the metaphor from the ship to the river, you may quote Denham and say: "Oh, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example as it is my theme! Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;

Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full." Each generation has its own authorities and teachers. I quote Tennyson now; fifty years ago I thought Coleridge's distinctions of poetry and romance, prose and verse, the best possible; and indeed I think you will still find them worth reading.

Foster. I know them well, though I did not read them fifty years ago. Judged by Coleridge's standard, is not Malory's book a romance rather than a poem? Squire. Perhaps it is. I am not at all willing, even for Malory's sake, to break down the distinction between prose and verse which I think so real and so important. I will content myself with saying that it is a work of art, real though rude; and for this I have the voice of the world of letters, gentle and simple, on my side, the few and minute critics notwithstanding. Whatever side lights their learning may have supplied to Spenser, Milton, and Tennyson, there can be no reasonable doubt that the Arthur and his knights whom they knew are the king and knights of Malory. The popular voice of approval has never been silent since Caxton printed his first edition; and during the present century it has been raised, with an ever-increasing volume, to what Tennyson may be said to have given a not inappropriate expression when he said, "There is no grander subject in the world than King Arthur."

Foster. The bibliography of the book is curious and interesting, especially as to Upcott's very ingenious interpolations to supply the missing pages of the Althorp copy. It seems odd that the truth had remained undiscovered for fifty years till

you told the story in the Introduction to the Globe Edition.

Squire. When I came to look into the

history of the text for myself, I was astonished at the inaccuracy and slovenliness of the professional critics, and their habit of putting second-hand guesses in the place of verified facts. But I venture to say that you may depend on the bibliography of the Globe Introduction and the Prolegomena of Dr. Somer. The work of Dr. Somer is, indeed, a wonderful monument of German learning, industry, and contentment with the reward of the approval and admiration of the few scholars competent to judge of its merits.

Foster. I am afraid that you cannot include the authorities of the British Museum among those who justly appreciate the worth of Malory's book, when they allowed the one perfect copy of the original edition to go to America.

Squire. From what I have heard, I guess that they outwitted themselves by the overdone caution not uncommon with buyers at auctions of trying to make their purchase without giving their bidding agent a free hand. I was very sorry when I first heard that the precious volume which, when it lay in the Osterly Park library, had been seen by very few but myself, was gone to Brooklyn instead of to Bloomsbury. But I could no longer grudge the loss when I remembered that the treasure had only gone to our brothers - may I say our sister? across the Atlantic, with whom, as its possessor, Mrs. Abby E. Pope, tells me, it is prized more than it was among ourselves. I could only wish that it may be as safe from risks of fire and other damage as it would have been in the British Museum, and that the present possessor of the Althorp copy will obtain would no doubt be allowed a photograph facsimile of the missing pages, to be substituted for the very inaccurate though beautifully written transcript by Whittaker. But here comes tea. Queen Guenever and her ladies never poured out that at the Round Table, nor invited Arthur and his knights to "five o'clocker."

Edward Strachey.

as

but should you not, yet still put it in, my dear fellow, for my sake and out of respect to a woman-poet's feelings.

1

Miss Hays I have seen. Charles Lloyd's conduct has been atrocious beyond what you stated. Lamb himself confessed to me that, during the time in which he kept up his ranting, sentimental correspondence with Miss Hays, he frequently read her letters in company, as a subject for laughter, and then sate down and answered them quite à la Rousseau! Poor Lloyd! Every hour new-creates him; he is his own posterity in a perpetually flowing series, and his body unfortunately retaining an external identity, their mutual contradictions and disagreeings are united under one name, and of course are called lies, treachery, and rascality! I would not give him up, but that the same circumstances which have wrenched his morals prevent in him any salutary exercise of genius; and therefore he is not worth to the world that I should embroil and embrangle my self in his interests. Of Miss Hays's intellect I do not think so highly as you; or rather, to speak sincerely, I think not contemptuously, but certainly despectively thereof. Yet I think you likely, in this case, to have judged better than I; for to hear a thing, ugly and petticoated, exsyllogize a God with cold-blooded precision, and attempt to run religion through the body with an icicle, an icicle from a Scotch hog-trough, I do not endure it! My eye beholds phantoms, and "nothing is, but what is not."

By your last I could not find whether or no you still are willing to execute the History of the Levelling Principle. Let me hear. Tom Wedgewood is going to the Isle of St. Nevis. As to myself, Lessing out of the question, I must stay in England. . . . Dear Hartley is well

1 Mary Hayes, a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose opinions she advocated with great zeal, and whose death she witnessed. She wrote a novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney.

and in high force. He sported of his own accord a theologico-astronomical hy.pothesis. Having so perpetually heard of good boys being put up into the sky when they are dead, and being now be yond measure enamoured of the lamps in the street, he said, one night, coming through the streets, "Stars are dead lamps; they be n't naughty; they are put up in the sky." Two or three weeks ago he was talking to himself while I was writing, and I took down his soliloquy. It would make a most original poem.

You say I illuminize. I think that property will some time or other be modified by the predominance of intellect, even as rank and superstition are now modified by and subordinated to property. That much is to be hoped of the future; but first those particular modes of property which more particularly stop the diffusion must be done away as injurious to property itself: these are priesthood and the too great patronage of government. Therefore, if to act on the belief that all things are the process, and that inapplicable truths are moral falsehoods, be to illuminize, why, then I illuminize. I know that I have been obliged to illuminize so late at night, or rather mornings, that eyes have smarted as if I had allum in eyes. I believe I have misspelt the word, and ought to have written Alum; that aside, 't is a humourous pun.

Tell Davy 2 that I will soon write. God love him! You and I, Southey, know a good and great man or two in this world of ours.

God love you, my dear Southey, and your affectionate

S. T. COLERIDGE. My kind love to Edith. Let me hear from you, and do not be angry with me that I don't answer your letters regularly.

2 Afterward Sir Humphry Davy. He contributed some verses to Southey's Anthology. If De Quincey is to be trusted, Coleridge cooled toward Davy when the brilliant man of science became a great figure in London society.

[Early in 1800.] MY DEAR SOUTHEY, — I shall give up this newspaper business; it is too, too fatiguing. I have attended the Debates twice, and the first time I was twentyfive hours in activity, and that of a very unpleasant kind, and the second time from ten in the morning till four o'clock the next morning. I am sure that you will excuse my silence, though indeed after two such letters from you I cannot scarcely excuse it myself.

First, of the book business. I find a resistance which I did not expect to the anonymousness of the publication. Longman seems confident that a work on such a subject without a name would not do. Translations and perhaps satires are, he says, the only works that booksellers now venture on without a name. He is very solicitous to have your Thalaba, and wonders (most wonderful!) that you do not write a novel. That would be the thing! And truly, if, by no more pains than a St. Leon requires, you could get four hundred pounds, or half the money, I say so too. If we were together, we might easily toss up a novel, to be published in the name of one of us, or two, if that were all, and then christen 'em by lots. As sure as ink flows in my pen, by help of an amanuensis, I could write a volume a week. And Godwin got four hundred pounds for it! Think of that, Master Brook! I hope that some time or other you will write a novel on that subject of yours. I mean The Rise and Progress of a Laugher. Le Grice in your eye, the effect of laughing on taste, manners, morals, and happiness. But as to the Jacobin book, I must wait till I hear from you. Phillips would be very glad to engage you to write a school-book for him,—The History of Poetry in all Nations; about four hundred pages. But this, too, must have

1 Valentine Le Grice, a Bluecoat boy, and friend of Lamb and Coleridge. He was a wit and scholar, who took orders, and acquired some note by being inhibited from preaching because

your name. He would give sixty pounds. If poor dear Burnett were with you, he might do it, under your eye and with your instructions, as well as you or I could do it, but it is the name. Longman remarked, acutely enough, "The booksellers scarcely pretend to judge the merits of the book, but we know the saleableness of the name; and as they continue to buy most books on the calculation of a first edition of a thousand copies, they are seldom much mistaken, for the name gives them the excuse for sending it to all the Gemmen in Great Britain and the colonies, from whom they have standing orders for new books of reputation." This is the secret why books published by country booksellers, or by authors on their own account, so seldom succeed.

As to my schemes of residence, I am as unfixed as yourself, only that we are under the absolute necessity of fixing somewhere, and that somewhere will, I suppose, be Stowey. There are all my books and all our furniture. In May I am under a kind of engagement to go with Sara to Ottery. My family wish me to fix there, but that I must decline in the names of public liberty and individual free-agency. Elder brothers, not senior in intellect and not sympathizing in main opinions, are subjects of occasional visits, not temptations to a co-township. But if you go to Burton, Sara and I will waive the Ottery plan, if possible, and spend May and June with you, and perhaps July; but she must be settled in a house by the latter end of July or the first week in August. Till we are with you, Sara means to spend five weeks with the Roskillies, and a week or two at Bristol, where I shall join her. She will leave London in three weeks, at least, perhaps a fortnight, and I shall give up lodgings, and billet myself, free of expense, at my friend Purkis's at Brentford. This is

of his free opinions. He is the C. V. le G. of Elia's Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago.