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He wrote The Fall of Robespierre in conjunction with Southey in 1794, and published it. Some prose pamphlets followed, and then Cottle, the Bristol providence of this group of men of letters, offered thirty guineas for a volume of poems, which duly appeared in 1796. Meanwhile Coleridge had started a singular newspaper called The Watchman, which saw ten numbers, appearing every eighth day.
A secondary interest of this nature belongs to the life of De Quincey, a life which inclosed, as an island, a whole period of English literature, one, too, which in activity and originality is unsurpassed by any other, including the names of Scott and Dickens, of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, and Southey, of Moore, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.
So that we remained in total uncertainty as to what was become of him; many years afterwards it appeared he had gone to Charleston, United States, where he died. Mr. Southey thus refers to W. Gilbert in his "Life of Wesley." "In the year 1796, Mr.
Some subjects, no doubt, were treated once for all; if Southey had written his history of the Peninsular war after Napier, he would have done a silly thing, and his book would have been damned unread. But what reason was there why we should not have half a dozen books on English thought in the eighteenth century?
But it may be said that the eighteenth century leaven which was so strong in each, and which is also noticeable in Southey, conciliated them.
It would be a mistake, of course, in dealing with a literary man of Coleridge's era, to apply the same standards as obtain in our own days. Wordsworth, as we have seen, made no scruple to accept the benevolences of the Wedgwoods. Southey, the type of independence and self-help, was, for some years, in receipt of a pension from a private source.
Southey has, in his poem, made Madoc combine with the Aztecs in the settlement of Mexico, but traces were said to be found of habits and countenances resembling those of the Welsh among the Indians of the Missouri; and, in our own days, the traveller Mr. Buxton was struck by finding the Indians of the Rocky Mountains weaving a fabric resembling the old Welsh blanket.
Southey has undoubtedly written four noble Poems Thalaba, Madoc, Kehama, and Roderick; and if the Poets of this age are admitted, by the voice of posterity, to take their places by the side of the Mighty of former times in the Temple of Immortality, he will be one of that sacred company.
How what should have been the making of his fortune, his appointment as Clerk of the Journals to the House of Lords, not unassisted by religious mania, drove him through sheer nervousness to attempt suicide, is one of the best known things in English literary biography, as indeed are most of the few events of his sad life, owing partly to his own charming letters, partly to the biographies of Southey and others.
He wanted also the sense of independence, and thought it no degradation to leave his wife and children to be maintained by the brain-work of the noble Southey, while he himself retired to Highgate Grove to discourse transcendentalism to his disciples, looking down contemptuously upon the honest work going forward beneath him amidst the din and smoke of London.
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