,
Tune all your mystic harps to praise Lepaux."]
[Footnote 3: Coleridge, beginning November 18, 1811, and ending January
27, 1812, delivered a course of seventeen lectures on Shakespeare and
Milton, "in illustration of the principles of poetry." The lectures were
given under the auspices of the London Philosophical Society, in the
Scot's Corporation Hall, Crane Court, Fleet Street. Single tickets for
the whole course were two guineas, or three guineas "with the privilege
of introducing a lady." J. Payne Collier took shorthand notes of the
lectures and published a portion of his material, the rest being lost
('Lectures on Shakespear', from notes by J.P. Collier), The notes, with
other contemporary reports from the 'Times', 'Morning Chronicle',
'Dublin Chronicle', Crabb Robinson's 'Diary', and other sources, were
republished in 1883 by Mr. Ashe ('Lectures and Notes on Shakspere and
other English Poets').
Collier, in his notes of Coleridge's conversation (November I, 1811),
gives the substance, in all probability, of the attack on Campbell
alluded to in the next letter. Coleridge said that "neither Southey,
Scott, nor Campbell would by their poetry survive much beyond the day
when they lived and wrote. Their works seemed to him not to have the
seeds of vitality, the real germs of long life. The two first were
entertaining as tellers of stories in verse; but the last, in his
'Pleasures of Hope', obviously had no fixed design, but when a thought
(of course, not a very original one) came into his head, he put it down
in couplets, and afterwards strung the 'disjecta membra' (not 'poetae')
together.
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