ΤΟ

JOSEPH HENRY GREEN, F.R.S.

PROFESSOR OF ANATOMY OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY,

ETC. ETC.

THE HONOURED FAITHFUL AND BELOVED

FRIEND OF

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE,

These Uolumes

ARE MOST RESPECTFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY

INSCRIBED.

PREFACE.

THE more frequently we read and contemplate the lives of those eminent men so beautifully traced by the amiable Izaak Walton, the more we are impressed with the sweetness and simplicity of the work. Walton was a man of genius-of simple calling and more simple habits, though best known perhaps by his book on Angling; yet in the scarcely less attractive pages of his biographies, like the flowing of the gentle stream on which he sometimes cast his line, to practise "the all of treachery he ever learnt," he leads the delighted reader imperceptibly on, charmed with the natural beauty of his sentiments, and the unaffected ease and simplicity of his style. In his preface to the

Sermons of (that pious poet and divine,) Dr. Donne, so much may be found applicable to the great and good man whose life the author is now writing, that he hopes to be pardoned for quoting from one so much more able to delineate rare virtues and high endowments: "And if he shall now be demanded, as once Pompey's poor bondman was, who art thou that alone hast the honour to bury the body of Pompey the great?" so who is he who would thus erect a funeral pile to the memory of the honoured dead? With the writer of this work, during the latter twenty years of his life, Coleridge had been domesticated; and his intimate knowledge of that illustrious character induces him to hope that his present undertaking, "however imperfectly it may set forth the memory he fain would honour," will yet not be considered presumptuous; inasmuch as he has had an opportunity of bringing together facts and anecdotes, with various memoranda never before published, some of which will be found to have much of deep interest, of