Morning Paper. I saw plainly, that literature was not a profession by which I could expect to live; for I could not disguise from myself, that whatever my talents might or might not be in other respects, yet they were not of the sort that could enable me to become a popular writer; and that whatever my opinions might be in themselves, they were almost equi-distant from all the three prominent parties, the Pittites, the Foxites, and the Democrats. Of the unsaleable nature of my writings I had an amusing memento one morning from our own servant girl. For happening to rise at an earlier hour than usual, I observed her putting an extravagant quantity of paper into the grate, in order to light the fire, and mildly checking her for her wastefulness: La Sir!' replied poor Nanny, 'why, it is only Watchman.'"-Biog. Lit. p. 167-178.

With his poems he was more successful; a second edition being required in 1797; to this edition were added some poems by his friends Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd. The same year he wrote, at the request of Sheridan, then manager of Drury Lane, the tragedy of Remorse; it was not brought on the stage till 1813, when the theatre was under the direction of Mr. Whitbread. It is said to have been sacrificed to Sheridan's inability to let slip, what he considered, a good joke. One scene presented a cave with streams of water weeping down the sides; and the first words, in a sort of mimicry of the sound "drip, drip, drip!" upon which Sheridan repeated aloud, "Drip, drip, drip:-Why, God bless me, there's nothing here but dripping;" and so arose a chorus of laughter amongst the actors, fatal to the probationary play. However, although a beautiful poem, it is not

suited to the stage.

* The English Opium-eater.-Tait's Magazine.

During his residence at Stowey, he preached every Sunday at the Unitarian chapel at Taunton. It was at this period that Hazlitt became acquainted with him, who, in the third number of the Liberal, has given the following graphic account of his first acquaintance with this extraordinary man.

"In the year 1798, Mr. Coleridge came to Shrewsbury, to succeed Mr. Rowe in the spiritual charge of a Unitarian congregation there. He did not come till late on the Saturday afternoon before he was to preach; and Mr. Rowe, who himself went down to the coach in a state of anxiety and expectation, to look for the arrival of his successor, could find no one at all answering to the description but a round-faced man, in a short black coat, like a shooting-jacket, which hardly seemed to have been made for him, but who seemed to be talking at a great rate to his fellow-passengers. Mr. Rowe had scarce returned to give an account of his disappointment, when the round-faced man in black entered, and dissipated all doubts on the subject, by beginning to talk. My father lived ten miles from Shrewsbury, and was in the habit of exchanging visits with Mr. Rowe. Coleridge had agreed to come over to see my father, according to the courtesy of the county, as Mr. Rowe's probable successor; but in the mean time I had gone to hear him preach on the Sunday after his arrival. A poet and a philosopher getting up into a Unitarian pulpit to preach the Gospel, was a romance in these degenerate days, a sort of revival of the primitive spirit of Christianity, which was not to be resisted.

"It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning before day-light, to walk ten miles in the mud, and went to hear this celebrated person preach. Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as this

cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of the year 1798. -Il y a des impressions que ni le temps ni les circonstances peuvent effacer. Dusse-je vivre des siècles entiers, le doux temps de ma jeunesse ne peut renaître pour moi, ni s'effacer jamais dans ma mémoire. When I got there, the organ was playing the 100th psalm, and, when it was done, Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text: And he went up

into the mountain to pray, himself alone.' As he gave out his text, his voice rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes,' and when he came to the two last words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The idea of St. John came into my mind, of one crying in the wilderness, who had his loins girt about, and whose food was locusts and wild honey.' The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. The sermon was upon peace and war; upon church and state-not their alliance, but their separation -on the spirit of the world and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another. He talked of those who had inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore.' He made a poetical and pastoral excursion, and to show the fatal effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, 'as though he should never be old,' and the same poor country-lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an alehouse, turned into a wretched drummer boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the loathsome finery of the profession of blood.

'Such were the notes our once-lov'd poet sung.'

"And for myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and philosophy had met together, truth and genius had embraced, under the eye, and with the sanction of religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied. The sun that was still labouring pale and wan through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the good cause; and the cold dark drops of dew, that hung half melted on the beard of the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in them; for there was a spirit of hope and youth in all nature, that turned every thing into good.

"On the Tuesday following, the half-inspired speaker came; I was called down to the room where he was, and went half hoping, half afraid. He viewed me very graciously, and I listened for a long time without uttering a word. I did not suffer in his opinion by my silence. 'For those two hours,' he afterwards was pleased to say, 'he was conversing with W. H.'s forehead!' His appearance was different from what I had anticipated from seeing him before, at a distance, and in the dim light of the chapel; there was to me a strange wildness in his aspect, a dusky obscurity, and I thought him pitted with the small-pox. His complexion was at that time clear, and even bright—

'As are the children of yon azure sheen.'

His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large projecting eye-brows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with darkened lustre. 'A certain tender bloom his face o'erspread,' a purple tinge as we see it in the pale thoughtful complexions of the Spanish portrait-painters, Murillo and Velasquez. His mouth

was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin goodhumoured and round; but his nose, the rudder of the face, the index of the will, was small, feeble, nothinglike what he has done. It might seem that the genius of the face as from a height surveyed, and projected him (with sufficient capacity and huge aspiration) into the world unknown of thought and imagination, with nothing to support or guide his veering purpose, as if Columbus had launched his adventurous course for the New World in a scallop, without oars or compass. So at least I commented on it after the event. Coleridge in his person was rather above the common size, inclining to the corpulent; or like Lord Hamlet, somewhat fat and pursy.' His hair (now, alas! grey) was then black and glossy as the raven's, and fell in smooth masses over his forehead.

“He talked very familiarly, but agreeably, and glanced over a variety of subjects. At dinner time he grew more animated, and dilated in a very edifying manner on Mary Wolstonecroft, and Mackintosh. The last, he said, he considered (on my father's speaking of his Vindica Gallicoe as a capital performance) as a clever scholastic man—a master of the topics—or as the ready warehouse. man of letters, who knew exactly where to lay his hand on what he wanted, though the goods were not his own. He thought him no match for Burke, either in style or manner. Burke was a metaphysician, Makintosh a mere logician. Burke was an orator (almost a poet) who reasoned in figures, because he had an eye for nature: Mackintosh, on the other hand, was a rhetorician, who had only an eye to common places.

"I forget a great number of things, many more than I remembered; but the day passed off pleasantly, and the next morning Mr. Coleridge was to return to Shrewsbury. When I came down to breakfast, I found he had