Highgate, and was interred on the 2nd of August, in the vault of Highgate church. Coleridge, as we have just seen, wrote his own epitaph; it is, however, inapplicable to the place in which he is buried; a handsome tablet erected in Highgate new church to his memory bears the following inscription : "Sacred to the Memory of SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, This truly great and good man resided for He quitted the body of his death' In the sixty-second year of his age. His social and Christian virtues, The friends with whom he resided And most painful disease His disposition was unutterably sweet and angelic. The most engaging home companion. "Oh! framed for calmer times and nobler hearts! Oh! studious poet, eloquent for truth, Philosopher containing wealth and death, Yet docile, child-like, full of life and love; Here on this monumental stone thy friends inscribe thy worth. Reader! for the world mourn, A light has passed away from the earth, But for this pious and exalted Christian Rejoice! and again I say unto you, rejoice! "Ubi Thesaurus Ibi Cor. "TABLE TALK.”* In his late years Coleridge was in the habit of holding weekly conversazioni at Mr. Gillman's house in Highgate. Those who knew little else of Coleridge are familiar by report with his extraordinary conversational powers. Of these the two volumes of Table Talk which have been published gave some notion. His conversation was not in fragments, but was wont to continue without aid from others, in the way either of affection or of contradiction, for hours at a time. All things, human and divine, joined with one another by scribbled-links, entered into his discourse; which, though employed upon the most abstruse subjects, was a spell, whose fascination even the most dull or ignorant could not resist. Here are some specimens: "How inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance. There seems a sort of generous sympathy between the more generous dogs and little children. I believe an instance of a little child being attacked by a large dog is very rare indeed." 66 's face is almost the only exception I know to the observation, that something feminine-not effeminate, mindis discoverable in the countenances of all men of genius. Look at that face of old Dampier, a rough sailor, but a man of exquisite mind. How soft is the air of his countenance, how delicate the shape of his temples!" "Quarantine cannot keep out an atmosphere in disease, but it can, and does always, increase the predisposing causes of its reception." "I know no genuine Saxon English superior to Asgill's. I think his and Defoe's often finer than Swift's." "When I was a little boy at the Blue-coat School there was a charm for one's foot when asleep, and I believe it had been in the school since its foundation in the time of Edward VI. The march of intellect has, probably, now exploded it. It ran thus: "Foot! foot! foot! is fast asleep! Thumb thumb! thumb! in spittle we steep : Two for thieves, and one for Christ Jesus!' * With Notes by various hands, and the Editor of the present work, And the same charm served for a cramp in the leg, with the following substitution: "The devil is tying a knot in my leg! Mark, Luke, and John, unloose it I beg !—- And really, upon getting out of bed, where the cramp most frequently occurred, pressing the sole of the foot on the cold floor, and then repeating this charm with the acts configurative thereupon prescribed, I can safely affirm that I do not remember an instance in which the cramp did not go away in a few seconds. I should not wonder if it were equally good for a stitch in the side, but I cannot say I ever tried it for that." "I regret to see that vile and barbarous vocable talented stealing out of the newspapers into the leading reviews, and most respectable publications of the day. Why not shillinged, farthinged, tenpenced, &c.? The formation of a participle passive from a noun is a licence that nothing but a very peculiar felicity can excuse. If mere convenience is to justify such attempts upon the idiom, you cannot stop till the language becomes, in the proper sense of the word, corrupt. Most of these pieces of slang come from America." "I think Wordsworth possessed more of the genius of a great philosophic poet than any man I ever knew, or, as I believe, has existed in England since Milton; but it seems to me that he ought never to have abandoned the contemplative position which is peculiarly, perhaps I might say, exclusively fitted for him. His proper title is Spectator ab extra." "When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things he is mad." “Othello must not be conceived as a negro, but a high and chivalrous Moorish chief. Shakspeare learned the spirit of the character from the Spanish poetry which was prevalent in England in his time. Jealousy does not strike me as the point in his passion; I take it to be rather an agony that the creature, whom he believed angelic, with whom he had garnered in his heart, and whom he could not help still loving, should be proved impure and worthless. It was the struggle not to love her. It was a moral indignation and regret that virtue should so fall.-' But yet the pity of it, Iago !-0, Iago, the pity of it, Iago!' In addition to this his honour was concerned. Iago would not have succeeded but by hinting that his honour was compromised. There is no ferocity in Othello; his mind is majestic and composed. He deliberately determines to die, and speaks his last speech with a view of showing his attachment to the Venetian State, though it had superseded him. Schiller has the material sublime to produce an effect, he sets you a whole town on fire and throws infants with their mothers into the flames, or locks up a father in an old tower. But Shakspeare drops a handkerchief, the same or greater effects follow." The expres sion "material sublime," like a hundred others which have slipped into general use, came originally from Coleridge, and was by him, in the first instance, applied to Schiller's Robbers, act iv. sc. 5. "Lear is the most tremendous effort of Shakspeare as a poet; Hamlet as a philosopher or meditator; and Othello is the union of the two, he is something gigantic and unformed in the former two; but in the latter everything assumes its due plan and proportion, and the whole mature powers of his mind are displayed in admirable equilibrium." 66 It is not easy to put me out of countenance, or intercept the feeling of the time by mere external noise or circumstance, yet once I was thoroughly done up as you would say. I was residing at a particular house, the Remora, and was in the midst of Alhadra's description of the death of her husband, when a scrubby boy, with a shining face set in dirt, burst open the door and cried out: 'Please, ma'am, master says will you ha', or will you not ha', the pin—round?" "You abuse snuff! Perhaps it is the final cause of the human nose." "A rogue is a roundabout fool, a fool in circumbendibus." "To see Kean act was like reading Shakspeare by flashes of lightning. I do not think him thorough-bred gentleman enough to play Othello." "The earth, with its scarred face, is the symbol of the past, the air and heaven of futurity." "Silence does not always mark wisdom. I was at dinner, some time ago, in company with a man who listened to me and said nothing for a long time, but he nodded his head and I thought him intelligent. At length, towards the end of the dinner, some apple-dumplings were placed on the table, and my man had no sooner seen them than he burst forth with— 'Them's the jockeys for me! I wish Spurzheim could have examined the fellow's head." VOL. I. 7 "Some folks apply epithets as boys do in making Latin verses. When I first looked upon the Falls of the Clyde I was unable to find a word to express my feelings. At last a man, who was a stranger to me, who arrived about the same time, said: 'How majestic!' It was the precise term, and I turned round, and was saying, 'Thank you, sir, that is the exact word for it,' when he added, eodem flatu-'Yes, how very pretty."" 66 Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing." "It is a small thing that the patient knows of his own state, yet some things he does know better than his physician.' "Good and bad men are each less so than they seem.' "The ant and the bee are, I think, much nearer man in the understanding or faculty of adopting means to proximate ends than the elephant." Coleridge was accustomed to consider the ant as the most intellectual creature, so far as our present acquaintance with the facts of natural history enables us to judge. "Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels of an error lest you get your brains kicked out." "Really, the metre of some of the modern poems I have read bears about the same relation to metre properly understood that dumb-bells do to music, both are for exercise, and pretty severe, too, I think." Locke "It used to be said that four and five make nine. says that four and five are nine. Now I say that four and five are not nine, but they will make nine. When I see four objects which will form a square, and five which will form a pentagon, I see that they are two different things; when combined they will form a third different figure, which we call nine. When separate they are not it, but will make it." "Charles Lamb translated my motto Sermoni propriora by Properer for a sermon." or so. and "A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr. myself in a lane near Highgate. knew him, and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute After he had left us a little way he came back, and said: 'Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!" 'There is death in that hand,' I said when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly." to "The discipline at Christ's Hospital in my time was ultra |