A DETECTIVE

3rd October, 1855.

POSTSCRIPT.

The foregoing letter was sent to the Editor of the Athenaum on the 3d of this month, accompanied by a note to the following effect : —

"This letter is sent to the Athenaum for 'publication under this condition : that if published at all, it shall be intact and entire, without addition or curtailment.

" Should this condition not be complied with, or should publication be altogether refused, it is the writer's intention to have the letter immediately printed for diffusion through the post-office."

To this an answer appeared in the Athenaum of the 6th, as follows : —

"A Detective is declined. His manuscript is left for him at our office. The insertion of the year within a parenthesis is a clear intimation that it was not printed on the document from which the writer was copying, and therefore was conjectural : Detective's com- ment is therefore a mere waste of words."

The Editor doubtless thought that this dictum would quite settle the matter, and leave " A Detective" in a pre- dicament, to exclaim with Charles, in the " Elder Brother" — "My head is broken with a parenthesis."

But the parenthesis which encloses the year in Mr. Collier's copy of the Coleridge prospectus is not, by any means, such a plain proof as the Editor of the Athenaum would assume, that there was no year printed in the original document ; especially in the face of the direct evidence to the contrary afforded by Mr. Gillman's reprint. (Life of Coleridge, vol. I. p. 262.) In that reprint there is no parenthesis, nor any other indication that the year had been an addition of Mr. Gillman's own.

Besides, even in Mr. Collier's version, the manner in which the parenthesis is inserted, within an including comma, and with no break in the quotation-marks, is certainly much more indicative of a singling out (by brackets) for the purpose of future comment, than of the intrusion of new matter extraneous to the original.

But admitting that the fact is as the Editor of the Athemeum assumes, and that there really was no year printed in the original prospectus, how does that alter the complexion of the manoeuvre? It merely changes the modus operandi from substitution to interpolation. The charge is that the pros- pectus is altered, and the Editor of the Athenaum seems to forget that alteration may be effected as well by interlopatiou as by substitution. 7s it not, in fact, an altered document as it stands ? ""

The statement of Mr. Collier was, that certain long lost notes — short-hand notes — had been found, which, when all written out, " extend to from ten to forty sides of letter- paper for each lecture ;"' that is, to sufficient for the manufacture of an octavo volume of matter to be attributed to Coleridge. The date of these notes is asserted in the most positive and unequivocal manner ; and is apparently confirmed by a printed document found with them, but mis-quoted with the addition of a fictitious, or, as the Editor of the Athencmm delicately terms it, a conjectural date to suit. If not as a corroborative, why was this date add< d at all ? Mr. Collier was repeating the year 1812 in almost every sentence of his own remarks upon the subject; where, then, could be the necessity of introducing it surreptitiously into a professed verbatim copy of another document, in contra- diction to the date that had previously been attributed to that document ?

But there was a third mutual corroborative, which also turned up at the same time, in the shape of a journal or diary, in which every thing seems to be fragmentary, except: ing tb^ various dates: they are perfect enough, and all

concur in supporting this same date which we are now to look upon as merely conjectural. Nay, this diary is so precise that it gives the date of an allusion by Coleridge himself to another series of lectures delivered by him the -preceding year. (? )

" Coleridge himself mentioned them in a conversation at my father's on the 21st October, 1812. It was on the same occasion that he announced to us his intention of giving the lectures, of seven of which I have notes, and which commenced on the 18th Nov. following."

But the Editor of the AtheW&um now assumes that the date of the year common to all these documents was con- jectural ! Conjecture implies doubt, and if Mr. Collier really wished to verify his date there was a ready means of so doing by a glance at obvious sources of information, such as Gillman's Life of Coleridge, or the Coleridge Lectures, in both of which the very prospectus he was copying is to be found.

It is almost incredible that any person would sit down to write matter to be attributed to Coleridge, and yet omit to consult at least the indexes of previous collections. Or was it with intention that Mr. Collier apparently provokes the inference that he had done so ? It is difficult to banish such a suspicion, when he is found reprinting the well known prospectus of 1818 with this preliminary remark : —

"As I cannot find that the prospectus of Coleridge's lectures in 1818, (they began on 27th January, and finished on 13 th March,) was ever reprinted, and as I happen to know that it cost him no little trouble and reflection, I venture, though it is somewhat long, to subjoin the introduction to what is called the syllabus of the course," &c.

Ever reprinted ! Why it occupies a conspicuous place in the " Remains," published in 1836; — it is reprinted at length in the " Life," published In 1838 ; — and it is the very first article in the 2d vol. of the "Lectures," published in 1849, being an obvious and indispensable portion of the lectures themselves.

Oue, at least, of these books Mr. Collier appears to be acquainted with ; since he quotes it, volume and page, in his

Notes and Emendations: and yet the expression "cannot find" would seem to imply a search ; aud if so, surely the books just enumerated are precisely those in which a search would be made.

But it is singular that this should be the second time that Mr. Collier considered it necessary to make the same disavowal. In a previous part of his communication he had said : —

"I had carefully preserved Coleridge's printed 'Prospectus' of his lectures in 1818 (I know not if it has been reprinted)," &c.

By the wray, there certainly is a word peculiar to Mr. Collier's copy of this Prospectus of 1818, which does distin- guish it from other versions, viz. : —

" The acquisitions and attainments of the intellect ought, indeed, to hold a very inferior rank in our estimation, opposed to moral worth, or even to professional and scientific skill, prudence, and industry." (Keprint in Notes and Queries, vol. x. p. 22.)

The word scientific, in all reprints save this of Mr. Collier's, is printed specific ; and it is needless to say, that all other reprints are unquestionably right : but perhaps this may be an emendation! — it has, indeed, a wondrous smack of the Old Corrector —

Although the print be little, the whole matter And copy oj the father —

But to return to the lectures of " 1812" — there is another circumstance, perhaps of not much importance in itself, but significant in aggravation of the other discrepancies in these revelations.

Mr. Collier states that he had recovered his notes of seven out of the fifteen lectures which constituted the course : and these seven he enumerates as " the first, second, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and twelfth. "

And yet, in the very next page to this enumeration, we read —

" These were the concluding words of Coleridge's second lecture. In his third he thus" — &c.

And then follows half a page of matter, reported in the first person, as though taken down from the lips of Coleridge, whose third lecture was not one of those of which the notes had been so fortunately recovered.

But if ever there was positive assertion, untinctured by the slightest appearance of doubt, hesitation, or conjecture, it assuredly is the assertion by Mr. Collier of every particular relative to his alleged date of Coleridge's Lectures " of 1812." A Detective cannot therefore agree with the Editor of the Athenceum, that it is "a mere waste of words" to draw public attention to the impossibility of that date, and consequently to the extreme improbability of its having been obtained from any bona fide or really contemporary source ; and, as a corollary to that conclusion, that no faith ought to be placed in any other antiquities that may have been issued from the same laboratory. ,

10th October, 1855.

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