Have you seen Cobbett's last number? It is the most _plausible_ and the best written of anything I have seen from _his_ pen, and _apparently_ written in a less fiendish spirit than the average of his weekly effusions. The self-complacency with which he assumes to himself exclusively, truths which he can call his own only as a horse-stealer can appropriate a stolen horse, by adding mutilation and deformities to robbery, is as _artful_ as it is amusing. Still, however, he has given great additional publicity to weighty truths, as _ex. gr._ the hollowness of _commercial_ wealth; and from whatever dirty corner or straw moppet the ventriloquist Truth causes her words to proceed, I not only listen, but must bear witness that it is Truth talking. His conclusions, however, are palpably absurd--give to an over-peopled island the countless back settlements of America, and countless balloons to carry thither man and maid, wife and brat, beast and baggage--and then we might rationally expect that a general crash of trade, manufactures, and credit, might be as mere a summer thunderstorm in Great Britain as he represents it to be in America.
One deep, most deep, impression of melancholy, did Cobbett's letter to Lord Liverpool leave on my mind,--the conviction that, wretch as he is, he is an overmatch in intellect for those, in whose hands Providence, in its retributive justice, seems to place the destinies of our country; and who yet rise into respectability, when we compare them with their parliamentary opponents.
I am commanded to add an especial request, that it may not be long before you make yourself visible on the banks of Lake Superior.
Ever, my dear sir Yours faithfully and affectionately, S. T. COLERIDGE.[105] T. Allsop, Esq.
You must have thought it strange that I had taken no notice of so kind a letter from you; but the truth is, I received the little packet supposing it to contain the Cobbett only, put it in my pocket for my reading at a leisure hour, and had not opened it until the day before I last saw you. Within a few days, I hope to lay myself open to you in an express letter; till when, I can only say, that the affectionate interest you have taken in my well-being, has been not only a comfort but a spur, when I needed both, and was almost yielding at times to the apprehension, that I had sacrificed all that the world holds precious, without being able to do any effective good in a higher and nobler kind. I have sent the three volumes of the _Friend_, with my MS. corrections, and additions. The largest, that towards the end of the last _philosophical_ essay in the third volume, had a two-fold object--to guard my own character from the suspicion of pantheistic opinions, or Spinozism (it _was_ written, though not so much at large, before the work was printed, and omitted by wilfulness, or such carelessness as does not fall far short of it); and next, to impress, as far as I could, the conviction that true philosophy, so far from having any tendency to unsettle the _principles_ of faith, that may and ought to be common to all men, does itself actually require them as its premises; nay, that it supposes them as its ground.--I was highly gratified to hear, and from such a man too as Mr. John Hookham Frere, that a man of rank, and of a highly cultivated mind, who had become reluctantly a sceptic, or something more, respecting the Christian religion, wholly in consequence of studying Leland, Lardner, Watson, Paley, and other defenders of the Gospel on the strength of the _ex_ternal evidences--not of Christianity, but of the miracles with which its first preaching was accompanied--and of having been taught to regard the arguments, and mode of proof adopted in the works above mentioned, as the only rational ones, had read the _Friend_ with great attention, and when he came to the passage in which I had explained the nature of miracles, their necessary dependence on a credible religion for their own credibility, etc., dropped the book (as he himself informed Mr. Frere), and exclaimed, "Thank God! I can still believe in the Gospel--I can yet be a Christian." The remark that a miracle, divested of all connection with a doctrine, is identical with witchcraft, which in all ages has been regarded with instinctive horror by the human mind, and the reference to our Lord's own declarations concerning miracles, were among the passages that particularly impressed his mind.