foot. He assented to the justness of
this distinction (which I have explained at length elsewhere, for the
benefit of the curious) and John Chester listened; not from any
interest in the subject, but because he was astonished that I should
be able to suggest anything to Coleridge that he did not already know.
We returned on the third morning, and Coleridge remarked the silent
cottage-smoke curling up the valleys where, a few evenings before, we
had seen the lights gleaming through the dark.

[16] He had no idea of pictures, of Claude or Raphael, and at
this time I had as little as he. He sometimes gives a
striking account at present of the Cartoons at Pisa by
Buffamalco and others; of one in particular, where Death is
seen in the air brandishing his scythe, and the great and
mighty of the earth shudder at his approach, while the
beggars and the wretched kneel to him as their deliverer. He
would, of course, understand so broad and fine a moral as
this at any time.

In a day or two after we arrived at Stowey, we set out, I on my return
home, and he for Germany. It was a Sunday morning, and he was to
preach that day for Dr. Toulmin of Taunton. I asked him if he had
prepared anything for the occasion? He said he had not even thought of
the text, but should as soon as we parted. I did not go to hear
him,--this was a fault,--but we met in the evening at Bridgewater. The
next day we had a long day's walk to Bristol, and sat down, I
recollect, by a well-side on the road, to cool ourselves and satisfy
our thirst, when Coleridge repeated to me some descriptive lines of
his tragedy of _Remorse_; which I must say became his mouth and that
occasion better than they, some years after, did Mr. Elliston's and
the Drury Lane boards,--

Oh memory! shield me from the world's poor strife,
And give those scenes thine everlasting life.

I saw no more of him for a year or two, during which period he had
been wandering in the Hartz Forest in Germany; and his return was
cometary, meteorous, unlike his setting out. It was not till some time
after that I knew his friends Lamb and Southey. The last always
appears to me (as I first saw him) with a commonplace book under his
arm, and the first with a _bon-mot_ in his mouth. It was at Godwin's
that I met him with Holcroft and Coleridge, where they were disputing
fiercely which was the best--_Man as he was, or man as he is to be_.
'Give me', says Lamb,