Up to 1903 the longest list of Coleridge marginalia extant was the seventy-nine volumes catalogued as belonging to the British Museum. In that year the present writer compiled a list of three hundred and forty-one marginalia in his privately printed Bibliography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Since that time the number has grown to more than four hundred and justifies the belief that there are over five hundred books in existence that contain autograph inscriptions of some sort by Coleridge. A few of those that have come to light since 1903 may be described as typical of the sort of books that Coleridge read and as indicative of the wide range of his intellectual interest.

Sotheby's in 1904 sold a copy of Acta Seminarii Regii et Societatis Philologica Lipsiensis (1811), in which Coleridge had written this note on the fly-leaf: "Given to Hartley Coleridge by his father, with a promise on the part of said H. C. that he will bona-fide read thro' them." Anyone familiar with the work may well question whether Hartley kept that rash promise. The volume later passed into the hands of his brother, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, and eventually became part of the fine set of Coleridgeana that was offered for sale by J. Pearson of London in 1911. That set was included in the important Robinson Sale disposed of by auction at Anderson's in New York on February 26, 1918, when this particular volume was sold for fifty dollars.

In the library of Sir William Osler is a copy of Browne's Religio Medici (1831) that was annotated by S. T. C., who was a close student of Browne. There are in existence at least three copies of Religio Medici containing Coleridge's comments. Up to the present time those marginalia have not been printed. The same holds true of the numerous critical notes by S. T. C. in a folio copy of Chapman's Homer (1616), which was once the property of Sara Hutchinson and after her death passed into the hands of her brother-in-law, William Wordsworth.

Among the numerous copies of Coleridge's own works containing his annotations or other autograph additions only a few can be mentioned. Sotheby's in 1903 sold a copy of the rare Fears in Solitude (1798) with an inserted letter dated February 9, 1819, in which Coleridge spoke of Hazlitt's hatred of him and deplored that critic's characterization of Christabel as an obscene poem. S. T. C. was evidently referring to the boorish critique of Christabel that had

appeared in the Edinburgh Review. In the Pearson set of Coleridgeana already mentioned was a copy of the third edition of Remorse (1813) which was presented by the poet to the Rev. Edward Coleridge. It contained an appropriate inscription and a long signed note referring to the savage criticism of the play in the Quarterly Review. The note reads in part: "The concluding paragraph of this Review, far more injurious to me than all the malignities of the Edinburgh, affords an instance of insolent intrusion into the sacredness of private life, surpassed only by the detestable attack on my dear friend Charles Lamb, perpetrated by the same Aristarchus, Mr. J. Gifford."

Of somewhat less personal interest are an inscribed copy of Sibylline Leaves (1817), presented by Coleridge to his sister-in-law, Miss Fricker, an inscribed copy of Wallenstein (1800), presented to the Rev. Mr. Roskilly, and a copy of the Statesman's Manual (1816), presented to Joseph Cottle and afterwards part of the Buxton Forman Library.

The late Professor Edward Dowden owned an interesting folio copy of Abraham Cowley's Works (1681), which had belonged to Wordsworth and had been sold with some of that poet's other books in 1859. In addition to a long penciled note by S. T. C. it contained on the inside cover at the end a grotesque penciled head with the legend: "Drawn by S. T. Coleridge entirely out of his own fancy, October 10, 1801-he being then only 29 years of age-yea, not 29, by 10 days."

Puttick's in 1905 sold at auction a copy of Eikon Basilike (1649), in which had been inserted a five-page autograph letter by S. T. C. relating to the work and discussing the question of its authorship. The present whereabouts of that volume has not been traced.

Mr. William Harris Arnold of New York City numbers among his literary treasures a small inscribed copy of Milton's Paradise Lost which Coleridge presented in 1808 to Mrs. Thomas Clarkson, wife of the author of History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Coleridge's article on that book in the Edinburgh Review was the only formal review that he ever published.

In 1907 Mr. Albert Sutton, a Manchester bookseller, offered for sale a copy of John Smith's Select Discourses (1660) containing many long and valuable annotations made by S. T. C. in 1824. Smith had been a fellow of Queen's College, Cambridge, and his discourses

on atheism, immortality, and kindred topics prompted Coleridge to suggest that a delightful and instructive essay might be written on the Latitudinarian Party at Cambridge from the close of James I's reign to the latter half of Charles II's reign. In his note Coleridge likewise characterized the principal members of the party according to their philosophical affiliations.

Sotheby's on April 12, 1907, sold one of the most interesting items of Coleridge marginalia. When Southey published his Life of Wesley (2 vols., 1820), he gave a presentation copy to his gifted brotherin-law. Coleridge rejoiced in it and called it "my darling book and the favorite of my library." During the ensuing years he enriched the two volumes with copious annotations, many of which were printed in later editions of the Life of Wesley. That all of the comments were not favorable may be inferred from the following significant note on the fly-leaf of the first volume: "Memento! It is my desire and request that this work should be presented to its Donor and Author, Robert Southey, after my Death. The substance and character of the marginal annotations will abundantly prove the absence of any such intention in my mind, at the time they were written. But it will not be uninteresting to him to know that the one or the other volume was the book more often in my hands than any other in my ragged Book regiment."

In conclusion we may refer to a volume that links the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with the greatest of the Victorian poets. Coleridge's race was nearly run when Tennyson's volumes of 1830 and 1833 appeared. In his Table Talk (April 24, 1833), he criticized Tennyson's lack of understanding of English meter and was probably referring to the 1833 volume, which had appeared in December, 1832. Perhaps at some earlier time he had come across a copy of Poems Chiefly Lyrical (1830), which Tennyson had presented to a lady with the inscription, "Jane Tonge, from her unworthy friend the Author." Coleridge asterisked the word "unworthy" and added the somewhat pointed comment: "No imputation is here cast on the judgement of the said Jane Tonge in the choice of a friend: nor is there any lurking allusion to the well-known adage, 'Great minds will descend.' Condescension is not descension. -the blue heaven bends over all.' S. T. C." This interesting volume was sold at Sotheby's on July 15, 1914.

In these brief notes on Coleridge's marginalia enough has been

revealed to show why S. T. C. has so small a following and why there is no general demand for a definitive edition of his complete works. His own grandson, Ernest Hartley Coleridge, who died as recently as 1920, did not even carry out his project to prepare an adequate biography of his illustrious grandfather. Coleridge was a man of the widest intellectual range. Few scholars of our own day are equipped to follow him in all the fields of his interest. His preparation for the synthesis of his scheme of philosophy was profound and comprehensive in the extreme, but as in the case of his poetry, his performance was fragmentary, disjointed, and largely ineffectual. Our age is one that has little time to meditate over nuggets of wisdom to be found in random table-talk, literary ana, or marginal commentary. Perhaps in that statement we may have the basic reason for the bibliophile's comparative neglect of the volumes containing S. T. C.'s illuminating marginalia.

T

DICKENS, DAVID COPPperfield, AND

THOMAS HOLCROFT

PAUL C. KITCHEN

Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

HE autobiographical element in David Copperfield has been extensively emphasized. So much, indeed, has been said about this aspect of the story that it requires some resolution to accept the thought that Dickens' imagination was furnished, although in a slight degree, by what another man had written of himself, as well as by the incidents and people of his own association. But Forster, the intimate friend and authoritative biographer, says that "too much has been assumed, from those revelations, of a full identity of Dickens with his hero," 1 and inclines one toward another point of view. Reflecting upon this statement, one may admit that Dickens found matter for the novel in the experience of another that closely resembled his own, and that his imagination dwelling upon the Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft, found the latter's revelations of childhood germane to his purpose. Two questions naturally arise: What did he find there? And how did he adapt what he found to the demands of the novel? The answers to these questions lie in certain comparisons of the two books.

The Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft is a chronicle of the uses of adversity. "By home," he writes, "I mean an old house half in ruins, about two miles on the north-east side of Rugeley, with a kitchen-garden, paddock, and croft, which afforded some scanty supplies to man and beast, when my father found it convenient, or thought proper, to rest a little from his labours; but to me this house often became a den of misery. I was not yet nine years old, but I had a variety of employments." How similar the situation here

'Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. III, Chap. I.

2

Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft, London, 1814. Quotations in the present paper are from a later edition, London, 1852.

'Holcroft, p. 21.