In answer to an application made by me to you three or four years ago, to know if you were willing to communicate to Mr. Coleridge's representatives any of his papers in your possession, you wrote to me a letter containing, amongst a great deal of matter in which I was not personally concerned, two complaints against me in particular. One was, that in the Table Talk, I had published as a remark of Mr. Coleridge that you were a very knowing person.' In reply to this (I speak from memory, not having any copy of these letters), 1 expressed my regret at having caused you any pain by publishing the words in question. I assured you, as was the fact, that Mr. Coleridge meant nothing offensive by them, but was speaking of your quick insight into the ways and characters of political personages; and I promised, if I remember rightly, to remove the expression which had given you offence upon the first opportunity which should occur. Within a few months that opportunity occurred, upon the publication of a new edition of the book. In that edition I altered the passage in such a manner as fully to show Mr. Coleridge's intended application of the phrase. See p. 164, "Table Talk," 1836.

The other complaint was, that in the same work I had published a remark by Mr. Coleridge that "he had raised the sale of the Morning Post from some small number to 7000 in one year." In answer to this I said, as well as I can recollect, that I published what at the time I believed to be the fact; that you, however, were of course a conclusive authority upon the matter of the sale; that I certainly had alway understood, not from Mr. Coleridge

only, but from others not interested in the question, that his services of one kind or other to the Morning Post and Courier had not been so very trifling and inconsiderable as you represented them to be; but that personally I had at that time little or no means of judg ing of the point in dispute. Nevertheless, that I might give you every satisfaction upon this subject also, I expunged the whole passage from the 2nd edition in 1836; see p. 90.

Further, with reference to your detailed statement of your intercourse and dealings with Mr. Coleridge, I told you in precise terms that I was not writing, nor intended to write, his life; but was simply collecting materials for a publication of his literary remains in one particular class. You were also informed who Mr. Coleridge's executor was, and it appears that you have long since known who intended to be his biographer. Under these circumstances permit me to ask how you justify your now speaking of me in print as having refused to do you justice, with regard to the only points on which you ever had a right, and, after my letters, could in fact have expected, to receive any satisfaction from me? If the satis

If

faction on these points promised and rendered was in your opinion insufficient, it was your part to have said so. You were silent for two years. you sent your pages to the Gentleman's Magazine without making any inquiry on the subject, where slept at once your feeling of self-respect, and sense of justice to another, a stranger to you, of which you so constantly speak? If you did make the inquiry, in what language do you think an ingenuous person would characterise your silence as to the result?

Having, sir, never introduced your name in public except upon the single occasion before mentioned, having tendered you amends for so introducing it, and being an entire stranger to you, I must in pointed terms request that for the future you will be so good as to abstain from making my name, whether in an ordinary or a flippant tone, the subject of your contributions to the public press.

So much for myself-one word for another.

To the soundness of your judgment in "not setting much value" on Mr. Coleridge's "letter to Fletcher" and "on the Spanish war,"-to your gratuitous and mistaken statements respecting his intercourse with Sir James Mackintosh and Messrs. Wedgewood; to these and the like I say, as they require, nothing.

But allow me to suggest that at one time in mentioning as if you believed a report of " Mr. Coleridge or his family at least being starving," and at another time in speaking directly of his "starving in Mr. Gillman's garret," you in both instances forgot your own express aim and intention of "wounding the feelings of no one;" and that in the latter instance at least, if not in the former, you said that which it is most extraordinary you should not have known to be in letter and spirit untrue. For surely you are not ignorant that Mr. Coleridge lived with Mr. and Mrs. Gillman as with an affectionate brother and sister; and you might in consequence have known that, with every room in a charming house at his command, he chose for his own convenience what you so kindly and tastefully denominate a garret-such a garret and so regarded by a great man's surviving friends, that the memory of its exact size, shape, and furniture was thought worthy of being perpetuated by the hand of a superior artist.

Sir, there is that in this publication of yours which might provoke and would justify a near relation of Mr. Coleridge's in addressing you in a graver tone. But remembering that you were once kind, and having no interest in heightening the painful contrast which you now voluntarily exhibit in this respect, I close the correspondence for ever, in the charity of a sincere regret that it was ever commenced.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
H. N. COLERIDGE.

ing, or the reputation of his writing, had actually been a principal mean of the rise of the Morning Post."

In answer, under date the 22d October, 1835, I complained at length of Coleridge's misrepresentations, for reasons already described, and acquitted Mr. H. C. of any intentional misstatement: but before he published his "Table Talk," I said Mr. H. C. should have consulted me on the points in which I was personally concerned. This was a long letter, to the effect of what I have already published in your Magazine. With that letter I delivered at Mr. H. C.'s chambers a large parcel of copies of Coleridge's letters to me, that he might be rightly informed; but still in the second edition of the "Table Talk" he says nothing to correct the mistaken opinions he had imbibed from Coleridge. He cuts the matter short. In a letter to me dated 7th November 1835, he writes,

With regard to all the matter which is contained in your letters concerning Mr. Coleridge's services to the papers, I have nothing now to say. As to the money statements, I do not exactly understand the precise character which you may intend to give to them, beyond the making known the simple fact of advances made to Mr. C. by yourself. If any thing more definite be meant, I trust you will not consider it either offensive or indecorous in me, as a near relation of Mr. C., to mention that Mr. Green of Lincoln's Inn Fields is his sole executor."

By the above, it appears, Mr. H. Coleridge declined to notice my representations of the exaggerated accounts of Coleridge's services; but when he referred me for a repayment of money, though in such civil terms, I thought he was laughing at me; and there ended my attempts and expectations of having that done by Mr. H. Coleridge, which I have been driven to do for myself in your Magazinė. I no longer communicated with Mr. H. Coleridge, whose qualification of the phrase "knowing person, and omission of the passage asserting the rise to 7000 in one year, shew Mr. H. Coleridge well knew what it was I solicited. Whether he was writing a life or not, he was publishing such things as usually compose a life, and it would not have been inconsistent with them, to have placed among them

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the representation I wished. Nay, he was confirming the very misstatements, which in his uncle's Literary Biography gave me uneasiness. "He would have nothing to say respecting Coleridge's services to the papers." But he had had to say in "The Table Talk" respecting them, and had said that which was untrue. He was bound either to apologize or persist in his statement. A silent omission in the second edition was insufficient. It might have been made by the printer or by accident, or for some other reason than the real one. Mr. H. C. no doubt preferred his uncle's representations to mine. He reproaches me with not consulting him before I sent my pages to the Magazine I reply, why did he not consult me before he published his "Table Talk," in which I, having been Secretary to "the Friends of the People," was made to appear as if I had betrayed their secrets to Fox? Secrets, as I have already said, they had none. It was not the assurances of Mr. H. C. and of Mr. Gillman that Coleridge always spoke well of me, nor the paragraph to that effect in Mr. Gillman's book; all that was not to the point. Coleridge had printed that he had made my fortune while he had received but a very small recompense. That assertion was in substance repeated by Mr. H. C. and Mr. Gillman in print, and in print I determined to place my reply. For this purpose I chose a Magazine of an Urbane character, as a repository preserved in libraries to which future writers could at all times refer.

Mr. H. Coleridge must have read over hastily the article in the Magazine. I did not say his uncle was starving in Mr. Gillman's garret; but that the "Literary Biography," and the publications of Mr. H. Coleridge and of Mr. Gillman, might lead future commentators to say, while I was riding in my carriage, I left Coleridge, who had made my fortune, to starve in Mr. Gillman's garret. I am well aware of the kindness of Mr. and Mrs. Gillman to Coleridge, of the comfort he enjoyed in their house, where, I may say, he was master of every thing they possessed; where he could and did receive his friends, as if the whole house, and every thing in it, had been his own. I will add, too, that he believed, and I believe, Mr. Gillman's

skill and attention prolonged his life many a day, and that his sense of this and his gratitude were unbounded.

When Doctor Currie published the works of Burns, upwards of thirty years ago, some one (probably Mr. Southey) applied to me, to explain a charge or insinuation in the work against me or one of my brothers. I did so; and proved that Doctor Currie had been misinformed. My elder brother Peter, who started the first daily evening newspaper, the Star, now exactly half a century ago, in consequence of the increased facilities of communication by Palmer's mail-coach plan, then just begun, had written to Burns, offering him terms for communications to the paper, a small salary, quite as large as his Excise-office emoluments. I forget particulars; but I remember my brother shewing Burns' letters, and boasting of the correspondence with so great a genius. Burns refused an engagement. And if, as 1 believe the "Poem written to a Gentleman who had sent him a Newspaper, and offered to continue it free of expense," was written in reply to my brother, it was a sneering unhandsome return, though Doctor Currie says fifty-two guineas per annum for a communication once a week was an offer "which the pride of genius disdained to accept." We hear much of purse-proud insolence; but poets can sometimes be insolent on the conscious power of talent, as well as vulgar upstarts on the conscious power of purse. In 1795, my brother Peter purchased the copyright of the Oracle newspaper, then selling 800 daily, for 80l. There were no house or materials; and I joined in purchasing the Morning Post, with house and materials, the circulation being only 350 per day, for 600l. What it was that occasioned such a depreciation of newspaper property at that time, I cannot tell. Then it was my brother again offered Burns an engagement, as appears by the account of Burns' Life, which was again declined. Burns began his style of Scottish Poetry on the model of that of Robert Fergusson, the schoolfellow and most intimate companion of my eldest brother Charles, who was also a poet, though of much inferior merit. Now, considering that a slur was cast upon the character of

my brother Peter by ill-informed, but honourably-meaning, Doctor Currie; I find in that circumstance an apology or a public justification of my own conduct to Coleridge, in explanation of the misstatements of the ill-informed Mr. H. Coleridge and Mr. Gillman. At the time of the Star in the years 1789 and 1790, my brother Peter engaged Mr. Macdonald, a Scotch poet, author of the play of 'Vimonda,' an accomplished literary gentleman, with a large family, in very distressed circumstances. My brother rendered him important pecuniary services. But his poems attracted so much notice, that the Morning Post tempted him, after a time, by a large salary, to leave my brother. Burns might have had such an engagement. It would surely have been a more honourable one than that of an Excise gauger?

I think I have already shown that with my purse I was liberal to Coleridge to excess. A circumstance has occurred to my mind, which, still more conclusively, negatives Mr. Henry Coleridge's assertion, on his uncle's authority, that Coleridge raised the Morning Post in one year from a low number to 7000. The last time Coleridge wrote for that paper was in the autumn of 1802, and it was well known that he wrote for it, and what it was he wrote. I recollect a conversation at that time with Mr. Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, in the smoking room of the House of Commons, in which Perry described Coleridge's writings as poetry in prose. The Morning Herald and the Times, then leading papers, were neglected, and the Morning Post by vigilance and activity rose rapidly. Advertisements flowed in beyond bounds. I encouraged the small miscellaneous advertisements in the front page, preferring them to any others, upon the rule that the more numerous the customers, the more independent and permanent the custom. Besides; numerous and various advertisements interest numerous and various readers, looking out for employment, servants, sales, and purchases, &c. &c. Advertisements act and re-act. They attract readers, promote circulation, and circulation attracts advertisements. The Daily Advertiser, which sold to the public for two-pence halfpenny, after paying a stamp duty of three halfpence, GENT. MAG. VOL. X.

never had more than half a column of news; it never noticed Parliament, but it had the best Foreign Intelligence before the French Revolution. The Daily Advertiser lost by its publication, but it gained largely by its advertisements, with which it was crammed full. Shares in it sold by auction at twenty years' purchase. I recollect my brother Peter saying, that on proposing to a tradesman to take shares in a new paper, he was answered with a sneer and a shake of the head," Ah! none of you can touch the Daily." It was the paper of business filled with miscellaneous advertisements, conducted at little expense, very profitable, and taken in by all public-houses, coffee-houses, &c., but by scarcely any private families. It fell in a day by the scheme of Grant, a printer, which made all publicans proprietors of a rival, the Morning Advertiser, the profits going to a publicans' Benefit Society, and they of course took in their own paper;-an example of the danger of dependence on any class. Soon after I joined the Morning Post in the autumn of 1795, Christie, the auctioneer, left it on account of its low sale, and left a blank, a ruinous proclamation of decline. But in 1802, he came to me again, praying for re-admission. At that time particular newspapers were known to possess particular classes of advertisements: the Morning Post, horses and carriages; the Public Ledger, shipping and sales of wholesale foreign merchandise; the Morning Herald and Times, auctioneers; the Morning Chronicle, books. All papers had all sorts of advertisements, it is true, but some were more remarkable than others for a particular class; and Mr. Perry, who aimed at making the Morning Chronicle a very literary paper, took pains to produce a striking display of book advertisements.

This display had something more solid for its object than vanity. Sixty or seventy short advertisements, filling three columns, by Longman, one day, by Cadell, &c. another Bless me, what an extensive business they must have!" The auctioneers to this day stipulate to have all their advertisements inserted at once, that they may impress the public with great ideas of their extensive business. They

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will not have them dribbled out, a few at a time, as the days of sale approach. The journals have of late years adopted the same rule with the same design. They keep back advertisements, fill up with pamphlets and other stuff unnecessary to a newspaper, and then come out with a swarn of advertisements in a double sheet to astonish their readers, and strike them with high ideas of the extent of their circulation which attracts so many advertisers. The meagre days are forgotten; the days of swarm are remembered.

The booksellers and others crowded to the Morning Post when its circulation and character raised it above all its competitors. Each was desirous of having his cloud of advertisements inserted at once in the front page. I would not drive away the short miscellaneous advertisements by allowing space to be monopolized by any class. When a very long advertisement of a column or two came, I charged enormously high, that it might be taken away without the parties being able to say it was refused admission. I accommodated the booksellers as well as I could with a few new and pressing advertisements at a time. That would not do; they would have the cloud: then, said I, there is no place for the cloud but the last page, where the auctioneers already enjoy that privilege. The booksellers were affronted, indignant; the last page! To obtain the accommodation refused by the Morning Post, they set up a morning paper-"The British Press ;" and to oppose the Courier, an evening one"The Globe." Possessed of general influence among literary men, could there be a doubt of success?

As it is common in such cases, they took from me my chief assistant, George Lane; supposing that, having got him, they got the Morning Post, and that I was nobody. Mr. Lane, as he owned, was indebted to me for all he knew of newspapers. At first he was slow and feeble, but his language was always that of a scholar and a gentleman, rather tame, but free from anything low, scurrilous, or violent. After several years of instruction by me-I may say, education-he had become a valuable parliamentary reporter, a judicious theatrical critic, a ready translator, and

the best writer of jeux d'esprit, short paragraphs of three or four lines, I ever had. With poetry and light paragraphs I endeavoured to make the paper cheerfully entertaining, not filled entirely with ferocious politics. One of Lane's paragraphs I well remember. Theatrical ladies and others were publishing their memoirs. Lane said they would not give a portrait, but a bust. Legat, the eminent engraver, came to me in raptures and pointed out the merits of the paragraph during an hour's expressions of admiration. Lane had little knowledge of politics and little turn for political writing; but he was a valuable assistant. He resided near the office, was ready and willing, at all hours, to go any where, and report any thing, and he could do every thing. Sometimes I even entrusted the last duties of the paper, the putting it to press, to him: an important and hazardous office, in the discharge of which he was growing more and more into my confidence. Of the corn riots in 1800, he and others gave long accounts in leaded large type, while the Times and Herald had only a few lines in obscure corners, in black. The procession proclaiming peace, the ascent of balloons, a great fire, a boxing match, a law trial-in all such occurrences the Morning Post outstripped its competitors, and its success was rapid. Lane was my chief assistant, and no wonder the booksellers thought they had got the Morning Post when they got Lane. But they never thought of Coleridge!!! though he, as we are told, raised the paper in one year from a low number to 7000 daily! and though it was well known he did write, and what he did write, as Perry's remarks to me in the House of Commons two months before Lane was taken away prove. Coleridge's last writings in the Morning Post appeared in the autumn of 1802: a few months afterwards the booksellers set up a rival journal and took from me my chief assistant, but they never thought of Coleridge; no offer, or hint of a wish was made to him. And yet the booksellers were very" knowing persons," particularly knowing on such subjects as newspapers and authors." Long before I

* Sir Richard Phillips was the most active of the booksellers on the occasion,