By Charles James Fox On His Deathbed

 

Click to embiggen and, indeed, clarify.

So: I've been reading Walter Scott's St Ronan's Well (1823), and came across the above-reproduced note. In Chapter 6 the love-interest in the novel, beautiful young Clara Mowbray, has yet to be introduced into the story, and the young hero Francie Tyrrel, who has returned to the Scottish spa-town of St Ronan's Well hoping to be reunited with her, hears her described by the fashionable ladies at dinner in Coleridgean terms:

“I own, madam,” [Tyrrel said], “I was a little surprised at seeing such a distinguished seat unoccupied, while the table is rather crowded.”

“O, confess more, sir! ... What if the Dark Ladye should glide in and occupy it?—would you have courage to stand the vision, Mr. Tyrrel?—I assure you the thing is not impossible.” ...

“Who is expected?” said Tyrrel, unable with the utmost exertion to suppress some signs of curiosity, though he suspected the whole to be merely some mystification of her ladyship.

“How delighted I am,” she said, “that I have found out where you are vulnerable!—Expected—did I say expected?—no, not expected.

She glides, like Night, from land to land,
She hath strange power of speech.

—But come, I have you at my mercy, and I will be generous and explain.—We call—that is, among ourselves, you understand—Miss Clara Mowbray, the sister of that gentleman that sits next to Miss Parker, the Dark Ladye, and that seat is left for her.—For she was expected—no, not expected—I forget again!—but it was thought possible she might honour us to-day, when our feast was so full and piquant.—Her brother is our Lord of the Manor—and so they pay her that sort of civility to regard her as a visitor—and neither Lady Binks nor I think of objecting—She is a singular young person, Clara Mowbray—she amuses me very much—I am always rather glad to see her.”

“She is not to come hither to-day,” said Tyrrel; “am I so to understand your ladyship?”

“Why, it is past her time—even her time,” said Lady Penelope. [St Ronan's Well, ch 6]

A footnote at this point directs the reader's attention to the endnote at the head of this post.

Two things interest me here. One is the reference to Coleridge's poem ‘The Ballad of the Dark Ladie’ (1799), a fragment of sixty lines that was intended to be a full-fledged ‘Gothic’ ballad of about one-hundred-and-ninety. It's an interesting if rather critically-neglected poem, this; and the function of the reference to it here in Scott's novel is ironic (the joke is that superannuated, affected Lady Penelope Penfeather sees everything through a ‘Romantic’ filter. When we finally meet Clara she is nothing like Coleridge's doomed Gothic maiden). It's tempting to read ‘The Ballad of the Dark Ladie’ as a dry-run for Coleridge's later Ancient Mariner, a gender-swapped version of a couplet from which is what Lady Penelope actually quotes in the above passage. (Is this a joke at the expense of her ignorance, maybe? Or is her fluency with Coleridge a sign of the depth of what nowadays we would call her fandom of STC?)

But there's another thing. When ‘Dark Ladie’ was first published [in the Morning Post, 21st Dec 1799] it was preceded by a 34-stanza ballad-form prologue. When ‘Dark Ladie’ was published in book-form (in the 2nd edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1801) Coleridge separated this prologue, trimmed seven stanzas from it top-and-tail and published it as a separate poem called ‘Love’. In his Princeton edition of Coleridge's Poems (2001; 16:605), J C C Mays says this:

The originally drafted ‘Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie’ and the later, pruned version, ‘Love’, were popular from the first, and were frequently reprinted in newspapers and anthologies in C's lifetime. Walter Scott told the actress Sarah Smith, ‘the verses on Love ... are among the most beautiful in the English language’ [Scott Letters III:400] and John Gibson Lockhart described the poem as ‘better known than any of its author's productions ... many hundreds of our readers have got it by heart long ago, without knowing by whom it was written’ [Blackwood's Magazine, Oct 1819]

I won't quote the whole poem (you can read it here, if you like), though it begins:

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.

Oft in my waking dreams do I
Live o'er again that happy hour,
When midway on the mount I lay,
Beside the ruined tower.

The moonshine, stealing o'er the scene
Had blended with the lights of eve;
And she was there, my hope, my joy,
My own dear Genevieve!

... and ends:

She half enclosed me with her arms,
She pressed me with a meek embrace;
And bending back her head, looked up,
And gazed upon my face.

'Twas partly love, and partly fear,
And partly 'twas a bashful art,
That I might rather feel, than see,
The swelling of her heart.

I calmed her fears, and she was calm,
And told her love with virgin pride;
And so I won my Genevieve,
My bright and beauteous Bride.

What intrigues me about Scott's note, at the top of this blogpost, is the suggestion that Whig politician Charles James Fox so loved this poem that he had it read to him on his deathbed. I've spent a while poking around in biographies and online resources to see if I can find any corroboration for this fact, but without success. Where did Scott (a deep-dyed Tory and no friend of the Whiggish-radical Fox) hear it? From the horse's mouth, perhaps—which is to say, not from Fox himself, but from someone present at his end? Or was it a common story? If so I can't track it down anywhere else.  

Is it true? (If so, why does nobody else talk of it?) Fox certainly loved poetry, although his real passion was for classical verse: he carried an edition of Horace in his pocket wherever he went. The 4-vol Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox (1857) is full of passages celebrating Greek and Latin classics, with the occasional praising note concerning his ‘great partiality to the Italian poets’, whilst at the same time deprecating Milton (‘there is a want of flow, of ease, in his blank verse which offends me more perhaps than it ought’). Fox does express a favourable opinion of Spenser, and there's plenty of flow and ease in Coleridge's ‘Love’, so it's not impossible that Fox rated it. And in 1806, when Fox died, Coleridge had begun, and had not yet completed, the process of crossing the political topography of left-and-right, radical-to-Tory. Young STC had been inspired by Fox's writing, and although slightly-older STC criticizes Fox's closeness to Napoleonic France in Essays on His Times, he does so respectfully enough. And we know that Wordsworth sent a copy of the 1801 Lyrical Ballads to Fox, so he would have known, or at least had the opportunity to read, the poem.

It would be nice to have some other confirmation, nonetheless.

And then, whilst poking around, I came across the following in a critical study of Crabbe:

The source here appears to be Crabbe himself, which opens the possibility that Scott heard the story that Fox read ‘Love’ on his deathbed from Coleridge himself (certainly possible). Did all the Romantic poets go around boasting that Charles James Fox selected one of their poems to read immediately before shuffling off his mortal coil?

[‘Comforts of a Bed of Roses’ (1806), in which Gillray depicts Death crawling out from under Fox's covers, entwined with a scroll inscribed ‘Intemperance, Dropsy, Dissolution’.]