Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 11.djvu/225

 10 s. XL MAR. 6, 1909.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

181

LONDON, SATURDAY, MARCH 6, 1909.

CONTENTS. No. 271.

UOTES : Coleridge as an Art-Critic, 181 Fleetwood of Calwich, 183 Bibliographical Terms, 184 Dickens: Podsnap and his Prototype " Detixionum Tabellse " : Disraeli Dante : Dorando : Durand Russian Names Beachey Head : its Derivation" Fossel," Term applied to Diamonds, 186 ' Bobbery," 187.

^QUERIES: "Punt" in Football " Samnitis "Burton's Line Population of Ancient Rome " Beeswaxers " "Glose" or "Gloss," French Verse - Form Authors Wanted" Wildman's," 187' The Monstrous Regimen of Women 'William Clayton, Baron Sundon Seventh Earl of Northumberland Talavera " Incut" J. Bew, Book- seller, 188 Bickerton Family Pictures from Kitterick Addleshaw " Druce," Lane-Name M. Gordon, Minor Poet H.M.S. Beaver, 1828 " Falsehood of extremes " 'Allied Armies before Sebastopol' "Blow the cobwebs away " Polish Dragoons : " Jager " Philip Thicknesse : Automaton Chess Player Barnard & Staples, Bankers, 189 Spenser's ' Faerie Queene,' 190.

HE PLIES: Falcon Court, Shoe Lane, 190 Rattlesnake Colonel, 191 Sir Arthur Leary Pigott ' Folkestone Fiery Serpent' "It is the Mass that matters" 3rd Foot Guards at Bayonne, 192 Elihu Yale's Epitaph Arms of Suffragan Bishops ' Village Blacksmith ' Parodied "Cripple Carrying," 193 Jeffrey Hudson the Dwarf "Hogling-Money " Index Saying Cobbett on Shake- speare and Milton Pimlico : Eyebright, 194 Vincent Alsop Sir Thomas Warner Rev. William Cox Wadding- ton as a Place-Name, 195 Thomas Dover Field Memo- rials to Sportsmen Authors Wanted "Man in the Street," 196 Heraldry Monkeys stealing from a Pedlar "Seraskier" "May I throughout this day of Thine" " Handsome Tracy," 197.

NOTES ON BOOKS : Hubert Hall on Official Historical Documents Reviews and Magazines.

Booksellers' Catalogues.

COLERIDGE AS AN ART-CRITIC.

THE following marginalia, which belong to the latest years of Coleridge's life, were written by him in the first volume of a copy of Allan Cunningham's ' Lives of the Most Eminent British Sculptors, Painters, and Architects.' This book has since 1892 been in the possession of the British Museum, but I am not aware that Coleridge's notes have hitherto been printed, or in any way brought to the notice of readers. Yet this, I think, they deserve, not only for their intrinsic interest, but also because they illustrate an unfamiliar aspect of Coleridge's critical powers. The general reader is apt, perhaps, to think of the critic Coleridge exclu- sively as a critic of literature. But, lacking though he was in any equipment of technical knowledge or training. Coleridge showed himself, at least in his later years, an enthusiastic and discriminating student of the painter's art. To this enthusiasm the first impetus came, perhaps, from his friendship with Sir George Beaumont, the from 1803 ; but it was not until he visited Rome in 1806 that he succeeded, by a close
 * ' Maecenas of Coleorton," which dates

study of the city's masterpieces, in laying the foundations of a cultivated taste and judgment. " By my regular attention to the best of the good things in Rome," he wrote subsequently, " and associating almost wholly with artists of acknowledged highest reputation, I acquired more insight into the fine arts in three months than I could have done in England in tliree years."

This insight he fostered as best he might on the scantier material accessible to him in his native land, and in the pages of ' Table Talk ' we have evidence that his interest in painting remained with him to the end of his life. Of positive criticisms of the art we have, indeed, but few examples in his published writings ; but such as exist are, I believe, sufficiently noticeable to justify us in welcoming any addition to them. For not only does Coleridge display, on the whole, a just discrimination with regard to the great masters of painting a possession far rarer and more difficult of acquisition in his day than in ours ; but his constant endeavour to ground his judg- ments upon the principles common to all art (principles themselves based, it may be added, on the facts of human nature and human life) makes his criticisms of individual pictures illuminating and sug- gestive, even where they are not convincing. In this connexion it should be remembered that Coleridge's only attempt at a thorough- going analysis of beauty (his ' Essays on the Principles of Genial Criticism concerning the Fine Arts ' ) is based, to quote his own words, upon " the laws and impulses which guide the true artist in the production of his works " ; and that it is more especially from the arts " of statuary and painting " that he purposes to draw his illustrations. It was in the spirit of this inquiry that all his art-studies (if this be not too ambitious a title) were conducted ; and we can under- stand what his nephew meant when he wrote in 1831 that " Coleridge had an eye almost exclusively for the ideal or universal in painting or music." Not, indeed, that Coleridge was indifferent to formal merits of line or colour ; but in the end the true value of any picture lay for him in its significance as an imaginative interpretation of life.

Hogarth and Sir Joshua Reynolds, their pictures and their genius, form the main topics of these marginalia. With Hogarth's paintings they show a close familiarity so close that one is led to suspect that Cole- ridge has a collection of prints before him as he writes. His acquaintance with Sir