Page:Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, etc., being selections from the Remains of Henry Crabb Robinson.djvu/127

 COLERIDGE'S LECTURES whenever he was able to be present. Among his papers there are preserved two pages which summarise Coleridge's lecture on poetry, the second of the course, delivered on February 5, 1808. These have been printed in Sadler's edition of Henry Crabb Robinson's Diary (2 vol. edition. Vol. I, p. 140), but since they are not well known, and since, "detached minutes" though they be, they help to indicate the poet's discursive treatment of his theme, they are reprinted here (pp. 102 et seq.).

It appears even from these notes that Coleridge was already apt to range from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven in his public discourses, and one can easily believe that, in spite of his fire and eloquence, his abrupt transitions and numerous digressions were often too much for his audience.

De Quincey's account of this first course of lectures and of the ineffectiveness of the speaker, when he chanced to keep his appointment, is well known. Coleridge was at this time continually under the influence of opium, and his friends might well despair of him and his future. Audience after audience were dismissed "with pleas of illness, and on many of his lecture-days (the speaker is De Quincey) I have seen all Albemarle Street closed by a lock of carriages filled with women of distinction, until the servants of the Institution or their own footmen advanced to the carriage-doors with the intelligence that Mr. Coleridge had been suddenly taken ill."

Coleridge's movements for the next year or two are not very certain. We know that he left London for the Lakes early in 1809, and that he spent most of his time there in Wordsworth's house at Allan Bank near Grasmere. When he returned to London in the summer of 1810 it was in the company of Basil Montagu. Crabb Robinson gives us a pretty full account of the consequent estrangement from Wordsworth, the result of Montagu's repetition and exaggeration of Wordsworth's