cuit but it fell on the buttered side? When did I ever cry, Head! but it fell tail? Did I ever once ask, Even or odd, but I lost? And no wonder; for I was sure to hold the marbles so awkwardly, that the boy could count them between my fingers! But this is to laugh at! though in my life I could never descry much mirth in any laugh I ever set up at my own vexations, past or present. And that's another step-dame trick of Destiny! My shames are all immortal! I do believe, Nature stole me from my proper home, and made a blight of me, that I might not be owned again! For I never get older. Shut my eyes, and I can find no more difference between eighteen me and eight me, than between to-day and yesterday! But I will not remember the miseries that dogged my earlier years, from the day I was first breeched! (Nay, the casualties, tears, and disgraces of that day I never can forget.) Let them pass, however-school-tide and holiday-tide, school hours and play hours, griefs, blunders, and mischances. For all these I might pardon my persecuting Nemesis! Yea, I would have shaken hands with her, as forgivingly as I did with that sworn familiar of hers, and Usher of the Black Rod, my old schoolmaster, who used to read his newspaper, when I was horsed, and flog me between the paragraphs! I would forgive her, I say, if, like him, she would have taken leave of me at the School Gate. But now, vir et togatus, a seasoned academic-that now, that still, that evermore, I should be the whipping-stock of Destiny, the laughing-stock of Fortune.” * * N.B. Of the "Selection from Mr. Coleridge's Literary Correspondence" the author said in a note to the Aids to Reflection, “which, however, should any of my readers take the trouble of consulting, he must be content with such parts as he finds intelligible at the first perusal. For from defects in the MS., and without any fault on the part of the Editor, too large a portion is so printed that the man must be equally bold and fortunate in his conjectural readings who can make out any meaning at all." -S. C. 1 NOTES. (a) p. 17. Ir now seems clear to me, that my Father here alludes to a course of lectures delivered in 1808, and I think it most probable that, from some momentary confusion of mind, he wrote "sixteen or seventeen," instead of "ten or eleven;" unless his writing was wrongly copied. It does not appear that he lectured on Shakspeare in 1801 or 1802; but in March, April, and May of 1808, and I doubt not in February likewise, he lectured on Poetry at the Royal Institution. Schlegel's lectures, the substance of which we now have in the Dramaturgische Vorlesungen, were read at Vienna that same Spring; but they were not published till 1809, and it is mentioned in an Observation prefixed to part of the work printed in 1811, that the portion respecting Shakspeare and the English Theatre was re-cast after the oral delivery. (b) p. 18. My Father appears to confound the date of publication with that of delivery, when he affirms that Schlegel's Dramatic Lectures were not delivered till two years after his on the same subjects: but the fact is, as has been mentioned in the last note, that those parts of Schlegel's Dram. Vorlesung. which contain the coincidences with my Father, in his view of Shakspeare, were not orally delivered at all-certainly not in the Spring of 1808, but added when the discourses were prepared for the press, at which time the part about Shakspeare was almost altogether re-written. Few auditors of Mr. Coleridge's earliest Shaksperian lectures probably now survive. None of those who attended his lectures before April in 1808 have I been able to discover or communicate with. But I have found this record in Mr. Payne Collier's edition of Shakspeare, vol. vii. p. 193. "Coleridge, after vindicating himself from the accusation that he had derived his ideas of Hamlet from Schlegel (and we heard him broach them some years before the Lectures Ueber Dramatische Kunst und Litteratur were published) thus in a few sentences sums up the character of Hamlet. "In Hamlet," &c. Introduction to Hamlet. |