Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge | Page 5

with me was to condense what I could remember on each
particular topic into intelligible wholes with as little injury to the living
manner and diction as was possible. With this explanation, I must leave
it to those who still have the tones of "that old man eloquent" ringing in
their ears, to say how far I have succeeded in this delicate enterprise of
stamping his winged words with perpetuity.
In reviewing the contents of the following pages, I can clearly see that I
have admitted some passages which will be pronounced illiberal by
those who, in the present day, emphatically call themselves liberal--the
liberal. I allude of course to Mr. Coleridge's remarks on the Reform Bill
and the Malthusian economists. The omission of such passages would
probably have rendered this publication more generally agreeable, and
my disposition does not lead me to give gratuitous offence to any one.
But the opinions of Mr. Coleridge on these subjects, however
imperfectly expressed by me, were deliberately entertained by him; and
to have omitted, in so miscellaneous a collection as this, what he was
well known to have said, would have argued in me a disapprobation or
a fear, which I disclaim. A few words, however, may be pertinently
employed here in explaining the true bearing of Coleridge's mind on
the politics of our modern days. He was neither a Whig nor a Tory, as
those designations are usually understood; well enough knowing that,
for the most part, half-truths only are involved in the Parliamentary

tenets of one party or the other. In the common struggles of a session,
therefore, he took little interest; and as to mere personal sympathies,
the friend of Frere and of Poole, the respected guest of Canning and of
Lord Lansdowne, could have nothing to choose. But he threw the
weight of his opinion--and it was considerable--into the Tory or
Conservative scale, for these two reasons:--First, generally, because he
had a deep conviction that the cause of freedom and of truth is now
seriously menaced by a democratical spirit, growing more and more
rabid every day, and giving no doubtful promise of the tyranny to come;
and secondly, in particular, because the national Church was to him the
ark of the covenant of his beloved country, and he saw the Whigs about
to coalesce with those whose avowed principles lead them to lay the
hand of spoliation upon it. Add to these two grounds, some relics of the
indignation which the efforts of the Whigs to thwart the generous
exertions of England in the great Spanish war had formerly roused
within him; and all the constituents of any active feeling in Mr.
Coleridge's mind upon matters of state are, I believe, fairly laid before
the reader. The Reform question in itself gave him little concern, except
as he foresaw the present attack on the Church to be the immediate
consequence of the passing of the Bill; "for let the form of the House of
Commons," said he, "be what it may, it will be, for better or for worse,
pretty much what the country at large is; but once invade that truly
national and essentially popular institution, the Church, and divert its
funds to the relief or aid of individual charity or public taxation--how
specious soever that pretext may be--and you will never thereafter
recover the lost means of perpetual cultivation. Give back to the
Church what the nation originally consecrated to its use, and it ought
then to be charged with the education of the people; but half of the
original revenue has been already taken by force from her, or lost to her
through desuetude, legal decision, or public opinion; and are those
whose very houses and parks are part and parcel of what the nation
designed for the general purposes of the Clergy, to be heard, when they
argue for making the Church support, out of her diminished revenues,
institutions, the intended means for maintaining which they themselves
hold under the sanction of legal robbery?" Upon this subject Mr.
Coleridge did indeed feel very warmly, and was accustomed to express
himself accordingly. It weighed upon his mind night and day, and he

spoke upon it with an emotion, which I never saw him betray upon any
topic of common politics, however decided his opinion might be. In
this, therefore, he was _felix opportunitate mortis; non enim vidit_----;
and the just and honest of all parties will heartily admit over his grave,
that as his principles and opinions were untainted by any sordid interest,
so he maintained them in the purest spirit of a reflective patriotism,
without spleen, or bitterness, or breach of social union.
It would require a rare pen to do justice to the constitution of
Coleridge's mind. It was too deep, subtle, and peculiar,