them, made proselytes, made enemies, were admired, and were laughed at. Coleridge was too much alone in the world now for any one to care what practicable future he relinquished for a vain and visionary scheme. But Southey had a rich aunt who turned her back upon him, and the Somersetshire father of Burnet was not so well content with farming as to approve of it in its newest disguise. The positions and prospects of certain of the proselytes are not ascertainable, but we know that a manservant of Southey's angry aunt belonged to the little band. This leal fellow, Shadrack by name, had "a prime hot berth" of it after his apostasy had become known, and when one night Southey was turned out of doors in the wet, he said: "Why, sir, you be'nt goin' to Bath at this time o' night, and in this weather!" The trusty soul was rewarded with true Pantisocratic fraternity. In a very large hand, Coleridge-Logician, Metaphysician, Bard— wrote these touching words: "SHAD GOES WITH US: HE IS MY BROTHER!" One cannot resist the conclusion that in the fiery furnace of their enthusiasm, there sometimes flickered a tiny jet of conscious travesty.

Coleridge returned to Cambridge to keep the Michaelmas Term. Back in his rooms at college he writes: "Since I quitted this room what and how important events have been evolved! America! Southey! Miss Fricker! ... Pantisocrasy! Oh, I shall have such a scheme of it! My head, my heart, are all alive." During the remainder of the term his head was not only alive, but as sore as that of a bear in its cage. He left Cambridge towards December, and went up to London. There he met Dyer, author of "Complaints of the Poor,"

and found him an eager partizan. Dyer was enraptured with the system, pronounced it impregnable, and believed that his friend, Dr. Priestley, would join the Pantisocritans. He does not appear to have mentioned a desire to join them himself. One great stride was now madethe place of settlement in the New World was decided upon. "Every night," wrote Coleridge, "I meet a most intelligent young man, who has spent the last five years of his life in America, and is lately come from thence as an agent to sell land. He was of our school. I had been kind to him; he remembers it, and comes regularly every evening to 'benefit by my conversation,' he says. He says £2,000 will do; that he doubts not we can contract for our passage under £400; that we shall buy the land a great deal cheaper when we arrive in America than we could in England; or why,' he adds, 'am I sent over here?' That twelve men may easily clear three hundred acres in four or five months; and that for six hundred dollars a thousand acres may be cleared, and houses built on them. He recommends the Susquehanna from its excessive beauty and security from hostile Indians. . . That literary characters may make money there, etc., etc. The mosquitos there are not so bad as our gnats, and after you have been there a little while they don't trouble you."

6

It was all so beautifully clear and simple. Two thousand pounds would do; the Susquehanna was free from hostile Indians, although it had so recently been desolated by them; literary characters could even make money there, and the mosquitos in a little while did not bite. The place of resort at which Coleridge met every night

the intelligent young man from America was a smoky little room in a pot-house in Newgate Street, known as the "Salutation and Cat." There in an odour of tobacco, egg-hot, and welsh rabbit, Coleridge discoursed nightly on poetry and metaphysics as well as on Pantisocrasy. The intelligent young man was not the only person who came every evening to benefit by Coleridge's conversation. Tradition says that when the time came for Coleridge to go to Bristol to be married, the landlord offered him free quarters if he would stay and talk. Long years afterwards the same offer was made to the poet's son, poor "laal Hartley," by the landlord of a certain "Red Lion" far away north among the mountains. In the smoky room of the "Salutation," Coleridge renewed his friendship with his old schoolfellow, Charles Lamb. Charles was now nineteen years old to Coleridge's two and twenty. When his friend went up to the University, Lamb had been apprenticed to the "desk's dry wood,' and he was now a clerk. in the India House. Looking longingly towards the career of learning which he was never to enjoy, he went on patiently writing the "books" that were never, never to be read. His father was falling into dotage; his mother was sickly; his sister was a brave, stricken soul, fighting the battle of life at awful odds. As needs must be, Charles plodded on in his beaten round with the docility of a mill horse, and some of its slumbering strength as well. But there were secret ambitions nestling deep down in hidden places, and when Coleridge came back to London full of glorious schemes, the dark pillar of hope just turning its face of fire-what a time it was for Lamb! Amid the associations of pipes

and oronokoo, in that dear little dirty pot-house in Newgate Street, how they talked and laughed and drank! And were ever friends more unlike-Coleridge, the eloquent madcap of genius, the dreamer of high dreams; Lamb with a dismal void in his heart, with his lisp and his half-playful, half-melancholy smile! In that smoky room Coleridge recited his newest poems in his deep intonation, and Lamb-cheated of his griefapplauded them in his sweet, broken accents. What Lamb thought of Pantisocrasy is not known. Coleridge had too deep a sense of the tragedy in the life of his friend to tempt him from his post of duty. What a friendship it was that really began in that odour of egghot and oronokoo! In loyalty, in beauty, in love, does the like of it appear elsewhere?

Whether Coleridge availed himself of the landlord's offer is not stated, but it is certain that he "stayed" and "talked." There is an idea that he stayed too long, in the judgment of the young lady who was waiting for him at Bristol. It is even said that the scrupulous Southey felt constrained to point out to his friend that he had gone too far in his attentions to Miss Fricker for any honourable retreat. But the poet was busy with poetry. He was printing his first sonnets in The Morning Chronicle, and finishing his "Religious Musings." I

"Coleridge

I Writing to Cottle (March 6, 1836), Southey says: did not come back again to Bristol till January, 1795, nor would he, I believe, have come back at all, if I had not gone to London to look for him, for having got there from Cambridge at the beginning of the winter, there he remained, without writing a line either to Miss Fricker or myself." The punctilious Southey searched for Coleridge at the smoky tavern in Newgate Street, but found him at the "Angel Inn," Butcher Hall Street, and carried him off to be married.

It was a mistake to think that he was not ardently in love. He returned to Miss Fricker, and to Pantisocrasy, early in 1795. These two, the lady and the system, sailed in one boat. Two thousand pounds would do to make everything "perfectly delightful"; but then it began to appear that "money" was "a huge evil," which the Pantisocritans would long have to contend with. In this older hemisphere the literary characters could make anything easier than money, and the gnats of the literary world were worse than the mosquitos of Susquehanna. A publisher in London offered Coleridge six guineas for a volume of poetry. The poets lectured at Bristol with only moderate success. Things were beginning to wear a grave aspect, when one day Cottle, the Bristol bookseller, said to Coleridge, "To encourage you, I will give you thirty guineas for your poems, and to make you easy you shall have the money as your occasions require.” Silence and the grasped hand showed that the poet was happy. He then lost no time in getting married; and Southey, to whom a similar offer had been made, soon followed suit. Coleridge was married Oct. 4th; and Southey Nov. 14, 1795, both at St. Mary's, Redcliffe, the church in which Chatterton, twenty-seven years before, pretended to find his Rowley forgeries. Marriage had always been regarded as a condition of harmony in the grand system, but nevertheless it introduced the first note of discord. The visionary Southey, who had sacrificed a rich aunt to Pantisocrasy, began to sober down into a person of practical mind at the near approach of his wedding-day. An uncle offered him a trip to Lisbon ; he saw money in the offer, and accepted. Coleridge is