This seems to have been overlooked: an article in the short-lived 1830s miscellany-magazine The Parterre (1832-36) that includes a number of anecdotes about Coleridge's life, including a hitherto unnoticed (parodic) couplet by the poet. The article is written by ‘A Descendent of Oliver Cromwell’, though it's a little hard to say whether this is meant literally, or whether it's an arch allusion to some mode of revolutionary political affiliation. If the latter (or indeed, the former) it is unlikely to be the Tory De Quincey, whose Lake Reminiscences began appearing in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine in 1839 and were later collected in book form (although a Coleridge memorabilium from De Quincey is quoted in this same volume of the Parterre—p.108—and attributed to him). None of these memorabilia appear in De Quincey, nor, so far as I can tell, anywhere else either:
MEMORABILIA, BY A DESCENDANT OF OLIVER CROMWELL (For the Parterre).I suppose ‘poor ———’ is Charles Lamb, with whom Coleridge was close and whose periods of insanity are well-known (though I can't find any other reference to Lamb's habit of praying standing up). The example of ‘quaint poetry’ of which STC was fond (‘Thin dandies in tights, weighing each one an ounce,/Young ladies befurbelowed, flounce upon flounce’) is from an anonymously published and, so far as I can see, never subsequently collected or acknowledged poem in The Literary Gazette (1826) called ‘A Modern Quadrille’:
I have seen and heard much through a long life. I have written my autobiography, which I intended should be published on the day a grave-stone was erected over my tomb. Too impatient, however, to await the period of my ghost flitting around my executors whilst employed correcting the proof sheets of my literary post obits, I have come to the resolution of giving the world some fragments of my memorabilia whilst l am yet alive.
I was in company with the celebrated Dr. Parr. He was then young and engaged in courtship. He related facetiously a dispute he had had with his lady-love. “If I marry,” said Parr, “I shall not approve of Jewish names for my expected children. I will not have a little tribe of Christian perfectly Jewish in nomenclature. If I had eleven daughters, I would name the first, “Amo; ” the second, “Amas; ” the third, “Amavi;” the fourth, “Amari;” the fifth, “Amandi;” the sixth, “Amando;" the seventh, “Amandum ; ” the eighth, “Amatum;” the ninth, “Amatu;” the tenth, “Amans; ” the eleventh, “Amaturus.” The translation of these latter words,” continued Parr, “would probably denote my love towards my wife, and my wife's love towards me, during the ten years necessary to give birth to the daughters to be named.”
Another time, I was with Dr. Parr at Will's coffee-house, Serle-street, London. Two Warwick attorneys were dining in the coffee-room. They did not like the port wine, and asked the waiter to change it for a tawny wine. “The wine you have got is what master calls attorney wine,” said the waiter.
The poet Coleridge was particularly fond of quaint poetry, similar to the description of a ball:
“Thin dandies in tights, weighing each one an ounce,I once went with Coleridge to visit a young lady whose father and mother were for years martyrs to the gout; when he in his eccentricity expressed their helpless situation by a parody of Byron, thus—
Young ladies befurbelowed, flounce upon flounce.”
“They lazily mumbled their meals in bed,Walking with Coleridge in the country, we saw washed linen hanging in a village church-yard. He said, “The inhabitants dry their clothes on the graves of their ancestors.” After a pause, he added, “the scene appears as if the ghosts had hung up their shrouds.”
Unable to crawl from the spot where they fed.”
Talking of the lunacy of poor ———, Coleridge said, “I intend writing some lines on one curious aberration of poor ———'s mind.” He declared that “kneeling was not the proper position in which a Christian ought to pray. He always prayed in an erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in figure of a cross.”
I remember Coleridge laughing immoderately at a stage coachman boasting he had realized more than £50 by the retail sale of one small barrel of ale. The boaster drove a stage-coach on one of the western roads, and kept, in his wife's name, on the same road a publichouse. He invariably stopped here under pretence of “washing his horses' mouths.” The passengers would call for “glasses or pints of ale.” It was speedily brought, and paid for; but no sooner did it touch the lips of a passenger, than its acidity caused him to forbear drinking; no one ever drank more than half his order. The coach again rolled forward with its four prancing steeds: the liquor which was left in the pints and glasses was carefully poured through the bung-hole of the barrel, to be re-sold to other sets of passengers of to-morrow and to-morrow.
Coleridge described singing without music as “singing without accompaniment of any sort, except the most wonderful distortion of face.”
The crime of murdering persons by pressing on their bodies and suffocating them, is, from its first discovered offender, Burke, called “Burking.” Coleridge, when any passage of his writings on rereading did not please him, would write a new passage on a slip of paper, and paste it over the disliked passage. This he called “Burking it.”
I suppose the phrasing here implies that ‘A Modern Quadrille’ was a poem Coleridge admired for its quirkiness, not a poem that he himself composed, although the latter possibility is not, perhaps, entirely ruled out of court. This is the poem, at any rate:
A Modern QuadrilleIt would be nice to think this a late-flowering spurt of Coleridge in his comic-satiric mode, but that's not very likely. The parody couplet (‘they lazily mumbled their meals in bed,/Unable to crawl from the spot where they fed’) clearly is Coleridgean; based, of course, on the lines from Byron's Seige of Corinth (1816) where dogs are chewing the bones of the slain:
“Concordia discors.”—Ovid.
Thin dandies in tights, weighing each one an ounce;
Young ladies befurbelow'd, flounce upon flounce;
Fond mothers extolling their daughters so dear,
To some good-natured youth of nine hundred a-year;
A party at whist, looking grim as a cannibal,
Each at their foe, like the Romans at Hannibal;
Some prints on the table, distressingly maul’d,
And “exquisite, lovely, bewitching!” miscall'd;
Three footmen in lace, and three others without,
All brilliant as candlesticks, stalking about;
An Austrian Hussar, a Sir Patrick O'Stokes,
Of the Poyais Light-horse (but of course that's a hoax);
A crowd on the stairs, with a wind like a knife,
Coming sharp round the legs of maid, husband, or wife;
A pensive young lady, rich, fickle, but cross,
With a pensive young Irishman near her, of course;
One preacher, two poets, and three poetesses;
A critic, fantastic and tawdry whose dress is;
All these, with their talents, loquacious or still,
Make up, gentle lady, a modern Quadrille!
And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wallBut the most interesting things here are the anecdotes. “The inhabitants dry their clothes on the graves of their ancestors; the scene appears as if the ghosts had hung up their shrouds” is just splendid. The ‘Burking’ reference also crops-up in Anton Langerhann's record of Coleridges' Table Talk from around 1830 (and there only, I think: it is reprinted in Carl Woodring's 1990 Collected Coleridge vol 14 Table Talk edition: 2:443), although the German Langerhann, whose reminiscences were not even translated into English until the 20th-century, cannot be the ‘descendant of Oliver Cromwell’ who wrote for the Parterre.
Hold o'er the dead their carnival,
Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb;
They were too busy to bark at him!
From a Tartar's skull they had stripp'd the flesh,
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
And their white tusks crunch'd o'er the whiter skull,
As it slipp'd through their jaws, when their edge grew dull,
As they lazily mumbled the bones of the dead,
When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed.
