Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 11.djvu/389

 9* S. XL MAY 16, 1903.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

381

LONDON, SATURDAY, MAY 13, 1903.

CONTENTS.-No. 281.

NOTES :-Sharpe, Phillips, and Coleridge, 331 Archbishop Temple, 382 Bacon-Shakespeare Question, 383 Letters of Dorothy Osborne, 385 Author's Mistake Hawke- Britannia Theatre, Hoxton, 386 Army Doctors ' H.B.D.' Jottings, 387-

QUKKIKS: Lepel Family Dante Portrait Orme Blue and the Virgin, 388 London Monumental Inscriptions

Ben Jonson : Epigram ' Bikon Basilike' Motto " Hugely "Mayors' TiMe and Precedence-De Bradfield Pedigree Gaol Deliveries, 1523 Poems on Mischief "Vita posse priore frui " Water-Emmets, 1705 'La Derniere Feuille de Rose,' 389-Cape Gardafui " Pillars of the Lord" Kay of Bury The Three Dukes, Children's Game "Up to Dick" Fountain Pens-" Snick-shack," 390.

REPLIES : King's Weigh House. 390 " Sandwich " "That immortal lie," 391 Isabella Colour Duncalfe " Travailler pour le Roi de Prusse " Hadrian I, 392 Bagpipes German Reprint of Leicarraga Forty Pounds a Year in Goldsmith's Day Ooruish Wreckers Taylor

" Pillow-ber," 393 "My ornaments are arms" "So many gods," &c. Poll-Books 'She Stoops to Conquer' Mottoes : their Origin Kemeys and Cbepstow Castle- Chancellor Evans, 394 " Nothing" " Cyclealities " "A mad world, my masters" Somerville, 395 " Old Jeffrey": "Prince Thames " Purcell Family Hoyar- sabal Reynolds Portrait, 396-" Honest" Epitaphs, 397- Bradshaw-J. W. Wood Keys to Novels, 398.

NOTES ON BOOKS : ' Index to the Complete Encyclo- paedia Britannica 'Barber's 'British Family Names' "The Fireside Dickens "" The Bibelots" Edinburgh Review.'

Notices to Correspondents.

LANCELOT SHARPE, SIR R. PHILLIPS,

AND S. T. COLERIDGE.

(See ante, p. 341.)

IN Sharpe's edition of the Rowley poems already mentioned p. xxiv is occupied by this announcement: "The Editor thinks himself happy in the permission of an in- genious Friend, to insert the following Monody." Then follows the first printed form of S. T. Coleridge's tribute to the memory of the "marvellous boy that perished in his pride." The printer of Sharpe's 'Rowley' was Benjamin Flower, the well-known Liberal of those days, who was the publisher of the Cambridge Intelligencer. This fact adds to the interest of a passage in which, after de- scribing Samuel Spitfire as "an oppositionist in politics and a deist in religion," the Satirist adds :

" In his tamer moments, when confined with the fever, and obliged to ' sport an aegrotat,' he whiled the time by composing what Voltaire calls diatribes for the Cambridge Intelligencer, and some of the most venomous tirades against the monarchy and the Church of England that appeared in that paper were the effusions of Sam's pen. I know that Mister Flower has laid claim to these ; but I assure you, Sir, from my own knowledge, in this case he is only the ' daw in borrowed plumes,' or, to use an apter comparison, the ' ass in the lion's skin.' "*

pp. 419-24, 538-44.
 * These passages are all in the Satirist, vol.

My friend Mr. John Albert Green, of Moss Side, who is a diligent student of Coleridge and has a large and interesting collection of Coleridgiana, has kindly looked over this note in MS., but is unaware of any reference by the poet to Mr. Sharpe or to this Satirist article. He has given me some references to the rela- tions between the poet and Sir Richard Phillips. In a note dated 1841 Sir Richard says :

11 Before he [Coleridge] went to Germany I passed a long afternoon in his company at a dinner party at Dr. Estlin's, at Bristol. Mr. Benjamin, after- wards Sir B. Benjamin, Dr. Beddoes, Mr. and Mrs. Barbauld, and some others were there. Coleridge sat next me, and he deafened me by set harangues on many trite subjects, treated in a scholastic and dogmatic way. In five or six hours the rest of the company edged in economically for a few minutes, but only while Coleridge took breath. He certainly was eloquent and very ingenious in quibbling. Though I tried the next morning to recollect some- thing that he had said, yet the whole resembled smoke, and I could grapple with no point whatever.'}

In another paper, dated some years after, Sir Richard describes his calling upon Cole- ridge at Mr. Gillman's at Highgate :

" His harangues were tunes of a barrel-organ, and in half-dozen sittings you heard the same ideas and phrases, which dazzled by their boldness and poetical effusions all their first auditors. His own very dull memories are a true exposition of his character. He had studied the Mystics, and his language was that of high abstraction, such as a young man might catch from Boehmen, Jeremy Taylor, Baxter, and the old writers of the syllogic school. Nothing is more easy, and yet nothing

more surprising to general readers In my opinion

Coleridge never wrote anything approaching his ' Ode to Pitt,' containing the line :

Letters four do spell his name."

This is given by John Timbs in his 'Anecdote Lives of the Later Wits and Humourists ' (1874, p. 9). Allsop's ' Letters, &c, of Coleridge ' contains a reference to Phillips in a note after Letter xxx. In this note Phillips is stated by Coleridge to have kept a host of writers in his pay, and to have been a gross flatterer. On one occasion, whilst speaking to Mrs. Barbauld, Coleridge was addressed by Phillips, who, after ex- pressing regret that he should have been in the company of so great a man without being aware of his good fortune, added shortly afterwards, "I would have given nine guineas a sheet for his conversation during the last hour and a half " (' Letters, Conversa- tions, &c., of Coleridge,' 1836, ii. 131-2).

In a letter to Southey, under date 9 De- cember, 1799, Coleridge makes a reference to George Dyer :

"God love him, he is a very good man; but he ought not to degrade himself by writing lives of