BIB_ID
415853
Accession number
MA 1854.2
Creator
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834.
Display Date
Calne, England, 1815 March 15.
Credit line
Purchased from Joanna Langlais, 1957.
Description
1 item (2 pages) ; 20.5 x 28.2 cm
Notes
Dr. Brabant was an English physician in Devizes who also had an interest in German Higher Criticism. Coleridge was a patient of Dr. Brabant during the years he lived in Calne.
This collection, MA 1854, is comprised of ten autograph letters signed from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to R.H. Brabant, written from March 10, 1815 through December 5, 1816. It also includes 4 pages of autograph notes and one fragment of an autograph letter signed to Brabant. The fragment is written from Calne but is undated.
This letter is from the Joanna Langlais Collection, a large collection of letters written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to various recipients. The collection has been divided into subsets, based primarily on Coleridge's addressees, and these sub-collections have been cataloged individually as MA 1848- MA 1857.
The letter has been cut in half. The size given above is of the two halves laid side by side.
According to a footnote to the published letter cited below, "This letter was written on the Monday after Letter 957 (MA 1854.1), the two letters being posted together." Coleridge has dated this letter "Calne, Monday Morning."
This collection, MA 1854, is comprised of ten autograph letters signed from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to R.H. Brabant, written from March 10, 1815 through December 5, 1816. It also includes 4 pages of autograph notes and one fragment of an autograph letter signed to Brabant. The fragment is written from Calne but is undated.
This letter is from the Joanna Langlais Collection, a large collection of letters written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to various recipients. The collection has been divided into subsets, based primarily on Coleridge's addressees, and these sub-collections have been cataloged individually as MA 1848- MA 1857.
The letter has been cut in half. The size given above is of the two halves laid side by side.
According to a footnote to the published letter cited below, "This letter was written on the Monday after Letter 957 (MA 1854.1), the two letters being posted together." Coleridge has dated this letter "Calne, Monday Morning."
Provenance
Purchased from Joanna Langlais in 1957 as a gift of the Fellows with the special assistance of Mrs. W. Murray Crane, Mr. Homer D. Crotty, Mr. and Mrs. Donald F. Hyde, Mr. Robert H. Taylor and Mrs. Landon K. Thorne. Formerly in the possession of Ernest Hartley Coleridge and Thomas Burdett Money-Coutts, Baron Latymer.
Summary
Referring to his previous letter (see MA 1854.1) and continuing to comment on Edward Williams' work on Calvin; discussing the "dire Curse of all habitual Immorality, that the impulses wax as the motives wane - like animals caught in the current of a Sea-vortex, (such as the Norwegian Maelstrohm) at first they rejoice in the pleasurable ease with which they are carried onward, with their consent yet without any effort of their will - as they swim, the servant gradually becomes the Tyrant, and finally they are sucked onward against their will : the more they see their danger, with the greater and more inevitable rapidity are they hurried toward and into it -. Now from this fact Dr. Williams deduces, that the inability to will good is no excuse for not doing so - in genere, and without reference to the origin of the inability - forgetting that our conscience never condemns us for what we cannot help unless this 'cannot in praesenti' is the result of a 'would not a preterito' - all moral Evil is either cum voluntate or de voluntate-. N.B. a voluntas causata is a contradiction, unless as causa sui. - Take Dr. Williams's own instances - suppose the man stated as utterly incapable of loving God to have been created with this incapability, and you no more blame him than you blame a rattle snake for his Poison. - All Law human and divine acknowledges this distinction - as in the criminality of murder committed in drunkenness, and the impunibility of the same act committed in madness;" expressing his anxiety about the Corn Bill saying "You cannot conceive, how this Corn Bill haunts me - and so it would you, if you had seen the pale faces and heard the conversation of the hundred poor creatures, that came to sign the Petition... I assumed as the Ideal of a Legislature - that in which all the great component interests of the State are adequately represented, so that no one should have the power of oppressing the others, the whole being in sympathy of action & re-action with the feelings and convictions of the People - I now see that this is not the case - & I see the historical cause too. - Neither Blackstone or De Lolme have truly given the Theory of our Constitution - which would have been realized in practice but for two oversights. - But of this hereafter -. I have no opportunity of seeing any of the Shoal of Pamphlets on this Question; but I suppose, that the Speeches in Parliament contain the Essence - if so, God have mercy on the Intellects of the Nation! How indeed can it be otherwise, with such Educations as our Gentleman receive! I have often heard of the Pain of Inferiority : this I could never understand. I have often enough met my superiors, some in all things, many in many things, - and God knows! the feeling was so delightful, that it has not seldom tempted me to overrate persons - but the pain of Superiority! That I have felt, and do feel it almost as often as I read a Speech or composition of my Contemporaries - & thence it is, that I devote myself almost exclusively to the Works of the great ever-living Dead Men of our Isle, or to the writings of the Germans, who appear to me (I mean, the learned Public of Germany ) a full century before the Scotch & English. To hear Malthus quoted as an Oracle in a British Senate! - Stupid, hard-hearted Blunders ingrafted on pedantically disguised, and yet falsely-worded, Truisms! Ubi non Fur, ibi Stultus, is my character of his Reverence Mr. Malthus - Were the Prince to knight him, he would smell no worse to my nostrils;" concluding with two short phrases in Greek and a final phrase "This I call letting a Pun."
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