tly, as the musical words flowed
in an unbroken stream from his lips. I listened entranced; but the
striking of a church-clock recalled me to a sense of duty." Charles
cut himself free with a pen-knife, he says, and went off to his
office. "Five hours afterwards, in passing the garden on my way home,
I heard Coleridge's voice, and on looking in, there he was, with
closed eyes--the button in his fingers--his right hand gracefully
waving." A good story, at least. This was no company for Lady
Jerningham, who demanded clarity, and probably had a good deal to do.

Lastly, we have Coleridge's own confession to Miss Betham that
"Bacchus ever sleek and young," as at this time Lamb called him,
"pouring down," he went on to say, "goblet after goblet," must
have outdone his usual outdoings. Here is the best he can say for
himself:--

"True history will be my sufficient apology. After my return
from Lady J.'s on Monday night, or rather morning, I awoke
from my short sleep unusually indisposed, and was at last
forced to call up the good daughter of the house at an early
hour to get me hot water and procure me medicine. I could not
leave my bed till past six Monday evening, when I crawled
out in order to see Charles Lamb, and to afford him such
poor comfort as my society might perhaps do in the present
dejection of his spirits and loneliness."

There is much more to the same effect; and surely it is not often that
a philosopher, or even a poet, will treat his post-prandial dumps (to
call them so) as a stroke of adverse fortune. Coleridge takes it as
an act of God. "This, my dear Miss Betham, waiving all connexion of
sentences, is the history of my breach of engagement, of its cause,
and of the occasion of that cause." There is much of Mr. Micawber
here.

And here, so far as _A House of Letters_ can help us, Coleridge's
correspondence with Matilda Betham ends. It may well have been the end
indeed. From that date onwards the wreck of the thinker and poet slid
swiftly down the slope appointed, until he came up, after many bumps,
in the hospitable Highgate backwater where he was to end his days.
It was a wonderful London which within the same twenty years could
harbour three men, like Blake, Coleridge and Shelley, in whom the
incondite spirit which we call genius dwelt so near the surface
of conscious being, and had such freedom to range. With Blake and
Shelley, however, once over the threshold,