of morals to the young nabobs at Calcutta, this moment to ripen into a legitimate fit. with an establishment of £3,900 a year!). What uninterrupted rural retirement can Stuart was so kind as to send me Fenwick's have had to do in the production of these review of it in a paper called the Albion, and outward and visible evils, I cannot guess; Mr. Longman has informed me that, by your what share it has had in consoling me orders, the pamphlet itself has been left for under them, I know with a tranquil mind me at his house. The extracts which I saw and feel with a grateful heart. Oh that pleased me much, with the exception of the you had now before your eyes the delicious introduction, which is incorrectly and clum- picture of lake and river and bridge and sily worded. But, indeed, I have often ob- cottage and spacious field with its pathway, served that, whatever you write, the first and woody hill with its spring verdure, and page is always the worst in the book. I wish mountain with the snow yet lingering in fanthat instead of six days you had employed tastic patches upon it, even the same which six months, and instead of a half-crown pam- I had from my sick-bed, even without raising phlet, had given us a good half-guinea octavo. my head from the pillow! O God! all but But you may yet do this. It strikes me that, dear and lovely things seemed to be known both in this work and in the second edition to my imagination only as words; even the of the "Political Justice," your retractations forms which struck terror into me in my fehave been more injudicious than the asser- ver-dreams were still forms of beauty. Betions or dogmas retracted. But this is no fit fore my last seizure I bent down to pick somesubject for a mere letter. If I had time, thing from the ground, and when I raised my which I have not, I would write two or three head, I said to Miss Wordsworth, "I am sheets for your sole inspection entitled "His-sure, Rotha, that I am going to be ill; tory of the Errors and Blunders of the Liter- as I bent my head there came a distinct, ary Life of William Godwin." To the world it would appear a paradox to say that you are at all too persuadable; but you yourself know it to be the truth. " for vivid spectrum upon my eyes; it was one little picture, a rock, with birches and ferns on it, a cottage backed by it, and a small stream. Were I a painter, I would give an outward existence to this, but it will always live in my memory. man of very vigorous intellect, won a good deal both on myself and Wordsworth; for what he said evidently came from his own feelings, and was the result of his own observation. My love to your dear little ones. I begin to feel my knee preparing to make ready for the reception of the Lady Arthritis. God bless S. T. COLERIDGE. and you TUESDAY EVENING, June 23, 1801. I shall send back your manuscript on Friday, with my criticisms. You say in your last, "How I wish you were here! When By the by, our rural retirement has been I see how little I have written of what I honored by the company of Mr. Sharp and could have talked, I feel with you that a let-the poet Rogers; the latter, though not a ter is but “a mockery" to a full and ardent mind. In truth, I feel this so forcibly that, if I could be certain that I should remain in this country, I should press you to come down, and finish. the whole in my house. But, if I can by any means raise the moneys, I shall go in the first vessel that leaves Liverpool for the Azores (St. Michael's, to wit), and these sail at the end of July. Unless I can escape one English winter and spring, I have not any rational prospect of recovery. You cannot help regarding uninterrupted rural retirement as a principal cause of my ill-health. My ill-health commenced at Liver, pool, in the shape of blood-shot eyes and swollen eyelids, while I was in the daily habit of visiting the Liverpool literati-these, on my settling at Keswick, were followed by large boils in my neck and shoulders; these, by a violent rheumatic fever; this, by a distressing and tedious hydrocele; and, since then, by irregular gout, which promises at SATURDAY NIGHT, June 4, 1803. GRETA HALL, KESWICK. MY DEAR GODWIN,-I trust that my dear friend, C. Lamb, will have informed you how seriously ill I have been. I arrived at Keswick on Good Friday, caught the influenza, have struggled on in a series of convalescence and relapse, the disease still assuming new shapes and symptoms; and, though I am certainly better than at any former period of the disease, and more steadily convalescent, yet it is not mere low spirits that makes me doubt on the restoration of the Belles Lettres, and on the Reformation. 7th Chap. Raymund Lully. 8th Chap. Peter Ramus. 9th Chap. Lord Bacon, or the Verulamian Logic. 10th Chap. Examination of the same, and comparison of it with the Logic of Plato (in which I attempt to make it probable that, though considered by Bacon himself as the antithesis and the antidote of Plato, it is boná fide the same, and that Plato has been misunderstood). 10th Chap. Descartes. 11th Chap. Condillac, and a philosophical examination of his logic, i. e., the logic which he basely purloined from Hartley. Then follows my own Organum Verè Organum, which consists of an Evoтnка of all possible modes of true, probable, and false reasoning, arranged philosophically, i. e., on a strict analysis of those operations and passions of the mind in which they originate, or by which they act; with one or more striking instances annexed to each, from authors of high estimation, and to each instance of false reasoning, the manner in which the sophistry is to be detected, and the words in which it may be exposed. The whole will conclude with considerations of the value of the work, or its practical util whether I shall ever wholly surmount the ages; and of the influence of Plato's works effects of it. I owe, then, explanation to you; for I quitted town, with strong feelings of affectionate esteem toward you, and a firm resolution to write to you within a short time after my arrival at my home. During my illness I was exceedingly affected by the thought that month had glided away after month, and year after year, and still had found and left me only preparing for the experiments which are to ascertain whether the hopes of those who have hoped proudly of me have been auspicious omens or mere delusions; and the anxiety to realize something, and finish something, has, no doubt, in some measure retarded my recovery. I am now, however, ready to go to the press with a work which I consider as introductory to a system, though to the public it will appear altogether a thing by itself. I write now to ask your advice respecting the time and manner of its publication, and the choice of a publisher. I entitle it "Organum Verè Organum, or an Instrument of Practical Reasoning in the Business of Real Life;" to which will be prefixed, 1. A familiar introduction to the common system of Logic; namely, that of Aristotle and the Schools. 2. A concise and simple, yet full statement of the Aristote-ity in scientific investigations (especially the lian Logic, with reference annexed to the first part, which contains the strictly demonauthors, and the name and page of the work strative reasonings, and the analysis of all to which each part may be traced, so that the acts and passions of the mind which may it may be at once seen what is Aristotle's, be employed to the discovery of truth) in the what Porphyry's, what the addition of the arts of healing, especially in those parts that Greek Commentators, and what of the School- contain a catalogue, etc., of probable reasonmen. 3. An outline of the History of Logic ing; lastly, to the senate, the pulpit, and in general. 1st Chapter. The Origin of our law courts, to whom the whole-but Philosophy in general, and of Logic speciatim. especially the latter three-fourths of the work, 2d Chap. Of the Eleatic and Megaric Logic. on the probable and the false-will be useful, 3d Chap. Of the Platonic Logic. 4th Chap. and partly instructive, how to form a coinOf Aristotle, containing a fair account of monplace book by the aid of the instrument, the Opyavov-of which Dr. Reid, in "Kaimes' so as to read with practical advantage, and Sketches of Man," has given a most false, (supposing average talents) to insure a faciland not only erroneous, but calumnious state-ity and rapidity in proving and in computing. ment-in as far as the account had not been I have thus amply detailed the contents of anticipated in the second part of my work; my work, which have not been the labor of namely, the concise and simple, yet full, etc., one year or two, but the result of many etc. 5th Chap. A philosophical examination years' meditations, and of very various readof the truth and of the value of the Aristote- ing. The size of the work will, printed at lian System of Logic, including all the after-thirty lines a page, form one volume octavo, additions to it. 6th Chap. On the charac- five hundred pages to the volume; and I teristic merits and demerits of Aristotle and Plato as philosophers in general, and an attempt to explain the fact of the vast influence of the former during so many shall be ready with the first half of the work for the printer at a fortnight's notice. Now, my dear friend, give me your thoughts on the subject: would you have me to offer it to the + man, booksellers, or, by the assistance of my friends, When this book is fairly off my bands, I shall, if I live and have sufficient health, set seriously to work in arranging what I have already written, and in pushing forward my studies and my investigations relative to the omne scibile of human nature-what we are, and how we become what we are; so as to solve the two grand problems-how, being acted upon, we shall act; how, acting, we shall be acted upon. But between me and this work there may be death. preface to his Moral and Political Philosophy'] more original thinking and observation upon the several subjects he has taken in hand than in any other, not to say in all others put together. His talent also for illustration is unrivalled. But his thoughts are diffused through a long, various, and irregular work.” And a friend of mine, every way calculated by his taste and private studies for such a work,* is willing to abridge and systematize that work from eight to two volumes, in the words of Paley, "to dispose into method, to collect into heads and articles, and to exhibit in more compact and tangible masses, what in that otherwise excellent performance is spread over too much surface." I would prefix to it an essay containing the whole substance of the first volume of Hartley; entirely defecated from all the corpuscular hypothesis, with more illustrations. I give my name to the essay. Likewise I will revise every sheet of the abridgment. I should think the character of the work, and the above quotations from so high an authority (with the present public, I mean) as Paley, would insure its success. If you will read or transcribe, and send this to Mr. Phillips, or to any other publisher (Longman and Rees excepted), yon would greatly oblige me; that is to say, my dear Godwin, you would essentially serve a young man of profound genius and original mind, who wishes to get his Sabine subsistence by some employment from the booksellers, while he is employing the remainder of his time in nursing up his genius for the destiny which he believes appurtenant to it. "Qui cito facit, bis facit." Impose any task on me in return. FRIDAY, July 10, 1803. I hope your wife and little ones are well. I have had a sick family At one time every individual-master, mistress, children, and servants were all laid up in bed, and we were waited on by persons hired from the GRETA HALL. town for the week. But now all are well, I MY DEAR GODWIN,-Your letter has this only excepted. If you find my paper smell moment reached me, and found me writing or my style savor of scholastic quiddity, you for Stuart, to whom I am under a positive enmust attribute it to the infectious quality of gagement to produce three essays by the bethe folio on which I am; writing namely, ginning of next week. To promise, there"Scotus Erigena de Divisione Naturæ," the fore, to do what I could not do would be worse forerunner, by some centuries, of the school- than idle; and to attempt to do what I could men. I cherish all kinds of honorable feel-not do well, from distraction of mind, would ings toward you and I am, dear Godwin, be trifling with my time and your patience. Yours most sincerely, If I could convey to you any tolerably disS. T. COLERIDGE. tinct notion of the state of my spirits of late, and the train or the sort of my ideas consoYou know the high character and present quent on that state, you would feel instantly scarcity of Tucker's Light of Nature.' "I *Hazlitt. The abridgment was made and pubhave found in this writer [says Paley, in his | lished in 1807. that my non-performance of the promise is matter of regret with me indeed, but not of compunction. It was my full intention to have prepared immediately a second volume of poems for the press; but, though the poems are all either written or composed, excepting only the conclusion of one poem (equal to four days' common work) and a few corrections, and though I had the most pressing motives for sending them off, yet, after many attempts, I was obliged to give up the very hope the attempts acted so perniciously on my disorder. with Shakspeare, between whom he seems to stand midway, with, however, a manner of his own which belongs to neither, with a manner and an excellence; lastly, to compare Dante and Chaucer, and inclusively Spenser and Shakspeare, with the ancients, to abstract the characteristic differences, and to develop the causes of such differences. (For instance, in all the writings of the ancients I recollect nothing that, strictly examined, can be called humor; yet Chaucer abounds with it and Dante, too, though in a very different way. Thus, too, the passion for personifications and, me judice, strong, sharp, practical good sense, which I feel to constitute a strikingly charac Wordsworth, too, wished, and in a very particular manner expressed the wish that I should write to him at large on a poetic sub-teristic difference in favor of the feudal poets.) ject, which he has at present sub malleo arden- As to information, I could give you a critical tem et ignitum. I made the attempt; but I sketch of poems written by contemporaries could not command my recollections. It of Chaucer, in Germany; an epic to comseemed a dream that I had ever thought on pare with his " Palamon," and tales with his poetry, or had ever written it, so remote were "Tales," descriptive and fanciful poems with my trains of ideas from composition or criti- those of the same kind in our own poet. In cism on composition. These two instances will, short, a Life of Chaucer ought, in the work in some manner, explain my non-perform- itself, and in the appendices of the work, to ance; but indeed I have been very ill, and make the poet explain his age, and to make that I have done anything in any way is a sub-the age both explain the poet, and evince the ject of wonder to myself, and of no causeless superiority of the poet over his age. I think self-complacency. Yet I am anxious to do something which may convince you of my sincerity by zeal and, if you think that it will be of any service to you, I will send down for the work; I will instantly give it a perusal con amore; and partly by my reverential love of Chaucer, and partly from my affectionate esteem for his biographer (the summer, too, bringing increase of health with it), I doubt not that my old mind will recur to me; and I will forthwith write a series of letters, containing a critique on Chaucer, and on the "Life of Chaucer," by W. Godwin, and publish them with my name, either at once in a small volume, or in the Morning Post in the first instance, and republish them afterward. The great thing to be done is to present Chaucer stripped of all his adventitious matter, his translations, etc.; to analyze his own real productions, to deduce his province and his rank; then to compare him with his contemporaries, or with immediate prede- and suc-cessors, first as an Englishman, and secondly as a European; then with Spenser and *I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping.-Table Talk, p. 310. that the publication of such a work would do your work some little service, in more ways than one. It would occasion, necessarily, a double review of it in all the Reviews; and there is a large class of fashionable men who have been pleased of late to take me into high favor, and among whom even my name might have some influence, and my praises of you some weight. But let me hear from you on the subject. Now for my own business. As soon as you possibly can do something respecting the abridgment of "Tucker," do so; you will, on my honor, be doing good, in the best sense of the word! Of course I cannot wish you to do anything till after the 24th, unless it should be put in your way to read that part of the letter to Phillips. As to my own work, let me correct one or two conceptions of yours respecting it. I could, no doubt, induce my friends to publish the work for me; but I am possessed of facts that deter me. I know that the booksellers not only do not encourage, but that they use unjustifiable artifices to injure, works published on the authors' own account. It never ❤Godwin exerted himself actively in the mattor, as appears by the correspondence of Charles Lamb. stance. answered, as far as I can find, in any in- | honor of calling on me, and leaving his card, on Sunday afternoon, unfortunately a few minutes after I had gone out-and I am so unwell, that I fear I shall not be able to return the call to-day, as I had intended, though it is a grief even for a brace of days to appear insensible of so much kindness and condescension. But what need has Grattan of pride? "Ha d' uopo solo I half caught from Lamb that you had written to Wordsworth, with a wish that he should versify some tale or other, and that Wordsworth had declined it. I told dear Miss Lamb that I had formed a complete plan of a poem, with little plates for children, the first thought, but that alone, taken from Gesner's "First Mariner; " and this thought, I have reason to believe, was not an invention of Gesner's. It is this: that in early times, in some island or part of the Continent, the ocean had washed in, overflowing a vast plain of twenty or thirty miles, and thereby insulating one small promontory or cape of high land, on which was a cottage, containing a man and his wife, and an infant daughter." This is the one thought; all that Gesner has And even the sale of a first edition is not without objections on this score; to this, however, I should certainly adhere, and it is my resolution. But I must do something immediately. Now, if I knew that any bookseller would purchase the first edition of this work, as numerous as he pleased, I should put the work out of hand at once, totus in illo. But it was never my intention to send one single sheet to the press till the whole was bonâ fide ready for the printer-that is both written, and fairly written. The work is half written out, and the materials of the other half are all in paper, or rather on papers. I should not expect one farthing till the work was delivered entire; and I would deliver it at once, if it were wished. But if I cannot engage with a bookseller for this, I must do something else first, which I should be sorry for. Your division of the sorts of works acceptable to booksellers is just, and what has been always my own notion or rather knowledge; but, though I detailed the whole of the contents of my work so fully to you, I did not mean to lay any stress with the bookseller on the first half, but simply state it as preceded by a familiar introduction, and critical history of logic. On the work itself I meant to lay all the stress, as a work really in re-made out of it (and I once translated into quest, and non-existent, either well or ill blank verse about half of the poem, but gave done, and to put the work in the same class it up under the influence of a double disgust, with " Guthrie," and books of practical in- moral and poetical) I have rejected; and, struction-for the universities, classes of strictly speaking, the tale in all its parts, that scholars, lawyers, etc., etc. Its profitable sale one idea excepted, would be original. The will greatly depend on the pushing of the tale will contain the curse, the occasions, the booksellers, and on its being considered as a process, with all its failures and ultimate practical book, Organum verè Organum, a success, of the construction of the first boat, book by which the reader is to acquire not and of the undertaking of the first naval exonly knowledge, but likewise power. I fear pedition. Now, supposing you liked the idea that it may extend to seven hundred pages; (I address you and Mrs. G., and as commerand would it be better to publish the Intro- ciants, not you as the philosopher who gave duction of History separately, either after us the first system in England that ever dared or before? God bless you, and all belonging reveal at full that most important of all imto you, and your Chaucer. All happiness to portant truths, that morality might be built you and your wife. on its own foundation, like a castle built from the rock and on the rock, with religion for the ornaments and completion of its roof and upper stories-nor as the critic who, in the life of Chaucer, has given us, if not principles of asthetic or taste, yet more and better data for principles than had hitherto existed in our language)-if (we pulling like two friendly tradesmen together, for you and your wife must be one flesh, and I trust are one heart) Ever yours, S. T. C. P. S. If f you read to Phillips any part of my letter respecting my own work, or rather detailed it to him, you would lay all the stress on the practical. TUESDAY, March 26, 1811. DEAR GODWIN,-Mr. Grattan did me the |