved in the fullest and therefore the best sense of the word. This may be a quotation from a novel or some other work that Coleridge had been reading, but equally he may have been resorting to a fictitious persona to voice his own complaint on this score. If so, he is likely to have had in mind the happy situation of Wordsworth, whose entourage of devoted womenfolk had long excited jealous instincts in him. The second of these passages (fols. 20^-22) (fig. 2) is the only one to include 145 2. Add. MS. 63785, fol. 22 date and place, namely lo February 1832, at Highgate, and a statement of its occasion. We can only surmise how-a copy of the advice 'WRITTEN IN A YOUNG LADY'S ALBUM— who was on the point of marriage' had come, if at all, into Mrs Gillman's possession: possibly she had prevailed upon writer or recipient—perhaps the daughter of a mutual friend or neighbour at Highgate—to let her take a copy.

Regarding Marriage therefore as the Laboratory of all the Duties and the Home and Hearth of all the virtues and all the Graces of womanhood I cannot think of a more appropriate offering for the first page of your Album my dear young friend than the following compendium of the true nature and objects of the conjugal Bond which for this purpose I have freely and with true enlargements translated from the Commensalia or Table Talk of the Lion-hearted Hero of the Reformation.

In claiming to have translated for this purpose some passages concerning marriage from Luther's Tischreden Coleridge rather misrepresented the case, for the basis of what he wrote is clearly Captain Henry Bell's translation (1652) of the Colloquia Mensalia, though incorporating 'true enlargements' of his own as they are found in the Ashley Library copy.^^ Finally, the remaining extract (fols. 24^-26), entitled 'The Six Heads or Capital Truths on the Belief Conviction and distinct understanding of which, and feelings and habits corresponding, the probability of marriage happiness principally rests—', promises insight into the 'proper import of love', from which may be deduced all conjugal duties, 'even to the minutiae of the conduct that will secure a happy marriage'. In fact, like the first, it proves to be a specimen of Coleridgean rhetoric at its most etherial.

From several points of view the most interesting of the transcripts incorporated (fols. 5-8^) in Frances Bunyon's notebook is that of Coleridge's annotations to the last book that he is known to have read. Nor is this merely because the actual copy that he used has not so far been traced. From a transcript made by an unnamed friend Lucy Watson printed one only of his observations, and several variants between the two suggest that her copy-text, though evidently deriving from her grandmother, was not the source of Frances Bunyon's transcript, which seems to have been taken directly from the original. The work in question was the Remains of the late Right Reverend Daniel Sandford, D.D. Oxon. Bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal Church . . . with a Memoir by the Rev. John Sandford, published in two volumes at Edinburgh in 1830. Sandford himself, who as a young clergyman had baptised 's daughter, may perhaps have been known at least by repute to the circle at Keswick and Grasmere in earlier times.^^ Certainly his third son and the author of the memoir. Archdeacon John Sandford, came to be on friendly terms with Coleridge's brother-in-law, . This young man had in 1823 married the favourite niece of Thomas Poole, an old and valued friend of the three .^"^ Elizabeth Sandford, nee Poole (1799-1853), was already an accomplished classicist and musician when in 1814 Wordsworth wrote to her uncle that 147 'I hear wonders of a niece of yours'.^^ After her marriage she became a writer in the field of what would now be called women's studies, publishing in 1831 Woman in her Social and Domestic Character and in 1833 the first and only volume of her Lives of English Female Worthies. At all events it was probably no mere accident that had led Coleridge and the Gillmans to hear of the Sandford memoir. Henry Nelson Coleridge remarked in his collection of the poet's Table Talk that Coleridge 'was deeply interested in the picture drawn of the Bishop, and said that the mental struggles and bodily sufferings indicated in the Diary had been his own for years past'.^^ He conjured me to peruse the Memoir and the Diary with great care: 'I have received', said he, 'much spiritual comfort and strength from the latter. O! were my faith and devotion, like my sufferings, equal to that good man's! He felt as I do, how deep a depth is prayer in faith. Again, during a conversation on 5 July 1834, when the topics ranged from Greville's 'Letter to a Lady of Quality', by way of Dryden and Fielding, to Roman Catholicism and to Bishop Sandford, Coleridge remarked, somewhat eccentrically, of the latter that he 'seems to have been a thorough gentleman upon the model of St Paul, whose manners were the finest of any man's upon record'."^^ In this respect his judgement concurred with that of Southey, to whom Archdeacon Sandford had sent a copy in August 1830, and who wrote that a 'more beautiful example of the Christian character has not been set before us in this generation'."^^ Mrs Watson printed a note that Coleridge sent to her grandmother on 4 July 1834, three weeks before his death, exhorting her 'Do not forget to look over the first three or four chapters of "Bishop Sandford's Life'".'*^ It may therefore be that Mrs Gillman was the person to whom he directed the recommendation that Frances Bunyon found in Volume I, namely 'Pray, read at least the ist 100 Pages of this volume & mark the book down for a 2"^ reading '. Immediately following this latter observation, from which it is separated in the notebook by a half-line of dashes, occurs a poignant extempore lament by Coleridge in his sixty-second year. Though not the last in the series of annotations recorded here, and therefore not certainly occupying page 100 of volume I, it evidently belongs to the point at which he had, at least for the time being, stopped reading. Though at first it seems defective in syntax and sense, if the first clause be accepted as a statement complete in itself there is no need to assume authorial distraction or scribal oversight. As far as I have read—for alas! thro weakness of the body and overactivity of the suggestive mind I now crawl thro' a book like a fly thro a milk splash on a Tea-tray! I who 20 years ago, used to read a volume, stereotype-wise by whole pages at a glance; as if my eyes and brain had been a Claude Lorrain Mirror, or a Camera Obscura or D*^ Wollaston's Camera Lucida or M'^ Burton's new patent Paneidolon, specimens of the produce of which you have seen in Sir F Head's 'Bubbles from the Brunnen.' STC. The initial comparison was not new in his thinking, for the very same image had appeared in his letter of 13 March 1832 to Eliza Nixon, the daughter of a neighbour in Highgate, while as recently as 2 June he had hkened the movement of Schiller's 148 blank verse to that of a fly in a glue pot."*^ Both he and Mrs Gillman, for whom the remark quoted above was most probably intended, had evidently also benefited from reading Sir Francis Bond Head's travel-book Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau. This work, that first appeared with the attribution 'by an Old Man' in late February 1834, was immediately popular and reached a second edition under the author's own name in early July of that year."*^ The copy in which they had read it was evidently that which his nephew had received from its publisher, John Murray, variously known to the poet whom he had offended over some business-dealings as 'the Man of Albermarle Street' and the 'Anthropoid'. In a note dated 18 March 1834 that Coleridge wrote on the flyleaves of this copy he says: 'I, the most incurious of all sensitive animals, do feel very curious to know, who is the Writer of this Book', and takes him roundly to task in absentia for his attack on public schools, the universities and the classical education that they offered.*^^ This curiosity was soon to be satisfied—though whether through the medium of Lockhart, as Coleridge proposed, or through that of Murray, is not known—for by 16 April he is found alluding to Head by name.'*^ An amusing posthumous sequel in which Henry was obhged to apologise for the inclusion of this critique in the Table Talk is related by Griggs.''^^ It may be appropriate to say something about the optical devices mentioned in Coleridge's note. The discovery of the camera obscura long predates Robert Hooke's construction of one in 1679 for the use of landscape painters, while the dark convex mirror which was traditionally known by the name of Claude Lorraine had been popular with artists and itinerant view-takers since the seventeenth century. The camera lucida, on the other hand, was the work of a contemporary physicist, WiUiam Hyde WoUaston, who had patented it as recently as 1807."^ This instrument was much used also in surveying and in drawing objects under the microscope, and a desire to fix the image that it cast was to lead Fox Talbot to his discoveries in photography. The Paneidolon was itself an attempt to accomplish what photography was later to achieve, and for a description of it we have to rely on Head's account, given in his chapter entitled 'Excursion to the Niederwald'."^^

This exceedingly clever, newly-invented instrument, the most silent—the most faithful—and one of the most entertaining compagnons de voyage which any traveller can desire, consists of a small box, in which can be packed anything it is capable of holding. On being emptied for use, all that is necessary is to put one's head into one side, and then trace with a pencil the objects which are instantly seen most beautifully delineated at the other.

Whether the perspective be complicated or simple—whether the figures be human or inhuman, it is all the same, for they are traced with equal facility, rain not even retarding the operation. The Paneidolon also possesses an advantage which all very modest people will, I think, appreciate, for the operator's face being (like Jack's) 'in a box', no person can stare at it or the drawing; whereas, while sketching with the camera lucida, everybody must have observed that the village peasants in crowds, not only watch every line of the pencil, but laugh outright at the contortion of countenance which the poor Syntax, in search of the picturesque, having one optic closed, 149 squints with the other through a hole scarcely bigger than the head of a pin, standing all the time in the comical attitude of a young magpie looking into a marrow-bone.

The construction of this device, if an example could still be found, would certainly be full of interest, even though the modesty that it affords is merely that of the ostrich. The specimens of its work that Coleridge mentions were the engraved illustrations to Head's book, all of which bear the legend 'Drawn by Burges's patent Paneidolon'. This effectively conceals a clever, though none the less sincere, piece of advertising on the author's part, for the inventor was his cousin Caroline Eliza Anne Burges, third daughter of the politician Sir James Bland Burges.^*' It is not clear whether it was Coleridge who misremembered or his transcriber who mistook the name of the inventor for Burton. The patent had been taken out as recently as September 1832, but the device evidently never gained widespread acceptance, for it had been long forgotten by the time that an unsuccessful enquiry on the subject was addressed to Notes and Queries a century ago.^^ In the three extracts that follow, the texts that inspired Coleridge's observations are quoted from the original, in Sandford's Memoir of his father in Volume I, rather than from the versions that survive in the notebook. They begin with a charming observation on the bishop's character and domestic life.

His manner towards women was uniformly that of deference and courtesy,—towards his daughters it united tenderness with respect. The closeness of affinity, which is sometimes considered a plea for indifference, was with him only an argument for more exact and delicate attention. [Memoir., p. 77]

I have never met with this remark in any other book—it is most beautiful, and of the deepest and dearest moral interest. The Father recognises in his Daughters the Representations and as it were the renewed Types of their dear Mother; & repeats towards them, delicately modified by the difference of the relation the tender reverence, the inward gentle awe, inseparable from all true love, that is at once pure and deep; and which even in the stirring gay and summer tide, the blossoming May and the sapful 'leafy June' of our natural life, can and will preserve the purer, permanent and spiritual Element, undebased by the earthly accessaries which it elevates, refines, cloathes and fills with its own Light, and finally almost transubstantiates into its own Essence. From the Father the same Tone and Feeling, again modified by the different relation, will pass to the Brother, and thus the parental Home be a rehearsal of the finest duties, of the continuous affections of the conjugal state. For Reverence of Womanhood is the Ground of all manly virtues, and a main condition o( all female excellence. STC.

Odium theologicum is not very far away, however, for a reference by Archdeacon Sandford to the writings of the Reverend WiUiam Paley could not be allowed to go unremarked. Like Colenso, Paley had first distinguished himself at Cambridge as a mathematician, became much sought after as a lecturer, and was later to apply his talents to close study of Biblical texts. Horce Paulince (1790) is a defence of the historicity of the New Testament through comparison of the accounts given of St Paul in the Epistles and Acts. Coleridge's attitude to its author underwent a profound change after

150 he had fully digested Paley's earlier work entitled Principles of Morals and Political Philosophy (1785). In 1798, during his first meeting with the young Hazlitt, he could speak of the man whom five years earlier he had regarded as *great and good' as *a mere time-serving casuist', the adoption of whose treatise on morals as a text-book at Cambridge was 'a disgrace to the national character'. ^^ Though in later hfe he spoke with similar disgust of the famous View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794)1 he seems throughout to have retained an admiration for the

. . . 'Paley's Horae Paulina,' the most invaluable work Paley ever produced. [Memoir, p. 353]

True and the mere English Reader may well be thankful for it. But it is likewise true, that for those acquainted with the German theologians of the 20 or 30 years before the publication of Paley's works, the Horae Paul^^ contains nothing that could be new to him. STC. This afludes to the founder of historical theology, Johann Salomo Semler, and to his contemporary Johann David Michaelis, whose principal working-period had spanned the years between 1750 and 1786.^"* Nevertheless, Paley's labours in the field did not pass unrecognised on the Continent, for shortly after the first appearance of the Hora^ Johann Jacob Hess, the Zurich theologian, approached the author with a proposal for republication in German.^^ Such a translation was eventually published at Helmstadt in 1797. Coleridge's final comment as recorded in the notebook relates to literary terminology and criticism: . . . from the Augustan age of the English church he [Bishop Sandford] had caught the diction, as well as the spirit, in which its masters wrote. [Memoir^ p. 96]

What age does the writer mean? It was once the fashion to call the age of Queen Anne and George i^^ our Augustan age. But if M"" S means the age from Ehz[abe]th to the Restoration, or from Hooker to Jeremy Taylor & Stillingfleet, I fully agree with him in his meanings tho' I do not think the age of Augustus the golden age of Roman Literature, but the century preceding. STC. During the eighteenth century the term *Augustan' was generally accepted as denoting the highest state of purity and sophistication in literature. Oldmixon, writing in 1712, seems to have been the first to characterise English poetry of the reign of Charles II, at least at the hands of 'Polite Writers' such as Dryden, in this way,^^ though Swift, writing about 1745, remarked that it was 'very absurdly' so called.^^ Fifteen years later, when Goldsmith published his piece on the 'Augustan Age in England', widespread adulation of Dryden's great successor. Pope, and the doctrine of 'correctness', decreed that the term be reapplied to writers of the reign of Queen Anne and her successor.^^ Naturally Coleridge does not mean to imply that by the 1830s fashion had moved on yet again, but is concerned to question the award of superlative merit to religious writers of the Restoration rather than of the preceding age. At the same time he alludes to his own conviction, imbibed under Boyer at Christ's Hospital and expressed in the first chapter of Biographia Literaria, that 'in truth and naturalness, both of their thoughts and diction' Lucretius, Terence and Catullus were as far above Virgil the Augustan as he in turn was superior to his contemporary Ovid.^^ It was a fortunate circumstance that led this early admirer of Coleridge to take up temporary residence on the southern border of Highgate in 1842, and there to strike up an acquaintance with Mrs Gillman. It meant that she gained access to books, letters and other memorabilia of the poet shortly before their final removal from The Grove, and the first major dispersal of the Gillman hbrary. The contents of this small and highly personal selection that she was able to make from his manuscripts add something of value to the general stock of knowledge concerning those 'minor' writings, the obiter dicta to which Coleridge attached such importance in his will. It is all the more to be hoped, therefore, that the missing notebook 'N*^ I', which like its fellow probably escaped the fire that largely destroyed the contents of Colenso's study at Bishopstowe in September 1884, will some day come to light.^

1 Lucy E. Watson, Coleridge at Highgate (London, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. George Whalley (ed.). 1925), pp. 12, 163-4. Marginalia, vol. i (Abbt to Byfield), (London 2 Sotheby's, 27 May 1986, lot 198: now British and Princeton, 1980), pp. clvi-clxxiv. Library Add. MS. 63785. 12 Earl Leslie Griggs (ed.), The Collected Letters of 3 Oxford, Rhodes House Library, MS. Afr.s.1284 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1956- (letters to her son Francis Ernest Colenso, from 72), vol. vi, p. 998. Natal, 1873-93); 3r^d MS. lnd. Ocean.s.292 13 BL, Ashley 4773 (edn. of 1652) and C.45.i.r6. 2/11, fols. 14-21 (three letters dated 1873-5). (edn. of 1791). 4 Besides Rees, op. cit., pp. 17-36 passim, other 14 Collected Works: Kathleen Coburn (ed.). The sources used in this paragraph include the Post Notebooks (London and Princeton, 1957), vol. i Office London Directory., 1811-44; Sir Charles (1794-1804), Text, p. XXXV. Robert Bignold, Five generations of the Bignoid 15 Watson, op. cit., p. 2. family (London, 1948), pp. 29, 149; J. A. 16 The Hutchinson Memoir is now BL, Ashley Venn, Alumni Cantahrigtenses, Part II, vol. i 4780. (Cambridge, 1940), p. 447; Gentleman's Maga- 17 E. H. Coleridge (ed.). The Poetical Works of zine, March 1846, p. 308; and C. J. Bunyon, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford, 1912), vol. i, Memoirs of Francis Thomas McDougall . . . pp. 381-2. (London, 1889), p. 15. 18 Pp. 180B, 180S where it is stated that the original 5 Rees, op. cit., p. 425. was owned by Mrs Henry G. (i.e. Lucy) Watson. 6 Ibid., pp. 30, 31, 66-88; and Sir George W. 19 Watson, op. cit., p. 152. Cox, The Life of John William Colenso, D.D. 20 For a list see Barbara Rosenbaum and Pamela (London, 1888), vol. i, pp. 188-211. White (eds.). The Index of English Literary 7 VCH, Middlesex, vol. vi (London, 1980), pp. Manuscripts, vol. iv. Part i (London, 1982), pp. 127-8; and Post Office Directory of the Six Home 626-34 (CoS 1328-1408). Counties (London, [1845]), pp. 454-6. 21 Henry Southgate, sale-cat, of 31 March 1843: 8 Rees, op. cit., pp. 27-8. see Marginalia, p. clxi. 9 Carlyle's Life of John Sterling (London, 1851), 22 BL, Ashley 2842, 2850, 2885, 4774, 4775, p. 81; and see chapter viii ('Coleridge'), pp. 69- 4777-80 and 5174-76: see The Ashley Library 80. (London, 1926), vol. viii, pp. 85-115 passim. 10 Sir John Frederick Maurice (ed.), The Itfe of Another family item acquired by Wise is F. D. Maurice chiefly told in his own letters, 3rd Gillman's presentation-copy of Coleridgeana edn. (London, 1884), vol. i, pp. 164-5. (London, 1835) to his son James (Ashley 11 The Bollingen edition of The Collected Works of 4771)- 152 23 Marginalia, pp. cxxiv-cxlvii. 44 Sydney Jackman, Galloping Head, 1958, pp. 24 Ibid., p. clxix. 57-9- 25 BL, Add. MS. 47531, fols. 51 et seq. 45 Collected Letters, vol. vi, pp. 977-9- 26 Collected Letters, vol. iii, p. 533, n. 2. 46 Table Talk, pp. 298-9. 27 BL, Add. MS. 47531, fols. 51^-59^. 47 Collected Letters, vol. vi, p. 977, n. 2. 28 Collected Letters, vol. vi, pp. 795-6. 48 For contemporary descriptions of the camera 29 Ibid., vol. iv, pp. 903-9. lucida and obscura see Sir David Brewster, A 30 Ibid., vol. vi, p. 1000; and Collected Works: J. treatise on optics (London, 1831), pp, 329-35, Engell and W. Jackson Bate (eds.), Biographia and William Nicholson's Journal of Natural Literaria (London and Princeton, 1983), vol. i, Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts, New Ser., p. Ixv. xvii (London, 1807), p. i. 31 Collected Letters, vol. v, p. 182, n. 2. 49 Op. cit., pp. 324-5. 32 Thomas Allsop, Letters, conversations and recol- 50 'Apparatus for sketching, drawing or delineat- lections of S. T. Coleridge, 3rd edn. (London, ing', Pat. no. 6301, 8 Sept. 1832. 1864), pp. 171-9. 51 Notes and Queries, 7th Ser., xii (12 December, 33 Collected Letters, vol. v, p. 152, n. 2 1891), p. 468. 34 Nowell C. Smith (ed.). Letters of Sydney Smith 52 , 'My first acquaintance with (Oxford, 1953), vol. i, p. 167 (letter to Lady poets', reprinted from The Liberal, xxiii (Lon- Holland, 21 Sept. 1809). don, April 1823), in P, P, Howe (ed.). The 35 For the press-mark see n. 16 above. Complete Works of William Hazlitt (London, 36 Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: the Great 1933), vol. xvii, p. 114; and Collected Letters, Unknown (London, 1970), vol. i, p. 170. vol. i, p. 48. 37 Mrs Henry Sandford, Thomas Poole and his 53 Notebooks, ed. cit., vol. ii (1804-8), no. 3145 friends (London, 1888), vol. ii, pp, 262-75. 12.60, where it is included in a book-list of 38 E. de Selincourt (ed.), The Letters of William September 1807. and Dorothy Wordsworth, 2nd edn., rev. by Mary 54 Albert Schweitzer, Paul and his interpreters {V^on- Moorman and Alan G. Hill, vol. iii. The Middle don, 1912), pp. 1-5. Years, Part ii (Oxford, 1970), p. 146. 55 Edmund Paley (ed.). The Works of William 39 The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Paley, D.D. (London, 1825), pp. 207-10. Coleridge (Oxford, 1917), p. 266, n. i. 56 Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to the Earl of 40 Ibid., p. 313. Oxford, about the English Tongue (London, 41 Kenneth Curry (ed.). New letters of Robert 1712), p. 19. Southey (New York and London, 1965), vol. ii, 57 Herbert Davis with Louis Landa (ed.). The Prose pp. 355-6 and n. Works of Jonathan Swift: A Proposal for correct- 42 Collected Letters, vol. vi, p. 985: printed from ing the English Tongue, etc. (Oxford, 1957), p. 249. Watson, op. cit., p. 154. 58 The Bee, no. viii, 24 Nov. 1759, p. 235. 43 Collected Letters, vol. vi, p. 889; and Table Talk, 59 Biographia Literaria, vol. i, pp. 8-9. P- 305- 60 Rees, op. cit., p, 382.

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