For after a winter spent in London, and enlivened by those
_noctes conoque De?»m_ at the "Cat and Salutation," which Lamb has
so charmingly recorded, Coleridge returned with Southey to Bristol at
the beginning of 1795, and there proceeded to deliver a series of
lectures which, whatever their other merits, would certainly not have
assisted Dr. Pearce to grasp the distinction between a Pantisocrat and
a Jacobin. As a scholar and a man of literary taste he might possibly
have admired the rhetorical force of the following outburst, but,
considering that the "HE" here gibbeted in capitals was no less a
personage than the "heaven-born minister" himself, a plain man might
well have wondered what additional force the vocabulary of Jacobinism
could have infused into the language of Pantisocracy. After summing up
the crimes of the Reign of Terror the lecturer asks: "Who, my brethren,
was the cause of this guilt if not HE who supplied the occasion and the
motive? Heaven hath bestowed on _that man_ a portion of its
ubiquity, and given him an actual presence in the sacraments of hell,
wherever administered, in all the bread of bitterness, in all the cups
of blood." And in general, indeed, the _Conciones ad Populum_, as
Coleridge named these lectures on their subsequent publication, were
rather calculated to bewilder any of the youthful lecturer's well-
wishers who might be anxious for some means of discriminating his
attitude from that of the Hardys, the Horne Tookes, and the Thelwalls
of the day.
Pages:
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39