“Chère amie. I begin my letter now before breakfast, apprehensive that something or other may occur, if it is delayed, to prevent its being written at all. Yesterday I did not feel that I could write, and to-morrow is no post-day. It may possibly happen, but I think it shall not, that I may be obliged to commit my scroll to the post before it is finished. If I do, you will understand my situation, recognise my motive, and excuse it.
“You cannot imagine how dull it is to travel with such a man as Phillips. I thought I understood him before, but, as I am always apprehensive of mistakes, and fearful to be unjust, I suspended my judgment. One day’s tête-a-tête instructs one, I believe, beyond the possibility of error. Such a snail in his discourse, so pompous, so empty, so fifty other things that are most adverse to my nature, I think I never encountered. My old bookseller Robinson, was a god to him. Though, to confess the truth, I never spent a day alone with Robinson; and if I had, I do not doubt I should have found him equally gross and worldly-minded, but not equally dull.
“A thousand times, as we passed along, I wished
myself at home. I cursed my own folly in ever having consented to such a
journey. To me, who had just left so different a scene, where we understood
each other by looks, where we needed but few words, and words were often
volumes, could anything be more humiliat-
| 76 | WILLIAM GODWIN |
“Yesterday I suffered the effects of it, and was in a continual fever. Yet yesterday insensibility did me good, and by night I was a great deal better. Yesterday was principally spent in the park and castle of Blenheim. The park is a fine scene by nature, which not all the puppy experiments of that mountebank Brown could entirely spoil. The castle is a magnificent pile of building, and contains many excellent pictures. Everything on a grand and lofty scale, most especially the grandeur of nature, seems to me in proportion to enlarge and elevate my existence. Yet here is even an uncommon mixture of genuine simple greatness with the poor stretchings and strainings of impotent pride, chiefly introduced by the stupid attempts of the famous Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough,—a pillar inscribed with the eulogies of her husband’s campaign, and crowded with Acts of Parliament in his praise,—and a most amazing funereal monument in the chapel. By the way, I am not sure I should like to have all my dead family repose under the same room with me. But what I principally like in the scene is its antiquity, not that it sheltered the sordid Duke of Marlborough, but that this was the favourite residence of our Henrys and Edwards, that it was crowded with knights in armour and a splendid train of ladies, that it was the seat of honour, and a generous thirst for glory, that all among them was decorous and all was picturesque, and that it is still haunted by the departed ghost of chivalry. My own Chaucer, too, adds glory to the object with the recollection of the simple square house that he inhabited just on the outside of the gate of the park. Poets then were loved by princes: they were so rare, and by their appearance such a novelty in the world, that the greatest and proudest of the species never thought they could pay them sufficient honour and attention.
“My dear love, take care of yourself. Manage and
economize your temper. It is at bottom most excellent: do not let it be
| CORRESPONDENCE WITH COLERIDGE. | 77 |
