, except the _Biographia Borealis_.

The life of Hartley was a strange and sad variant of his father's,
though, if he lacked a good deal of S. T. C.'s genius, his character was
entirely free from the baser stains which darkened that great man's
weakness. Born (1796) at Clevedon, the first-fruits of the marriage of
Coleridge and Sara, he was early celebrated by Wordsworth and by his
father in immortal verse, and by Southey, his uncle, in charming prose,
for his wonderful dreamy precocity; but he never was a great reader.
Southey took care of him with the rest of the family when Coleridge
disappeared into the vague; and Hartley, after schooling at Ambleside,
was elected to a post-mastership at Merton College, Oxford. He missed
the Newdigate thrice, and only got a second in the schools, but was
more than consoled by a Fellowship at Oriel. Unfortunately Oriel was not
only gaining great honour, but was very jealous of it; and the
probationary Fellows were subjected to a most rigid system of
observation, which seems to have gone near to espionage. If ever there
was a man born to be a Fellow under the old English University scheme,
that man was Hartley Coleridge; and it is extremely probable that if he
had been let alone he would have produced, in one form or another, a
justification of that scheme, worthy to rank with Burton's _Anatomy_.
But he was accused of various shortcomings, of which intemperance seems
to have been the most serious, though it is doubtful whether it would
have sunk the beam if divers peccadilloes, political, social, and
miscellaneous, had not been thrown in. Strong interest was made in
favour of mercy, but the College deprived him of his Fellowship,
granting him, not too consistently, a _solatium_ of L300. This was
apparently in 1820. Hartley lived for nearly thirty years longer, but
his career was closed. He was, as his brother Derwent admits, one of
those whom the pressure of necessity does not spur but numbs. He wrote a
little for _Blackwood_; he took pupils unsuccessfully, and
school-mastered with a little better success; and during a short time he
lived with a Leeds publisher who took a fancy to him and induced him to
write his only large book, the _Biographia Borealis_. But for the most
part he abode at Grasmere, where his failing (it was not much more) of
occasional intemperance was winked at by all, even by the austere
Wordsworth, where he wandered about, annotated a copy of Anderson's
_Poets_ an