beyond most men nature had created with the necessity of conscious independence, all men besieged with the assurance that he was, must be, ought to be dependent; nay, that it was his primary duty to be grateful for his dependence. I have not looked into any edition of Burns, except once for a quotation, since this year 1801-when I read the whole of Currie's edition, and had opportunities of meeting the editor -and once subsequently, upon occasion of a fifth or supplementary volume being published. I know not, therefore, how this matter has been managed by succeeding editors, such as Allan Cunningham, far more capable of understanding Burns's situation, from the previous struggles of their own honourable lives, and Burns's feelings, from something of congenial power. I, in this year, 1801, when in the company of Dr. Currie, did not forget, and, with some pride I say that I stood alone in remembering, the very remarkable position of Burns: not merely that, with his genius, and with the intellectual pretensions generally of his family, he should have been called to a life of early labour, and of labour unhappily not prosperous, but also that he, by accident about the proudest of human spirits, should have been by accident summoned, beyond all others, to eternal recognitions of some mysterious gratitude which he owed to some mysterious patrons little and great, whilst yet, of all men, perhaps, he reaped the least obvious or known benefit from any patronage that has ever been put on record. Most men, if they reap little from patronage, are liberated from the claims of patronage, or, if they are summoned to a galling dependency, have at least the fruits of their dependency. But it was this man's previous irritability on unhappy fate with an early and brow-that is bad; and that is a curse, and pronounced such by God. But, when that is all, the labourer is by comparison happy. The second curse makes that a jest: he must sue, he must sneak, he must fawn like an Oriental slave, in order to win his fellow-man, in Burns's indignant words, "to give him leave to toil." That was the scorpion thought that was for ever shooting its sting into Burns's meditations, whether forward-looking or backward-looking; and, that considered, there arises a world of allowance for that vulgar bluster of independence which Lord Jeffrey, with so much apparent reason, charges upon his prose writings. this very point-to find himself saddled, by his literary correspondents, with all that was odious in dependency, whilst he had every hardship to face that is most painful in unbefriended poverty. On this view of the case, I talked, then, being a schoolboy, with and against the first editor of Burns :— -I did not, and I do not, profess to admire the letters (that is, the prose), all or any, of Burns. I felt that they were liable to the charges of Lord Jeffrey, and to others beside; that they do not even express the natural vigour of Burns's mind, but are at once vulgar, tawdry, coarse, and commonplace; neither was I a person to affect any profound sympathy with the general character and temperament of Burns, which has often been described as of the earth, earthy"—unspiritualanimal- beyond those of most men equally intellectual. But still I comprehended his situation; I had for ever ringing in my ears, during that summer of 1801, those groans which ascended to heaven from his over-burthened heart-those harrowing words, "To give him leave to toil," which record almost a reproach to the ordinances of God-and I felt that upon him, amongst all the children of labour, the primal curse had fallen heaviest and sunk deepest. Feelings such as these I had the courage to express: a personal compliment, or so, I might now and then hear; but all were against me on the matter. Dr. Currie said "Poor Burns! such notions had been his ruin"; Mr. Shepherd continued to draw from the subject some scoff or growl at Mr. Pitt and the Excise; the laughing tailor told us a good story of some proud beggar; Mr. Clarke proposed that I should write a Greek inscription for a cenotaph which he was to erect in his garden to the memory of Burns; and so passed away the solitary protestation on behalf of Burns's jacobinism, together with the wine and the roses, and the sea-breezes of that same Everton, in that same summer of 1801. Mr. Roscoe is dead, and has found time since then to be half forgotten; Dr. Currie, the physician, has been found" unable to heal himself"; Mr. Shepherd of Gatacre is a name and a shadow; Mr. Clarke is a shadow without a name; the tailor, who set the table in a roar, is dust and ashes; and three men at the most remain of all who in those convivial meetings held it right to look down upon Burns as upon one whose spirit was rebellious overmuch against the institutions of man, and jacobinical in a sense which " property" and master manufacturers will never brook, albeit democrats by profession.1 men of 1 De Quincey's strictures in this paper of 1837 on the Liverpool literary coterie of 1801 gave great offence in that town. The Liverpool papers attacked him for it; and Dr. Shepherd of Gatacre, apparently then the sole survivor of the coterie, addressed a letter of remonstrance to the editor of Tait's Magazine. It appeared in the number of the magazine for May 1837, with some editorial comments. "The question of which I have to treat," wrote Dr. Shepherd, "is a question of accuracy of recollection; and I am constrained to remark that, as, from the appellation by which, with an extraordinary kind of taste, Mr. De Quincey chooses to designate himself in his literary character, he seems to have been at one period of his life the slave of a deleterious drug, which shakes the nerves, and, inflaming the brain, impairs the memory, whilst I have avoided that poison even in its medical application, therefore my recollection is more likely to be correct that his." The letter proceeds to vindicate Dr. Currie, Mr. Roscoe, and the writer himself, from the charge of defective appreciation of the manly demeanour of Burns in his relations with the Scottish aristocracy and lairds; after which come some words of special self-defence of the writer in the matters of his political consistency and his jests at Hannah More. The letter altogether is destitute of effective point; and the editor of Tait was quite justified in standing by De Quincey. This is done in every particular of the offending paper, with this included sting: "It may tempt a smile from the few who are likely to trouble themselves about this foolish affair to find that, though solemnly assuming the office of advocategeneral for the other members of the extinct coterie, Dr. Shepherd, as well as the newspaper writers, has entirely overlooked the vivacious tailor celebrated by Mr. De Quincey, of whom we think none of his literary friends have the least reason to be ashamed."-The main matter of interest now in this little controversy of 1837 respects De Quincey's own estimate of Burns. Although he had taken up the cudgels for Burns in that particular in which he thought Dr. Currie and the rest of the Liverpool coterie of 1801, professed democrats though they were, had done Burns injustice,-viz. his spirit of manly independence and superiority to considerations of mere worldly rank,— it remains true that De Quincey's own estimate of Burns all in all fell woefully beneath the proper mark. There are evidences of this in the present paper, and there are other evidences at different points of De Quincey's life. Wordsworth in this respect differed immensely from his friend De Quincey, and might have taught him better. In that letter of Wordsworth's which is referred to by De Quincey (ante, p. 131) precisely because it had deprecated the republication in 1816 of Dr. Currie's Life of Burns in 1800, how enthusiastic was the feeling for Burns and his memory compared with anything that De Quincey seems ever to have permitted himself! And, as long before as 1803, had not Wordsworth, in his lines At the Grave of Burns, given expression to the same feeling in more personal shape? Who can forget that deathless stanza in which, remembering that Burns had died so recently, and that, though they had never met, they had been near neighbours by their places of habitation, the new poet of England had confessed his own indebtedness to the example of the Scottish ploughman bard ? "I mourned with thousands, but as one How verse may build a princely throne In connexion with the fact of De Quincey's defective appreciation of Burns even so late as 1837, it is additionally significant that, though he refers in the present paper, with modified approbation, to Jeffrey's somewhat captious article on Burns in the Edinburgh Review for January 1809, he does not mention the compensation which had appeared, with Jeffrey's own editorial sanction, in the shape of Carlyle's essay on Burns in the same Review for December 1828.-M. CHAPTER II SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 1 IT was, I think, in the month of August, but certainly in the summer season, and certainly in the year 1807, that I first saw this illustrious man. My knowledge of him as a man of most original genius began about the year 1799. A little before that time Wordsworth had published the first edition (in a single volume) of the "Lyrical Ballads," 2 and into this had been introduced Mr. Coleridge's poem of the "Ancient Mariner," as the contribution of an anonymous friend. It would be directing the reader's attention too much to myself if I were to linger upon this, the greatest event in the unfolding of my own mind. Let me say, in one word, that, at a period when neither the one nor the other writer was valued by the public-both having a long warfare to accomplish of contumely and ridicule before they 1 This chapter is composed of four articles contributed to Tait's Magazine under the title of "Samuel Taylor Coleridge: By the English Opium-Eater." They appeared, respectively, in the numbers of the Magazine for September, October, and November 1834, and January 1835. Three of these articles were revised by De Quincey, and thrown into one paper for Vol. II of the Collective Edition of his writings, published in 1854. The fourth article was not included in that paper; but it is added to the reprint of the paper in the American Collective Edition of De Quincey, and is necessary to complete his sketch of Coleridge. It is therefore reproduced here. The reader will understand, accordingly, that as far as to p. 208 we follow De Quincey's revised text of three of his Coleridge articles; after which we have to print the fourth article as it originally stood in Tait.-M. 2 Published in 1798.-M. |