Be this as it may, I am persuaded that the Morning Post proved a far more useful ally to the Government in its most important objects, in consequence of its being generally considered as moderately anti-ministerial, than if it had been the avowed eulogist of Mr. Pitt. The few, whose curiosity or fancy should lead them to turn over the journals of that date, may find a small proof of this in the frequent charges made by the Morning Chronicle, that such and such essays or leading paragraphs had been sent from the Treasury. The rapid and unusual increase in the sale of the Morning Post is a sufficient pledge, that genuine im constable, for the dire murmuring and strange consternation which precedes the storm or earthquake of national discord. Not only in coffee-houses and public theatres, but even at the tables of the wealthy, they would have heard the advocates of existing Government defend their cause in the language and with the tone of men, who are conscious that they are in a minority. But in England, when the alarm was at its highest, there was not a city, no, not a town or village, in which a man suspected of holding democratic principles could move abroad without receiving some unpleasant proof of the hatred in which his supposed opinions were held by the great majority of the people; and the only instances of popular excess and indignation were on the side of the government and the established church. But why need I appeal to these invidious facts? Turn over the pages of history and seek for a single instance of a revolution having been effected without the concurrence of either the nobles, or the ecclesiastics, or the monied classes, in any country, in which the influences of property had ever been predominant, and where the interests of the proprietors were interlinked! Examine the revolution of the Belgic provinces under Philip II.; the civil wars of France in the preceding generation; the history of the American revolution, or the yet more recent events in Sweden and in Spain; and it will be scarcely possible not to perceive that in England from 1791 to the peace of Amiens there were neither tendencies to confederacy nor actual confederacies, against which the existing laws had not provided partiality with a respectable portion of literary talent will secure the success of a newspaper without the aid of party or ministerial patronage. But by impartiality I mean an honest and enlightened adherence to a code of intelligible principles previously announced, and faithfully referred to in support of every judgment on men and events; not indiscriminate abuse, not the indulgence of an editor's own malignant passions, and still less, if that be possible, a determination to make money by flattering the envy and cupidity, the vindictive restlessness and self-conceit of the half-witted vulgar; a determination almost fiendish, but which, I have been informed, has been boastfully avowed by one man, the most notorious of these mob-sycophants! From the commencement of the Addington administration to the present day, whatever I have written in THE MORNING POST, or (after that paper was transferred to other proprietors) in THE COURIER,46 has both sufficient safeguards and an ample punishment. But alas! the panic of property had been struck in the first instance for party purposes; and when it became general, its propagators caught it themselves and ended in believing their own lie; even as our bulls in Borrowdale sometimes run mad with the echo of their own bellowing. The consequences were most injurious. Our attention was concentrated on a monster, which could not survive the convulsions, in which it had been brought forth,even the enlightened Burke himself too often talking and reasoning, as if a perpetual and organized anarchy had been a possible thing! Thus while we were warring against French doctrines, we took little heed whether the means by which we attempted to overthrow them, were not likely to aid and augment the far more formidable evil of French ambition. Like children we ran away from the yelping of a cur, and took shelter at the heels of a vicious war horse." (Vol. II. Essay i. p. 21, 4th edit.) 46 [Mr. Coleridge began to write for The Courier in 1811. One series of Essays, mentioned in a subsequent page, he had been in defence or furtherance of the measures of Things of this nature scarce survive that night Can scarcely aught be said, but that they were! 47 Yet in these labours I employed, and, in the belief of partial friends wasted, the prime and manhood of my intellect. Most assuredly, they added nothing to my fortune or my reputation. The industry of the week supplied the necessities of the week. From government or the friends of government I not only never received remuneration, nor ever expected it; but I was never honoured with a single acknowledgment, or expression of satisfaction. Yet the retrospect is far from painful or matter of regret. I am not indeed silly enough to take as any thing more than a violent hyperbole of party debate, Mr. Fox's assertion that the late war (I trust that the epithet is not prematurely applied) was a war produced by the Morning Post; or I should be proud to have the words inscribed on my tomb.48 As little do I regard the cir published in that Paper in 1809. He wrote for the Morning Post in 1800 and 1802, but not regularly or throughout each of those years. See the Biog. Supplement. S. C.] 47 [From the prologue to "The Royal Slave," a Tragi-comedy by William Cartwright. The author of this play flourished in the reign of James I. and his successor, and died of the camp disease, in 1643, according to Wood's Athen. Ox. in the thirty-third year of his age. He wrote, beside The Royal Slave, The Ordinary, a Comedy; The Lady Errant, a Tragi-comedy; The Siege, or Love's Convert, a Tragi-comedy; and Poems, all which were printed together in 1651. S. C.] 48 [In the Autumn of 1802 Mr. Coleridge published in the Morning Post two long letters to Mr. Fox, the first of which L cumstance, that I was a specified object of Buonaparte's resentment during my residence in Italy in appeared on the fourth, and the second on the ninth, of November. These Letters are not only Anti-Gallican and Anti-Jacobin, but strongly Anti-Napoleon. They breathe the same uncompromising hostility to the then master of France, the same disdain of the "upstart Corsican," not simply or chiefly as an invader of hereditary rights, but as an unprincipled despot and oppressor of liberty, whom force of circumstance more than inherent power had raised on high,-disdain unmitigated by a shade either of admiration or fear,-which continued to be his line of sentiment on that subject for the rest of his life. But the friends and admirers of Fox were displeased with the letters on his account, because they reflected on him for a departure from sound Anglicanism in his later policy, and expressed the deeper regret on this head, because his character, as previously manifested, had seemed to be that of a "genuine Englishman." The writer was reproached with inconsistency, because he had once been the satirist of Pitt and the eulogist of Fox. Whether or no these censures were deserved, whether the language of the Letters was indeed, as even his friend Lamb pronounced it, "a gentlemanly ushering in of most arrogant charges," or only such plain bold speaking as becomes an English subject,—an erection of strong blame upon a groundwork of real earnest praise;—whether or no its tone and import argue any essential inconsistency in a former eulogist of Fox, whom it declares to have " a just claim on the gratitude and admiration of his country for his counsels and exertions during the whole continuance of the ominous" revolutionary war; or a satirist of Pitt, when it affirms that the Jacobinical party in England had never been truly formidable, "unless it were during the Jacobinical career of Mr. Pitt's partisans" at the close of the contest with America ;-these are questions, which will be answered more justly and dispassionately hereafter, by many even now, than they were in the year 1802. Upon the whole," says Mr. Dequincey, in reference to my father's change of sides in politics, "I am of opinion, that few events of Mr. Coleridge's life were better calculated to place his disinterested pursuit of truth in a luminous point of view." An extract from Mr. Dequincey's defence of consequence of those essays in the Morning Post during the peace of Amiens. Of this I was warned, directly, by Baron Von Humboldt, the Prussian Plenipotentiary, who at that time was the minister of the Prussian court at Rome; and indirectly, through his secretary, by Cardinal Fesch himself. Nor do I lay any greater weight on the confirming fact, that an order for my arrest was sent from Paris, from which danger I was rescued by the kindness of a noble Benedictine, and the gracious connivance of that good old man, the present Pope.49 For the late tyrant's vindictive appetite was omnivorous, and preyed equally on a Duc d'Enghien,50 and the writer of a newspaper paragraph. Like a true vulture, Napoleon with an eye not less telescopic, and with a taste equally coarse in his ravin, could descend from the most dazzling 51 Mr. Coleridge's political consistency, and an opinion expressed by him of his political writings, in allusion to what is said of Buonaparte's resentment" in this paragraph of the B. L. will appear in the Appendix, note J. S. C.] 66 49 [Rather unexpectedly he had a visit early one morning from a noble Benedictine with a passport signed by the Pope in order to facilitate his departure. He left him a carriage, and an admonition for instant flight, which was promptly obeyed by Coleridge. Hastening to Leghorn, he discovered an American vessel ready to sail for England, on board of which he embarked." Life of Coleridge, by James Gillman, pp. 180-1. S. C.] 50 I seldom think of the murder of this illustrious Prince without recollecting the lines of Valerius Flaccus : super ipsius ingens Instat fama viri, virtusque haud læta tyranno; Ergo anteire metus, juvenemque exstinguere pergit. 51 Θηρᾷ δὲ καὶ τὸν χῆνα καὶ τὴν δορκάδα, Argonaut, I. 29. Καὶ τὸν λαγωὸν, καὶ τὸ τῶν ταύρων γένος. Manuel Phile, De Animal. Proprietat. sect. i. l. 12. |