Part 15 (1/2)

Anderson's Nose, Odes to Georgiana D. of D. (horribly misprinted), Christmas Carols, etc., etc.--anything not bad in the paper, that is not yours, is mine. So if any verses there strike you as worthy the ”Anthology,” ”do me the honour, sir!” However, in the course of a week I _do mean_ to conduct a series of essays in that paper which may be of public utility. So much for myself, except that I long to be out of London; and that my Xstmas Carol is a quaint performance, and, in as strict a sense as is _possible_, an Impromptu, and, had I done all I had planned, that ”Ode to the d.u.c.h.ess” would have been a better thing than it is--it being somewhat dullish, etc. I have bought the ”Beauties of the Anti-jacobin,” and attorneys and counsellors advise me to prosecute, and offer to undertake it, so as that I shall have neither trouble or expense. They say it is a clear case, etc. I will speak to Johnson about the ”Fears in Solitude.” If he gives them up they are yours. That dull ode has been printed often enough, and may now be allowed to ”sink with deep swoop, and to the bottom _go_,” to quote an admired author; but the two others will do with a little tr.i.m.m.i.n.g.

My dear Southey! I have said nothing concerning that which most oppresses me. Immediately on my leaving London I fall to the ”Life of Lessing”; till that is done, till I have given the Wedgwoods some proof that I am _endeavouring_ to do well for my fellow-creatures, I cannot stir. That being done, I would accompany you, and see no impossibility of forming a pleasant little colony for a few years in Italy or the South of France. Peace will come soon. G.o.d love you, my dear Southey!

_I_ would write to Stuart, and give up his paper immediately. You should do nothing that did not absolutely _please_ you. Be idle, be very idle!

The habits of your mind are such that you will necessarily do much; but be as idle as you can.

Our love to dear Edith. If you see Mary, tell her that we have received our trunk. Hartley is quite well, and my talkativeness is his, without diminution on my side. 'Tis strange but certainly many things go in the blood, beside gout and scrophula. Yesterday I dined at Longman's and met Pratt, and that honest piece of prolix dullity and nullity, young Towers, who desired to be remembered to you. To-morrow Sara and I dine at Mister Gobwin's, as Hartley calls him, who gave the philosopher such a rap on the s.h.i.+ns with a ninepin that Gobwin in huge pain _lectured_ Sara on his boisterousness. I was not at home. _Est modus in rebus._ Moshes is somewhat too rough and noisy, but the cadaverous silence of Gobwin's children is to me quite catacombish, and, thinking of Mary Wollstonecraft, I was oppressed by it the day Davy and I dined there.

G.o.d love you and

S. T. COLERIDGE.

FOOTNOTES:

[115] I cannot remember whether anybody has ever made a list of the books that Coleridge did not write. It would be the catalogue of a most interesting library in Utopia.

ROBERT SOUTHEY (1774-1843)

One of the strangest things met by the present writer in the course of preparing this book was a remark of the late Mr.

Sc.o.o.nes--an old acquaintance and a man who has deserved most excellently on the subject--in reference to Southey's letters, that they show the author as ”dry and unsympathetic.” ”They contain too much information to be good as letters.” Well: there certainly is information in the specimen that follows: whether it is ”dry” or not readers must decide. The fact is that Southey, despite occasional touches of self-righteousness and of over-bookishness, was full of humour, extraordinarily affectionate, and extremely natural. There is moreover a great deal of interest in this skit on poor Mrs. Coleridge: for ”lingos” of the kind, though in her case they may have helped to disgust her husband with his ”pensive Sara,” were in her time and afterwards by no means uncommon, especially--physiologists must say why--with the female s.e.x.

The present writer, near the middle of the nineteenth century, knew a lady of family, position and property who was fond of the phrase, ”hail-fellow-well-met,” but always turned it into ”Fellows.h.i.+p Wilmot”--a pretty close parallel to ”horsemangander” for ”horse-G.o.dmother”. Extension--with levelling--of education, and such processes as those which have turned ”Sissiter” into ”Syrencesster” and ”Kirton” into ”Credd-itt-on”, have made the phenomenon rarer: but have also made such a _locus cla.s.sicus_ of the habit as this all the more valuable and amusing. It may be added that Lamb, in one of his letters, has a sly if good-natured glance at this peculiarity of the elder Sara Coleridge in reference to the apt.i.tude of the younger in her ”_mother_-tongue.” Southey has dealt with the matter in several epistles to his friend Grosvenor Bedford. The whole would have been rather long but the following mosaic will, I think, do very well. Dr.

Warter, the editor of the supplementary collection of Southey's letters from which it comes, was the husband of Edith May Southey, the heroine of not a little literature, sometimes[116] in connection, not merely as here with Sara Coleridge the younger, but with Dora Wordsworth--the three daughters of the three Lake Poets. She was, as her father says, a very tall girl, while her aunt, Mrs. Coleridge, was little (her husband, writing from Hamburg, speaks with surprise of some German lady as ”smaller than you are”).

30. TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD ESQ:

KESWICK, Sep. 14, 1821

Dear Stumparumper,

Don't rub your eyes at that word, Bedford, as if you were slopy. The purport of this letter, which is to be as precious as the Punic scenes in Plautus, is to give you some account (though but an imperfect one) of the language spoken in this house by ... and invented by her. I have carefully composed a vocabulary of it by the help of her daughter and mine, having my ivory tablets always ready when she is red-raggifying in full confabulumpatus.

31. TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD ESQ:

KESWICK, Oct. 7, 1821.

My dear G,

I very much approve your laudable curiosity to know the precise meaning of that n.o.ble word _horsemangandering_. Before I tell you its application, you must be informed of its history and origin. Be it therefore known unto you that ... the whole and sole inventor of the never-to-be-forgotten _lingo grande_ (in which, by the bye, I purpose ere long to compose a second epistle), thought proper one day to call my daughter a great _horsemangander_, thinking, I suppose, that that appellation contained as much unfeminine meaning as could be put into any decent compound. From this substantive the verb has been formed to denote an operation performed by the said daughter upon the said aunt, of which I was an astonished spectator. The horsemangander--that is to say, Edith May--being tall and strong, came behind the person to be horsemangandered (to wit, ...), and took her round the waist, under the arms, then jumped with her all the way from the kitchen into the middle of the parlour; the motion of the horsemangandered person at every jump being something like that of a paviour's rammer, and all resistance impossible.

32. TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD ESQ:

KESWICK, Oct. 8, 1821.

P.S. The name of the newly-discovered language (of which I have more to say hereafter) is the _lingo grande_.