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Page 45
"Dear Miss Betham,--Not my will, but accident and necessity
made me a truant from my promise. I was to have left Merton,
in Surrey, at half-past eight on Tuesday morning with a Mr.
Hall, who would have driven me in his chaise to town by ten;
but having walked an unusual distance on the Monday, and
talked and exerted myself in spirits that have been long
unknown to me, on my return to my friend's house, being
thirsty, I drank at least a quart of lemonade; the consequence
was that all Tuesday morning, till indeed two o'clock in the
afternoon, I was in exceeding pain, and incapable of quitting
my room, or dismissing the hot flannels applied to my
body...."
This was no ordinary philosopher; but the chapter is not yet full.
He left Merton, he says, at five, walked stoutly on, was detained an
hour and a half on Clapham Common, "in an act of mere humanity," and
finally reached Vauxhall.
"At Vauxhall I took a boat for Somerset House: two mere
children were my Charons; however, though against tide, we
sailed safely to the landing-place, when, as I was getting
out, one of the little ones (God Bless him!) moved the boat.
On turning halfway round to reprove him, he moved it again,
and I fell back on the landing-place. By my exertions I should
have saved myself but for a large stone which
I struck against just under my crown and unfortunately in the
very same place which had been contused at Melton (_sic_) when
I fell backward after learning suddenly and most abruptly of
Captain Wordsworth's fate in the _Abergavenny_, a most dear
friend of mine. Since that time any great agitation has
occasioned a feeling of, as it were, a _shuttle_ moving from
that part of the back of my head horizontally to my forehead,
with some pain but more confusion."
The unction of that blessing called down upon his persecutor is
truly Coleridgian. "Melton" is the Editor's rendering of Malta, where
Coleridge was when he heard of John Wordsworth's drowning in 1805. He
had then kept his bed for a fortnight, or so he told Mrs. Coleridge.
Apparently no meeting took place, as yet another letter, dated 7th
May, relates how instead of going to New Cavendish Street, where Miss
Betham lived, he went to Old Cavendish Street, where she did not. "I
knocked at every door in Old Cavendish Street, not unrecompensed for
the present pain by the remembrances of the different characters
of voice and countenance with which my question was answered in
all gradations, from gentle and hospitable kindness to downright
brutality." Further promises and assurances are given, and in July, as
we learn from a letter of Southey's, the good Matilda was still high
in hopes that her sitter would eventually sit. Her hopes could not
have come from Southey, who had none. "You would have found him the
most wonderful man living in conversation, but the most impracticable
one for a painter, and had you begun the picture it is ten thousand
to one that you must have finished it from memory." He was right. When
his lectures were over, in June, Coleridge went to Bury St. Edmunds,
and by the 9th September he was in Cumberland. "Coleridge has arrived
at last, about half as big as the house," Southey writes to his
brother on that day. There he cogitated and there began _The Friend_,
and there the separation from his wife was finally made.
After the separation, very characteristically, he was less separated
from Mrs. Coleridge than he had been for many years. In 1810 he was
still in the Lakes, in the summer of which year his wife gives news of
him to the poetess. "Coleridge has been with me for some time past,
in good health, spirits and humour, but the _Friend_ for some
unaccountable reason, or for no reason at all, is utterly silent.
This, you will easily believe, is matter of perpetual grief to me, but
I am obliged to be silent on the subject, although ever uppermost in
my thoughts, but I am obliged to bear about a cheerful countenance,
knowing as I do by sad experience that to expostulate, or even to
hazard one anxious look, would soon drive him hence." Then comes a
sidelight on the Wordsworths. "Coleridge sends you his best thanks for
the elegant little book; I shall not, however, let it be carried
over to Grasmere, for _there_ it would soon be _soiled_, for the
Wordsworths are woeful destroyers of good books, as our poor library
will witness."
But all this was too good to last, and as everybody knows, it did not.
In October Coleridge left the Lakes with the Montagues, and almost
immediately after that the rupture with the Wordsworths occurred,
which involved also the family at Keswick. Southey's letter to Miss
Betham giving her an account of the affair has been published by
Mr. Dykes Campbell, and is misplaced in _A House of Letters_. The
unfortunate philosopher set up his rest with the Morgans, friends of
the Lambs, at Hammersmith; and there he was in February, 1811, when
Miss Betham conceived her project of getting him as a lion at the
party of her friend Lady Jerningham.
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