"It was then recollected by some of his anxious and importunate friends, that Bath was near, and that a good judge of requisite qualifications therein was found, in the person of the Rev. David Jardine, with whom some of Mr. C.'s friends were on terms of intimacy; so that it was determined that Mr. Coleridge, as the commencement of his brilliant career, should be respectfully requested to preach his inaugural discourse, in the Socinian chapel at Bath. (There may be something of the ludicrous in the following statement, but with this I have nothing to do. I have only to please the reader by giving a correct account of things as they occurred.)

"The invitation, couched in flattering terms, having been given and accepted, I felt some curiosity to witness the firmness with which Mr. C. would face a large and enlightened audience, and, in the intellectual sense, grace his canonical robes. No conveyance having been provided, and wishing the young ecclesiastic to proceed to the place of his exhibition, with some decent respectability, I agreed with a common friend, the late Mr. Charles Danvers, to take Mr. C. over to Bath, in a chaise.

"The morning of the important day unfolded, and, in due time we arrived at the place of our destination. We now advanced from our inn, towards the chapel; when on the way, a man stopped Charles Danvers, and asked him if he could tell where the Rev. Mr. Coleridge preached. Follow the crowd,' said Danvers, and walked on. Mr. C. wore his blue coat and white waistcoat; but what was Mr. Jardine's surprise, when he found that his young probationer peremptorily refused to wear the hide-all sable gown! Expostulation was unavailing, and the minister ascended to the pulpit in his coloured clothes!

"Considering that it had been announced, on the preceding Sunday, that the Rev. S. T. Coleridge, from Cambridge University' would preach there on this day, we naturally calculated an overflowing audience, but it proved to be the most meagre congregation I had ever seen. The reader will but imperfectly appreciate Mr. C.'s discourse, without the previous information, that this year (1796) was a great year of scarcity, and consequent privation, amongst the poor; on which subject the sermon was designed impressively to bear. And now the long-expected service commenced. However reluctant, it must be impartially stated, suggesting, as it will, complicated feelings in the reader's mind.

"The prayer, without being intended, was formal, unimpressive, and undevotional. The singing, from two or three exclusive voices, was somniferously languid, but we expected that the sermon (as the great Lexicographer would, or might have expressed it) would arouse the inattentive, and invigorate the dull. The moment for announcing the text arrived. Our curiosity was excited. With little less than famine in the land, our hearts were appalled at hearing the words, When they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves, and curse their king, and their God, and look upward.' (Isaiah viii. 21.) Mr. Winterbotham, a little before, had been thrown into prison for the freedom of his political remarks in a sermon at Plymouth, and we were half fearful whether in his impetuous current of feeling, some stray expressions might not subject our friend to a like visitation. Our fears were groundless. Strange as it may appear in Mr. Coleridge's vigorous mind, the whole discourse consisted of little more than a Lecture on the Corn Laws!' which some time before he had delivered in Bristol, at the Assembly-Room, and which Corn Laws,' he laboured to show, were cruelty to the poor, and the alone cause of the prevailing sufferings, and popular discontent.

"Returning from our edifying discourse, to a tavern dinner, we were privileged with more luminous remarks on this inexhaustible subject; but something better (or worse, as the reader's taste may be) is still in reserve. After dinner, Mr. Coleridge remarked, that he should have no objection to preach another sermon that afternoon. In the hope that something redeeming might still appear, and the best be retained for the last, we encouraged his proposal, when Mr. C. rang the bell, and, on the waiter appearing, he was sent, with

Mr. Coleridge's compliments, to Mr. Jardine, to say, if agreeable, Mr. C. would give his congregation another sermon, this afternoon, on the Hair Powder Tax! On the departure of the waiter, I was fully assured that Mr. Jardine would smile, and send a civil excuse, satisfied that he had quite enough of political economy, with blue coat and white waistcoat, in the morning, but (exciting the greatest surprise) the waiter returned with Mr. Jardine's compliments, saying, 'he should be happy to hear Mr. Coleridge!'

"Now all was hurry, lest the concourse should be kept waiting. What surprise will the reader feel, on understanding, that, independently of ourselves, and Mr. Jardine, there were but seventeen persons present, including men, women, and children! We had, as we expected, a recapitulation of the old lecture in reprobation of the Hair Powder Tax; (with the exception of its humorous appendages) and the twice-told tale, even to the ear of friendship, in truth, sounded rather dull!

"Two or three times Mr. C. looked significantly toward our seat, when fearful of being thrown off my guard into a smile, I held down my head, from which position I was aroused, when the sermon was about half over, by some gentleman throwing back the door of his pew, and walking out of the chapel. In a few minutes after, a second individual did the same; and, soon after, a third door flew open, and the listener escaped! At this moment, affairs looked so very ominous, that we were almost afraid Mr. Jardine himself would fly, and that none but ourselves would fairly sit it out.

"We all returned to Bristol with the feeling of disappointment ;-Mr. C. from the little personal attention paid to him by Mr. Jardine; and we, from a dissatisfying sense of a Sunday desecrated. Although no doubt can be entertained of Mr. Coleridge having, in the journey before noticed, surpassed his first Essay, yet with every reasonable allowance, the conviction was so strong on my mind, that Mr. C. had mistaken his talent, that my regard for him was too genuine to entertain the wish of ever again seeing him in a pulpit!"—Vol. i. pp. 177-184.

Our readers will be gratified with the statements contained in the following paragraphs, relating to Mr. Coleridge's abandonment of Socinianism, which we have culled from various pages.

"In a former page, Mr. Coleridge has been represented as entertaining sentiments in early life, approaching to, though not identified with, those of Socinians on his return to Bristol, in the year 1807, a complete reverse had taken place in his theological tenets, (as stated, Vol. ii. p. 76. Reflection and reading, particularly the Bible, had taught him,' as he said, 'the unstable foundation on which Socinians grounded their faith;' and in proportion as orthodox sentiments acquired an ascendency in his mind, a love of truth compelled him to oppose his former errors, and stimulated him, by an explicit declaration of his religious views, to counteract those former impressions, which his cruder opinions had led him once so strenuously to enforce on all around.”—Vol. ii. pp. 99, 100.

"I was invited to meet Mr. Coleridge, in company with a zealous Socinian minister. It was natural to conclude, that such uncongenial, and, at the same time, such inflammable materials, would soon ignite. The subject of Socinianism having been introduced soon after dinner, the minister avowed his sentiments, in language that was construed into a challenge, when Mr. Coleridge, advanced at once to the charge, by saying, 'Sir, you give up so much, that the little you retain of christianity is not worth keeping. We looked in vain for a reply. After a manifest internal conflict, the Socinian minister very prudently allowed the gauntlet to remain undisturbed." "Mr. C. said, he had recently had a long conversation with Mr. (a Socinian minister) who declared, that,' He could discover nothing in the New Testament which in the least favoured the divinity of Christ." Mr. C. replied, that It appeared to him impossible for any man to read the New Testament,

VOL. I. N. S.

3 Y

with the common exercise of an unbiassed understanding, without being convinced of the Divinity of Christ, from the testimony almost of every page."pp. 101, 102.

"Mr. C. also said, that he had always found SocINIANS to be an intolerant, bigotted people; more so than any other sect; and at the same time, they were ludicrously supercilious' He said, 'they did not fairly weigh and investigate the opinions of others, but they sneered, and thought that argument sufficient; modestly considering all reason and intellect confined to them.' He mentioned also the unfair books they put into the hands of their children, as the evidences of christianity, which taught no more religion than the Koran."Vol. ii. pp. 103.

"It was with extreme reluctance that the Socinians in Bristol resigned their champion, especially as other defections had recently occurred in their com munity, and that among the more intellectual portion of their friends. Although the expectation might be extravagant, they all still cherished the hope, however languid, that Mr. C, after some oscillations, would once more bestow on them his suffrage; but an occurrence took place, which dissipated the last vestige of this hope, and formed between them a permanent wall of separation.

"Mr. Coleridge was lecturing in Bristol, surrounded by a numerous audience, when, in referring to the Paradise Regained,' he said, that Milton had clearly represented SATAN, as a sceptical Socinian.' This was regarded as a direct and undisguised declaration of war. It so happened that indisposition prevented me from attending that lecture, but I received from Mr. C. directly after, a letter, in which he thus writes:

*

Mr.

- I find is raising the city against me, (as far as he and his friends can) for having stated a mere matter of fact; viz. that Milton had represented SATAN as a sceptical Socinian; which is the case; and I could not have explained the excellence of the sublimest single passage in all his writings, had I not previously informed the audience, that Milton had represented Satan, as knowing the Prophetic and Messianic character of Christ, but was sceptical as to any higher claims. And what other definition could Mr. himself give of a sceptical Socinian? (with this difference indeed, that Satan's faith somewhat exceeded that of Socinians.) Now that Satan has done so, you will consult 'Paradise Regained, Book IV. from line 196, and the same Book, from line 500.'"-Vol. ii. pp. 111, 112.

Mr. Coleridge thus briefly states, in a letter to a friend, the change that had passed in his mind on this question.

"I was for many years a Socinian; (and at times almost a Naturalist) but sorrow, and ill health, and disappointment in the only deep wish I had ever cherished, forced me to look into myself; I read the New Testament again, and I became fully convinced, that Socinianism was not only not the doctrine of the New Testament, but that it scarcely deserved the name of religion in any sense."-Vol. ii. p. 117.

The latter part of the second volume is occupied with letters and discussions relating to the deplorable vice of sipping opium, to which for twelve years poor Coleridge was a miserable victim. The correspondence is highly creditable to the christian fidelity of Mr. Cottle, but we are not equally confident respecting the wisdom of its publication. Mr. Cottle's apology is the hope of impressing some young delinquents, who are beginning to sip the deadly poison, with a sense of the seductive progress and miserable effects of this peculiar vice. We have the fullest confidence in the sincerity of this plea, and as poor Coleridge's own account supplies also a caution to persons of another class, we shall endeavour to present the facts of his mournful case in as few words as possible.

In 1814 Mr. Cottle ascertained from an unquestionable source, that the emaciated appearance and paralytic weakness of his gifted friend arose from the enormous quantity of laudanum he drank, amounting to two quarts a week, and sometimes to more than a pint a day! With exemplary fidelity, Mr. Cottle wrote at length to his friend upon the subject, and closed an affectionate and deeply impressive letter by conjuring him, "alike by the voice of friendship and the duty he owed to himself and his family; above all by the reverence he felt for the cause of Christianity: by the fear of God and the awfulness of eternity, to renounce from that moment opium and spirits as his bane "

To this Coleridge replied in the following terms.

"You have poured oil in the raw and festering wound of an old friend's conscience, Cottle! but it is oil of vitriol! I but barely glanced at the middle of the first page of your letter, and have seen no more of it-not from resentment, (God forbid!) but from the state of my bodily and mental sufferings, that scarcely permitted human fortitude to let in a new visitor of affliction.

"The object of my present reply is to state the case, just as it is-first, that for ten years the anguish of my spirit has been indescribable, the sense of my danger staring, but the consciousness of my GUILT worse-far worse than all! I have prayed, with drops of agony on my brow; trembling, not only before the justice of my Maker, but even before the mercy of my Redeemer.' I gave thee so many talents, what hast thou done with them?' Secondly-overwhelmed as I am, with a sense of my direful infirmity, I have never attempted to disguise or conceal the cause. On the contrary, not only to friends, have I stated the whole case with tears, and the very bitterness of shame; but in two instances, I have warned young men, mere acquaintances, who had spoken of having taken laudanum, of the direful consequences, by an awful exposition of its tremendous effects on myself.

"Thirdly, though before God I cannot lift up my eyelids, and only do not despair of his mercy, because to despair would be adding crime to crime, yet to my fellow-men, I may say, that I was seduced into the accursed habit ignorantly. I had been almost bed-ridden for many months, with swellings in my knees. In a medical Journal I unhappily met with an account, of a cure performed in a similar case, (or what appeared to me so) by rubbing in of Laudanum, at the same time taking a given dose internally. It acted like a charm, like a miracle! I recovered the use of my limbs, of my appetite, of my spirits, and this continued for near a fortnight. At length the unusual stimulus subsided, the complaint returned, the supposed remedy was recurred to-but I cannot go through the dreary history.

"Suffice it to say, that effects were produced which acted on me by terror and cowardice, of pain and sudden death, (not so help me God!) by any temptation of pleasure, or expectation, or desire of exciting pleasurable sensations. On the very contrary, Mrs. Morgan and her sister will bear witness so far, as to say, that the longer I abstained, the higher my spirits were, the keener my enjoyments-till the moment, the direful moment arrived when my pulse began to fluctuate, my heart to palpitate, and such a dreadful falling abroad, as it were, of my whole frame, such intolerable restlessness, and incipient bewilderment, that in the last of my several attempts to abandon the dire poison, I exclaimed in agony, which I now repeat in seriousness and solemnity, I am too poor to hazard this. "Vol. ii. pp. 155-158.

Mr. Cottle has published other letters on the same distressing topic, and narrates some particulars which we wish he had suppressed. It is due alike to biographical fidelity and to the mercy and grace of God, that the degrading vassalage and most blessed

emancipation of Mr. Coleridge should be distinctly recorded, but in our judgment the contrition of such a mind, confirmed as it was by the subsequent testimony of twenty years, abounding in "fruits meet for repentance," demanded from his private friends something of the spirit that Shem and Japheth displayed, when the patriarch was inebriated.

While the public taste for personal and private anecdote remains what it is, these and similar volumes will doubtless find many readers. This we cannot regret, for Mr. Cottle has written like a Christian, and sought to make his volumes useful. At the same time they contain much that is of little value, "long passages that end in nothing," and are so eked out with shreds and scraps of biography and oiko-biography, as to prove that Mr. Cottle has not forgotten the art of book making.

The volumes, it is true, are well got up, and are embellished with six youthful portraits of Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and Amos Cottle, which are well executed and highly interesting. Still all that is valuable in these volumes, might have been published in one book half their size, and at half their price.

The Sanctuary and the Oratory; or Illustrations and Records of Devotional Duty. By the Rev. Thomas Milner, M. Å. Small 8vo. pp. 404. London: W. Ball. 1837.

THE grand and merciful design of the plan of salvation is to restore man to the favour and to the moral image of God, and thus to open a way for the inestimable privilege of holy and permanent communion with Him. Wherever the transforming benefits of this plan have been effectually applied in the understanding and the heart, the individual has never failed to become anxious for fellowship with the Father through the atoning merit of the Son, and by the gracious aid of the Holy Ghost. Patriarch and prophet, the sweet singer of Israel, and the disciple of our Lord, yea, and the followers of the Lamb in every age, have all felt in their degree, the power, the sweetness, and the necessity of this exercise. Whilst it is held forth in the inspired pages as one of the most imperative and solemn duties, thousands and tens of thousands have borne striking testimony to its being one of the noblest of blessings. And just in proportion as this vital privilege is sought and enjoyed, the soul will grow in purity, in elevation, and in happiness. This communion may be realized in all its preciousness, in the secrecy of the closet, in the sacrifice of prayer and praise which daily ascends from the domestic altar, or amidst the gladdening services of the sanctuary. Let but the Christian in either of these situations resolve to delight himself in the Lord, to employ the whole energy of the intellect, and all those susceptibilities of hallowed impression which have been re-awakened within him by divine grace, in contemplating his glory in the person and in the stupendous work of Christ, and as a cheering result, he will be "changed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord."

If there be any justness in these remarks, it will then be very