ARTHUR COLERIDGE.*

THE late Arthur Coleridge, who died in 1913, had played no great part in the public eye, but he was an accomplished man, with many friends, and his reminiscences, sympathetically edited by Mr. Fuller Maitland, are pleasant reading. He was born as far. back as 1830 in the little town of Ottery St. Mary, which Thackeray, who stayed there with his stepfather, has made familiar under the name of Clavering St. Mary. His • Arthur Coleridge : Reminiscences. Edited by J. A. Faller Maitland. With Additions by the late F. Wane Cornish, Sir W. Ryland Adkhis. and L. Braes 110114ad. - London Constable. Iles. ed. sretJ - • father, Francis Coleridge, a country solicitor, was a nephew of the poet and a brother of Sir John Coleridge, Judge of the King's Bench, whose son became Lord Chief Justice. Of this Sir John Coleridge it is recorded that, after his retirement from the Bench, he was so much distressed at his younger son Henry's secession from the Church of England to the Jesuits as to think seriously of taking orders by way of protest. Francis Coleridge had a similar desire for a different reason—namely, that he had a profound admiration for his friend John Keble. Keble, some of whose letters are printed in this book, dissuaded both the brothers from changing their vocation. " Persevere with a good heart, my dear fellow, where you are," he wrote to Francis, " and do not doubt that Providence will give you opportunities enough of being useful." Arthur Coleridge never saw his great- uncle the poet, but had some family stories about him:— " For some years my father's cousin, William Hart Coleridge, was a curate at St. Andrew's, Holborn. On one sharp winter's day, the poet walked all the way from Highgate to call on his nephew, wishing, as he said, to hear him read the service ; I fear there may have been a mixed motive for this morning's walk. The poet, thinly clad, was observed to be unusually anxious about the to buttons of a double-breasted waistcoat.

• Bless my heart, William, I have forgotten my shirt.' William disappeared in the upper regions and soon came back with a change of raiment, at once appropriated and never returned to the reverend owner. Lord Houghton once showed me a novel funded on S. T. Coleridge's experiences in the army as a Cavalry soldier, and I asked him to give me an account of the conversa- tion that passed between him, his undergraduate friend, and S. T. Coleridge, when the poet was in extremis at Highgate. He told me that the conversation turned upon the Conversion of St. Paul on his way to Damascus. How,' said S. T. C.,

can anyone believe such a story told by a tipsy man on horse- back ? ' I was staggered by the story, and in after years put the case before Lord Tennyson, who relieved me greatly by saying : Lord Houghton started a paradox and wanted to give you a shock which might draw you into some controversy as to the state of your relative's religious belief. He was quite capable of mystifying younger men who only knew him by his books.' With me he was only half successful, for my belief remains unshaken that none but reverential words and thoughts filled the mind of the poet in his last hours."

Arthur Coleridge went to Eton in the forties ; his volume of recollections of Eton is well known, but his chapter on his schooldays has some interesting references to Dr. Hawtrey, to his beloved master William Johnson (Cory of Ionica), and to his friend Henry Bradshaw, afterwards the famous Cambridge librarian. Of Cory he says : " W. J. was by far the greatest personality I have ever been thrown in contact with," and alto " a wholesome terror and delight to me with my lax, undisci- plined, illogical mind." From Eton he went to King's College, Cambridge, and thence to the Bar. Unfortunately, he did not write his Cambridge reminiscences.

Arthur Colts-idge was a musician above all, and his musical recollections form the best part of the book. He had a good tenor voice and he studied singing under the best Continental teachers. We may infer that he was no mere amateur from the fact that he often sang duets with his friend Jenny Lind, and that he once sang, in public, a duet with Santley. Of Jenny Lind he writes with passionate enthusiasm :— " I first saw the last-named singer in the Puritani in 1848, and that visit to the Opera was a reward from my tutor for having done some one thing that pleased him in the summer half. Oh, the joy of one's youth ! How my heart beat when Jenny Lina came fluttering in to meet old Lablache, the Giorgio of the opera. At the polacca, Son vergin vezzosa,' I thought I should have cried with delight when my old tutor, who was weeping with emotion himself, said, Wait a bit, Arthur, you'll hear still greater things directly,' and the Nightingale was showering her trills and roulades like sparkling diamonds all over the place. It was the first time and the last, with the single exception of Rachel, that I have seen real indisputable genius on the stage. Macready had great moments, so had Devrient, but not one of these carried the spectator away so that one was absolutely insensible to every other object that came before the senses. • . . In the Puritani, nevertheless, I was not so completely carried away by the brilliance of the prima donna as not to watch the enthusiasm of the old Duke of Wellington, as badly bitten by the Jenny Lind mania as any schoolboy in the audience. In four months after her arrival in London the old warrior had become a captive to the enchantress. He courted the lady so ostentatiously as to rouse the jealousy of the Italian faction ; his enthusiasm was rather awkward at times to the object of his homage. I have her own authority for saying that the Duke always arrived early and seated himself in his box on a level with the stage ; directly he saw Jenny Lind he opened fire : I God evening, Miss Lind, how are you to-night 7 All right, pe ! ' These well-meant utterances were a trifle out of place at the particular time, for the Lucia, Amine, or Daughter of the Regiment was always so absorbed in her part as to be out of touch with all outside influence. On one 'occasion the Duke asked her to sing at a concert at Apeley House, and she inquired who were to taker part in it. The answer came, ' Oh, the cad thing ; Grisi and Mario.' The Nightingale politely declined."

In later years he saw a great deal of the " Swedish Nightingale," Madame Goldsohmidt, and prided himself on the fact that he had introduced to her notice Bach's great Mass in B minor, which in mid-Victorian days was still unknown to most musicians. "To think," she said, " that an old woman like me, who have lived in music all my life, should have been told of this music by an amateur." She trained part of the Bach Choir for the first performance in 1878. Hullah remarked of it, " Well, Bach was certainly an inspired barbarian." Coleridge had met Rossini and Auber in Paris:— "Lord Kinnaird told me that Rossini was his father's frequent guest at Resale, and that he himself thought the maestro a sportsman of the Winkle order. Once he joined a shooting- party, and contrived to give the coup de grace to a badly wounded hare. Transported with his performance he carried the corpse of poor Wat to his bedroom, took it down to dinner, and flourished it triumphantly before the guests with :—' J'ai eu un grand combat avec celui-la.' " Auber was more of a sportsman ; he had at least acquired a passion for the Turf in England and filled his rooms with pictures of English racehorses. Coleridge could also boast of having talked at Weimar with Liszt, who gave him some personal reminiscences of Beethoven. Liszt in his clerical robes reminded Coleridge of Cardinal Newman. Coleridge was an intimate friend of Millais, whose brother William was an ardent musician as well as a painter. Tennyson, too, was a great friend, whose conversations Coleridge preserved in a book published just before his death. One or two more sayings are given here, such as :- " T. I am rather in favour of Confession for boys and girls. Your story of Newman and Andrews illustrates the slavery, the abject slavery of the Papist mind. You know what Wise- man, when dying, said to the nurse at his bedside : ' Give- me some command that I may obey it.' People are mistaken in saying that all my characters are photographs of men and women known to me ; nearly all are drawn from imagination. If two Irishmen were on their way to Paradise, and it rained automatic shillelaghs on either side of them, they would not be contented."

Cory, he says, thought Tennyson " a much greater poet than Spenser and was not afraid to say so." " I remember," he adds, " the excitement at King's when Johnson, the last new poem in hand, rushed across the lawn as if afraid of losing his newly acquired treasure."

Coleridge's professional task for many years was to act as Clerk of Assize on the Midland Circuit, and two of his old friends, Sir W. Ryland Adkins and Mr. Spencer Holland, contribute an amusing chapter of reminiscences :-

" I recall how, one evening, when something came up about the characteristics of rural clerks and sextons, his eye gleamed and he said : " Ah, that is like the Derbyshire man who saw the Judge of Assize when he went to church in state and was much impressed. The following Sunday, it being summer, the Judge strolled out into the country and entered a village church. Morning service had just begun. In his place stood the clerk, who recognized the Judge. How was he to show his respect and knowledge during morning prayer T The Ts Deum was reached, and he saw his chance. Luckily it was his turn to repeat the versicle, ' We believe that Thou shalt come to be our judge,' and suiting the action to the words, he turned to Mr. Justice X and bowed profoundly as he sounded the words ' our judge.' The King's representative was not to be ignored in the National Church."

Coleridge once said that Gladstone's nickname at Eton was " Merrypebble " and that Lord Granville always called him " Mr. Merrypebble " in private letters. He was full of stories of the Bench and Far.

" Coleridge used to tell how at Warwick one day Lord Campbell, irritated by the chimes of a neighbouring church, shouted out, Stop those bells ! ' suddenly adding, unless it be for Divine service, in which case God forbid.' On another occasion, in St. Mary's, Warwick, where the Judges were in attendance, a nervous chaplain began the prayer for Parliament, upon which Lord Campbell rose in his robes from the State pew and called out, No, no, young man ; Parliament stands prorogued.' "

He used to relate how Mr. Justice Lawrence, when counsel for the Duke of Rutland in an action brought by a miner, opened his

defence by saying :—

" I do not appear for a wealthy collier, swilling champagne at the mouth of a pit which he refuses to descend : I appear for a simple horny-handed Duke."

Mr. Gladstone's remark

" On a Judge who gave a youth only three months' hard labour for firing at the Queen's carriage, used to haunt Coleridge's memory : Will no one relieve us from this man's ghastly incompetence ' " But it would be -unfair to quote any more from this ple(tsant and entertaining book, which is a worthy tribute to a good man's memory.