Coleridge and John Murray

Next to the spacious first-floor room in 50 Albermarle Street which used to be John Murray’s library is another room lined with portraits and other mementos of the age of Byron.  Most of these were collected and perhaps placed there during Murray’s lifetime.  Prominent among them is Thomas Phillips’s portrait of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, painted early in 1819, when his Philosophical Lectures were still in progress at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand.  This is Coleridge at forty-six, his hair grey, almost white: Coleridge the talker.  His expression is animated, as though he had just paused at the end of an involute sentence, the implications of his argument flowing into the silence, reaching out expectantly to what the eyes promise.  In his hand he holds the small brown-covered notebook in which some of the notes for those lectures are preserved; his finger marks the place, but he has evidently forgotten his notes and is now in the full flood of improvised rhapsody.  John Murray did not acquire this portrait as an afterthought—he commissioned it.  If Coleridge ever saw it hanging on John Murray’s wall it must have given him a twinge of ironical pleasure.  For Murray’s association with Coleridge was more chequered and equivocal than this placid memorial would suggest.

John Murray as publisher and as owner of the ‘Quarterly Review’ is complex enough to be interesting as a person and not simply as a literary focus.  Something of a dandy, he had an unpretentious taste for the good things of life.  He is said to have been a procrastinator and an indolent man; he hated reading manuscripts, frequently mislaid and sometimes lost them.  Brilliantly successful in his business, he set the pattern for the more reputable type of modern publisher; and this he achieved without ever showing any inordinate concern for literature as such.  All the major decisions in his business he reserved to himself, yet showed skill and judgment in delegating minor responsibility.  His greatest gift was an instinctive and insatiable interest in people: his house became a centre of good conversation as naturally as his list found its centre of gravity in biography, memoirs, and travels.  If he lacked penetration and refinement as a literary critic, his judgment was always fortified by his personal understanding of an author—he was always able to see the person behind the pen.  In matters of business he refused to be dictated to, he refused to be cheated; when either threat was aimed at him his elegance was superseded by a severity that even now, in the faded scribe’s copies in his letter-books, can send shivers along the spine.  He never regarded manuscripts merely as commodities, he never forgot that somehow a book is written in blood; but he had a very fine judgment for what would sell and what would not, and his personal decision was final.  There are no signs, however, that this man, who so curiously combined shrewd sense with personal humility, ever sought to exploit to his own advantage the power that miraculously fell into his hands.  He could enjoy prosperity and distinguished company without becoming a brash arriviste: he was no snob, for there was no uncertainty in him.  He was Byron’s friend and intimate correspondent, yet never presumed upon affectionate and jocular intimacy to forget that he was publisher and that Byron was a peer of the realm.

In 1802 the Edinburgh publisher Constable launched the ‘Edinburgh Review.’  From that time the term ‘criticism’ takes on a sinister colour, and the first person plural was sharpened to an insinuating rapier wielded by an unseen antagonist for personal and political, as well as literary, ends.  The ‘Edinburgh’s’ success was immediate and phenomenal, and its purpose as an instrument of political influence was not slow to announce itself.  John Murray, Constable’s London agent in Fleet Street, watched this new departure with lively interest.  From the beginning Walter Scott had contributed to and supported the ‘Edinburgh’ (for Constable was his publisher); and in June 1807 we find him urging Southey to become a regular contributor.  Southey replied that ‘Judge Jeffrey of the “Edinburgh Review”’ was ‘a bad politician, a worse moralist, and a critic, in matters of taste, equally incompetent and unjust.’  Then ‘Marmion’ was unjustly reviewed by Jeffrey, and Scott was immediately disposed to agree with Southey.  Although he was not yet in touch with Scott, John Murray was equally enraged by the ‘Marmion’ review.  At a single stroke his vague hopes for a profitable commercial enterprise in imitation of the ‘Edinburgh Review’ crystallised into resolute action.  He broke his association with Constable; he sought Canning’s support; he travelled to Edinburgh to see Scott.  In him he found an energetic and experienced ally, a Tory enthusiast, a man of the world who well knew how to make a political periodical look like a literary review.  Scott’s political confidant, George Ellis, threw in his weight.  Murray’s scheme had now changed even beyond the scope of his righteous anger; and the man whom Byron called ‘the timidest of men’ and ‘the most timorous of all God’s booksellers’ found himself the founder-owner of the ‘Quarterly Review.’

How far Murray was responsible for setting the tone of the ‘Quarterly’ it is difficult to determine.  Nor is it clear by what process of poetic logic William Gifford was selected as first editor; Canning’s influence probably had much to do with it.  A man of humble origins and unfortunate youth, Gifford had entered the literary world belatedly by the backdoor of patronage, by writing satires which purported to be translations from the classical tongues, and by uttering libels which had not always escaped indictment.  Scott with commendable enterprise secured Southey’s services as regular reviewer; further, he appointed himself as Gifford’s mentor, and addressed him in a letter of portentous length and unabashed cynicism.  Gifford, he said, must exercise to the full the editor’s prerogative of, altering his contributors’ articles in detail and at large.  It would be profitable to ‘spice up’ those essays of ‘stupefying dullness’ which scholars and specialists could always be relied upon to produce; but beyond this he was to pay particular attention to ‘the most delicate and yet most essential part of our scheme’—the political battle against the ‘Edinburgh Review’ and the Whigs.  Was Gifford such a thorough rogue as Hazlitt paints him?  Scott’s championship, like much else that Scott did, is ambiguous.  Southey, a man of morbid rectitude, managed to swallow day-to-day annoyances and stay the whole course of Gifford’s editorship without dropping any hint that he admired or respected the man.  Murray’s opinion is difficult to gauge.  He was evidently satisfied that he had found the right person for the job and saw no reason to publish his opinion of Gifford as a man.  After all, he had staked his reputation and fortune upon the ‘Quarterly’; for three years he fought to establish it, not against fierce opposition but against indifference.  The thorough scholarship and ant-like industry of men like Southey and Barrow supplied the solid respectable core of the ‘Quarterly’; Gifford’s handling of controversial and personal issues has not left him with an unsullied reputation.  And at his elbow stood the preposterous Croker, that Secretary of the Admiralty whose literary immortality rests upon his butcher’s review of ‘Endymion.’  It is impossible to believe that Murray did not know these men for what they were: and so it is as difficult to condemn them as it is impossible to exonerate them.  Gifford at his death took the reasonable precaution of destroying his correspondence, so there is much we can never know about his editorship.  As Canning’s associate in the ‘Anti-Jacobin’ he had published a gross libel against Coleridge in 1799; this explains why Coleridge in his few dealings with the ‘Quarterly Review’ always approached Murray and not Gifford.

Coleridge’s dislike of journalism and of party-politics was vigorous and sensitive in the way that only a deep-rooted conviction can be.  In January 1798 he had accepted an annuity from the Wedgwoods in the belief that it would rescue him from the ‘warping of the intellectual faculty’ and the ‘motives to Falsehood and Simulation’ incidental to journalism.  Even in the months of his most ardent radicalism in Bristol in 1795 he had refused to associate himself with any political party; this same anti-partisan feeling was clearly stated in the prospectuses of his two one-man excursions into periodical writing—‘The Watchman’ (1796) and ‘The Friend’ (1809-10).  After several years of intermittent and not undistinguished contribution to the ‘Morning Post’ and the ‘Courier,’ he broke with Daniel Stuart because ‘the “Courier” was not the independent paper I had been led to believe, and had myself over and over again asserted.’  His objections to reviewing were equally personal and inflexible.  After an early taste of anonymous writing for the ‘Critical Review’ he had in 1797 renounced ‘the operation which united Trial, Verdict, and Execution,’ and thereafter pronounced reviewing to be ‘an immoral Act.’

When the first number of the ‘Quarterly Review’ was issued in March or April 1809 (dated February) there was nothing in its constitution or origins to suggest that Coleridge would be associated with it.  He was in poor health, his personal affairs were in a state of suspended crisis, and anyway he was about to launch, on June 1, 1809, the first number of his own periodical, ‘The Friend’ — ‘the main pipe, from which I shall play off the whole accumulation and reservoir of my head and heart.’  Furthermore, in the spring of 1808 he had broken his vow against reviewing to write an article for the ‘Edinburgh’ on Clarkson’s ‘History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade.’  This he did ‘for the sake of mankind’: but Jeffrey, impervious to such niceties of humanitarian feeling, ‘most shamefully mutilated’ the articles so that Coleridge still smarted from the outrage twenty years later.

After ‘The Friend’ had stopped at the twenty-ninth number, Coleridge passed a happy summer at Greta Hall, communing with Southey and his books.  But misfortunes were crowding rapidly in upon him.  By late autumn he was in London and had quarrelled almost irremediably with the Wordsworths.  Virtually penniless, he was housed by friends.  He worked for the ‘Courier’ until an article of his was suppressed by the government.  At the turn of the year 1811-12 he delivered his celebrated lectures on Shakespeare and Milton; then he travelled North to fetch the printed sheets of ‘The Friend’ which Gale and Curtis were to re-issue in London.  He had other schemes in his head too—not least of all the book which had been burning in his mind for eight or nine years and which became ‘Biographia Literaria.’  It was in these circumstances that Coleridge and Murray first met.

In the early part of 1812 Coleridge’s fortunes were steadily declining; but John Murray’s were taking a spectacular turn.  One morning in March, Murray suddenly discovered that the publication of ‘Childe Harold’ had made him a wealthy man and a celebrity.  He reacted

instantly and with enormous gusto.  He bought 50 Albemarle Street as a suitable setting for the distinguished company he had been quietly collecting around him.  No sooner was he installed there than he wrote with guileless enjoyment of the ‘elegant library which my drawing-room becomes in the morning,’ and how he was in the habit of seeing there ‘persons of the highest rank in literature and talent, such as Canning, Frere, Mackintosh, Southey, Campbell, Walter Scott, Madame de Staël, Gifford, Croker, Barrow, Lord Byron, and others.’  The ‘Quarterly Review’ accounts for most of this select group.  But Coleridge, who first joined the ‘others’ at this time, had had no connection with the ‘Quarterly’ although he had watched Southey’s contributions with interest and even admiration.  We know that Coleridge called on Murray early in April 1812 and listened to him grumble about the ‘delays and irresolutions and scruples’ that had crippled the sales of Bell’s ‘New System of Education.’  Coleridge had long enjoyed in London a notoriety which was widespread if not altogether complimentary; there was reason to suppose that Murray would be sympathetically inclined towards his work.  His contributions to Southey’s ‘Omniana,’ collected in 1810 and published in 1812, suggested to Coleridge that he could make a book out of ‘the huge cumulus of my Memorandum & common place Books.’  In an undated letter of this year he sought Murray’s encouragement for two volumes which he dared venture to say would be ‘one of the most entertaining Books in our Language.’  This is the proposed title page:

‘EXOTICS NATURALISED, i.e. impressive Sentiments, Reflections, Aphorisms, Anecdotes, Epigrams, short Tales and eminently beautiful Passages from German, Spanish, and Italian Works, of which no English Translations exist;—the whole collected, translated, and arranged by S. T. Coleridge, with explanatory, critical, and biographical notes and notices by the Collector.’

He only asked for an answer of ‘a single Line ... a mere yes or no’; he seems to have received an unmistakable no from Murray, for we hear no more of this scheme.

At this time, even in his straitened circumstances, Coleridge evidently made no attempt to write for the ‘Quarterly.’  Books and not articles were in Coleridge’s mind when he first approached Murray.  Not until February 1813 did Coleridge give any sign that the ‘Quarterly’ might be of benefit to him: and what he wanted then was, not to review, but to be reviewed.

For a few intoxicating days it looked as though the run of his poetic drama ‘Remorse’ at Drury Lane would bring him a little much-needed money, that it might even make him rich.  Byron, on the managing committee of Drury Lane, was instrumental in getting the play staged; so (whether or not Coleridge knew of Byron’s help) Murray must have been aware of the performance and of its importance to Coleridge.  Three editions of ‘Remorse’ were published in the early months of 1813; and when the second of these was about to be issued Coleridge wrote to Southey.  Gifford, he reported, had ‘said good-naturedly that I ought to be whipt for leaving so many weak and slovenly lines in so fine a poem’; that did not disturb him.  But the ‘Quarterly’ had repeated from Smith’s notorious ‘Rejected Addresses’ a gibe aimed at Coleridge, and this he considered ‘surely unworthy of a man of sense like Gifford.’  So he wrote Southey a long critique of ‘Remorse,’ in the hope that Southey would review it for him.  But a few days later he confided to Rickman that he had ‘reason to suspect, that Mr Gifford will not permit Southey to review it.’  This gloomy guess was accurate enough: Southey did not review ‘Remorse.’  And although the review was sympathetically written by John Taylor Coleridge, it was not published until the following April, by which time Coleridge was in Bristol in such depths of despair, isolation, and illness that the review could make no difference to him.

In August 1814 Murray first approached Coleridge on his own initiative.  He sent a message by Lamb and Henry Crabb Robinson that he would like Coleridge to make a verse translation of Goethe’s ‘Faust,’ and that he understood that Coleridge was the only man in England capable of the task.  Coleridge was interested and flattered and some correspondence followed in which Murray showed that he had taken the measure of Coleridge’s capacity for delay and had not overlooked the poet’s poverty.  Only one of Murray’s letters survives from this incident; it shows him in his least attractive character as the shrewd man of business.  Coleridge found Murray’s offer of 100l. ‘humiliatingly low,’ though he was prepared to believe that the terms ‘very probably are the highest, it may be worth your while to offer to me.’  But he reminded Murray that the ‘Faust’ was of a ‘questionable nature,’ that it was ‘so very difficult a work’ to translate, that it was ‘only a Fragment,’ and that the Baroness de Staël had given Lamb ‘a very unfavourable account of the Work.’  He recited the dismal history of his translation of Schiller’s ‘Wallenstein,’ how despite an excellence that surpassed the original it had become winding-sheets for pilchards.  But if Murray would agree to certain details of copyright and payment, and send him a copy of Goethe’s works and some other books, he would set to work immediately.  Murray, as Coleridge complained later to Byron, ‘did not even condescend to return me an answer.’  (This practice of using silence to announce unsavoury decisions later roused Crabb Robinson to call Murray ‘Absolute John.’)  These melancholy transactions gave Coleridge an opportunity to protest to Murray that the ‘Quarterly’ had no right to attack him for ‘neglecting and misusing’ his powers.  But he never made the translation; and although he says he started it, no fragment survives.  We can only guess at the loss—and deplore it.

For more than a year no letters passed between Murray and Coleridge.  Helped by his Bristol friends, Coleridge struggled against his drug addiction and overcame it sufficiently to prepare ‘Sibylline Leaves’ for the press and to write and start printing ‘Biographia Literaria.’  In the autumn of 1815 Byron in a spirit of genuine admiration opened a correspondence with him.  First he sent Coleridge a gift of 100l.; then he induced Murray to publish the little volume ‘Christabel, Kubla Khan, and The Pains of Sleep,’ which ran through three editions in 1816.  Byron also encouraged Coleridge to consider certain dramatic projects, one of which—‘Zapolya’—was far enough advanced for Murray to make an advance against publication.  By the time Coleridge was established with the Gillmans in Highgate in April 1816, relations with Murray seem to have been positively genial.  Coleridge borrowed books from him to disprove ‘the cruel calumny concerning my carelessness in returning Books’; he invited the publisher to ‘sun and air yourself on Highgate Hill during any of your holiday Excursions,’ and Murray did call at least once only to find that the poet was not at home.  Coleridge suggested that ‘there might be set on foot a Review of Old Books’ with himself as editor, but Murray managed to reject this proposal without giving immediate offence.  Before ‘Christabel’ was published Byron had written a most magnanimous letter to Thomas Moore, asking him to promise that when Coleridge’s ‘two volumes of Poesy and Biography’ appeared he would review them favourably in the ‘Edinburgh Review.’  ‘Praise I think you must, but you will also praise him well,—of all things the most difficult.  It will be the making of him.  This must be a secret between you and me, as Jeffrey might not like such a project;—nor indeed, might C. himself like it.  But I do think he only wants a pioneer and a sparkle or two to explode most gloriously.’  But the effort went awry.  Jeffrey took the bit in his own teeth, ‘cut up’ ‘Christabel,’ and turned against Byron for championing Coleridge.  Critical reaction to the book elsewhere ranged from outright abuse to pompous disappointment; the ‘Quarterly’ kept silence; and Coleridge, further discouraged that Murray had rejected various projected publications—among them ‘Biographia Literaria’—drifted away under some ill-defined obligation for ‘Zapolya.’  By early 1817 Byron and Coleridge had quarrelled and thereafter had no good word to say for each other.  Murray said nothing.  At Byron’s instigation he had been disposed for a while to include Coleridge in the select company of 50 Albemarle Street; but from this time onward he dealt with Coleridge strictly in a ‘business’ manner.

This coolness between Albemarle Street and Highgate Hill was unfortunate.  Coleridge was just entering upon his most productive period in prose.  There can be no doubt that if Murray had taken him into his confidence and assured him of publication of his work as it was completed Coleridge would have published in final form much more work before his death than he did.  But the problem was insoluble.  Murray probably detested his own indolence and procrastination when he saw it in Coleridge; and he had decided that Coleridge’s work would not sell.  The immediate result of the estrangement was the loss of another important piece of writing from Coleridge’s pen.  In August 1816 John Hookham Frere made the first overtures for the ‘Quarterly’ by asking him to review Goethe’s ‘Dichtung und Wahrheit.’  Coleridge declined.  ‘I have an exceeding reluctance,’ he told Boosey the bookseller, ‘to write in any Review entirely from motives of Conscience, conducted as all the Reviews are at present.  Should I attempt it, my main Temptation would be the procuring the last Edition of Goethe, which I cannot at present afford to purchase.’  This irreverent attitude to such an instrument of power as the ‘Quarterly’ is perhaps to Coleridge’s credit, but it soon got him into trouble with Murray.  Early next year when Murray asked for the 50l. advanced on ‘Zapolya,’ Coleridge with enraging condescension offered ‘to repay the money…or to work it out by furnishing you with miscellaneous matter for the “Quarterly,” or by sitting down to the  “Rabbinical Tales.”’  Whatever else may be said of the ‘Quarterly Review’ under Gifford, Murray did not regard it as a repository for ‘miscellaneous matter.’  His letter is not preserved, but we can judge from Coleridge’s protesting reply what sort of letter it was.  ‘I cannot be offended,’ he wrote, ‘by your opinion that my Talents &c are not adequate to the Requisites of Matter and Manner for the “Quarterly Review.”’  Would it not be more just, he hinted, to test his ability as a writer by the opinion of Southey, Scott, Byron, and Frere rather than by the ‘Edinburgh Review’ and Hazlitt’s malicious attacks in the ‘Examiner’?  And besides, he continued, everybody knew that the ‘Quarterly,’ although it had refrained from attacking ‘Christabel,’ was ‘ashamed to say a word in its favour.’  Three days later he repaid the 501.; he was frankly perplexed at Murray’s change of attitude, but thanked him for ‘the kindness and courtesy that I received from you on my first coming to Town.’  That was in March 1817.  In July he wrote Murray an ingratiating letter, protesting his integrity,  thanking him for his ‘friendly kindness,’ and saying that ‘if Mr Gifford have taken a prejudice against my Writings, I never imputed it as blame to you.’  Also he offered Murray the ‘Sibylline Leaves,’ but again Murray rejected the proposal.  In September Coleridge wrote again giving in most particular detail an account of the chronic illness which had prevented him from completing an article for the ‘Quarterly.’  This may still have been the Goethe review; but it was never completed, nor was that book ever reviewed in the ‘Quarterly.’

Murray’s coolness was not encouraging; and it seemed to Coleridge that Gifford was deliberately trying to bring him into discredit.  The silence of the ‘Quarterly Review’ weighed heavily upon his mind.  At times it became an obsession; it was part of the conspiracy of neglect that the world seemed determined to level at his ripest work.  It restricted the sale of his published work, he said; it made publishers suspicious to accept new projects from him; it had prevented him from completing his great life-work, the ‘Logosophia.’  Too proud and honest to curry favour on his own behalf, he managed to use his association with John Murray to the advantage of others.  In his Literary Lectures of 1818 he drew attention to Francis Gary’s translation of Dante; the ‘Quarterly’ and ‘Edinburgh’ took up the hymn of praise; 1,000 copies of this book which had been utterly neglected were sold at once and the book has been a classic ever since.  In the following year he gave Mariane Starke the introduction to John Murray which secured the publication of her popular ‘Travels on the Continent.’  In the same year he introduced his friend Hyman Hurwitz and Murray published his ‘Vindiciae Hebraicae.’  At the same time Coleridge wistfully suggested that the ‘Quarterly’ print an essay on Greek metres, at which he and his son Hartley had been ‘long labouring,’ as a review of Frere’s Aristophanic Imitations, but that was not accepted.  There was a long silence then until the beginning of 1822, when Coleridge offered to prepare for Murray a condensed edition of his fifteen-years’ favourite, Archbishop Robert Leighton.  The scheme was at first accepted, but soon broke down in exactly the same pattern as the ‘Faust’ negotiations.  This time Coleridge’s loss was not total, for he kept in his possession the four-volume edition of Leighton which Murray had sent him for the work; more than a year later he sent it to Taylor and Hessey as copy for the modified scheme published in 1825 as ‘Aids to Reflection.’

But before ‘Aids to Reflection’ had ‘struggled into the light’ Coleridge received a piece of news which gave him ‘a pain, which it required all my confidence in the soundness of your judgment to counteract’: his nephew, John Taylor Coleridge, had accepted the editorship of the ‘Quarterly Review’ on Gifford’s retirement.  The appointment could not affect the ‘Quarterly’s’ campaign of silence: both Lamb and Coleridge appreciated that such an austere organ of opinion could not lay itself open to an obvious charge of ‘Partiality and Nepotism.’  He had on earlier occasions offered gratuitous advice to Daniel Stuart and to the editors of ‘Blackwood’s’ on how to run a periodical; he now seized the opportunity of advising his nephew how, to the greater glory of literature and the preservation of morals, the ‘Quarterly’ should be run.  And some of this, suitably digested, J. T. Coleridge passed on in his own name to John Murray when he resigned from the editorship eleven months later.  It is only fair to say that Heraud, a young protégé of Southey’s, sent the introduction of a review of ‘Aids to Reflection’ as a preliminary to ‘an exposition of all that school of philosophy’ which, J. T. Coleridge told Murray, ‘he seems to understand and to be able to make intelligible to others.’  That was shortly before J.T.C. resigned; the article was not commissioned by his successor, J. G. Lockhart, and the silence remained unbroken.  When his nephew resigned (for reasons of ill-health) Coleridge rejoiced unashamedly: ‘I cannot persuade myself that the business of reviewing and the habit of procuring, sanctioning and becoming both morally and ostensibly responsible for anonymous criticisms on the work of contemporaries are not unfavourable to sanity of judgment and delicacy of feeling—the Pulse in those minor morals which are perhaps most friendly to the spiritual growth of the entire man.’

Coleridge made, or almost made, a third vague attempt to write for the ‘Quarterly.’  In the British Museum there is preserved an unaddressed draft letter, written some time in 1828, in which he offers an article on the first volume of Napier’s ‘History of the War in the Peninsula.’  It is a pathetic letter.  He gives a brief history of his few excursions into reviewing and states his moral reasons for having ‘kept aloof from Reviews.’  Now, however, he was prepared to believe that those reasons were no longer valid: for some years he had considered ‘the leading Reviews, on their present plan, among the most powerful Moral Steam-engines, that the age has produced.’  The letter is incomplete and perhaps was never posted: perhaps he recalled how in 1823 he had swallowed the bile of earlier insults and contributed articles—though not reviews—to ‘Blackwood’s.’  Probably he was right: times had changed and reviews had changed; even Lockhart had changed.  Gradually the frosty silence of the ‘Quarterly’ began to thaw.  A year before he died Coleridge had the pleasure of seeing the poems of his brilliant and erratic son Hartley reviewed there.  But the final vindication—the review of the 1834 ‘Poetical Works’ a masterly, comprehensive, and sympathetic assessment of Coleridge’s work written by his nephew-son-in-law Henry Nelson Coleridge—was not published until August 1834, a matter of days after S.T.C.’s death.  Fortunately we know that Coleridge read the article in manuscript.  The table of contents of the ‘Quarterly Review’ for the next few years reads like the programme of a Grasmere celebration: in succession there appeared reviews of Wordsworth’s ‘Poetical Works,’ Coleridge’s ‘Table Talk,’ Lamb’s ‘Last Essays of Elia,’ Wordsworth’s ‘Yarrow Revisited,’ Hartley Coleridge’s ‘Lives of the Northern Worthies,’ Coleridge’s ‘Literary Remains.’  Admittedly Henry Nelson Coleridge wrote four of these reviews: but at least he was allowed to write and publish them.

The story is, from Coleridge’s angle of vision, a sad one; but it is no disgrace to John Murray.  Murray was conducting a publisher’s business, not a philanthropic society.  His career shows that he could drive a hard bargain, that he refused to be hoodwinked in trade, that he had a shrewd eye for a saleable manuscript.  Some of the manuscripts he chose were immortal—Byron and Jane Austen particularly—and few were trivial or ephemeral; and to his most favoured authors he extended the hand of whole-hearted friendship.  Clearly Murray did not regard Coleridge’s work as a sound investment, and the sales of the first edition of ‘Biographia Literaria’ confirm this commercial judgment; also he soon found that he was unreliable in business matters and in completing manuscript on time.  He can be forgiven for failing to recognise Coleridge’s greatness, for most of Murray’s contemporaries either discounted Coleridge’s genius or were afraid and jealous of it.  Murray was a good businessman—in the better sense of the word good—and Coleridge is not the only writer who has been caught in the gap between a publisher’s limited judgment of what will show a profit and the author’s view of what sub specie aeternilatis is excellent.  Murray might, to Coleridge’s advantage, have been more patient and lenient; but there was no reason why he should have been.  John Murray was not a god: he never pretended to be anything more than a publisher.  Coleridge himself recognised this and never accused Murray personally of crippling his work.

It is less easy to absolve the ‘Quarterly Review.’  The ‘Edinburgh Review’ could utter its ‘loud calumny’ of supposed political and religious apostasy; but if that was a party matter, how do we account for ‘the silent but more injurious detraction of the “Quarterly Review”’?  The answer must rest in the fundamental defect of the nineteenth-century reviews, in their use of literary criticism as a vehicle of party policy.  Coleridge refused to side with any party and so was not supported by either.  Despite his poverty, he never seriously wished to become a regular—or even an occasional—contributor to the ‘Quarterly.’  All he wanted was that his work should receive impartial and serious criticism.  His reputation as a writer and thinker was widely acknowledged; it led him to suppose that he was entitled to such criticism.  And he needed it more than most, especially as the years advanced, to penetrate the miasma of gossip, half-truth, and mystification that gathered around his name.  Byron joined in the cuckoo-cry and Hazlitt and DeQuincey and lesser men like Thelwall; even Carlyle, a little jealous no doubt and perhaps also a little frightened, added weight to the theme: the brilliant and promising young poet who had risen above the horizon with Wordsworth had become the sage of Highgate, the man of genius had buried his priceless talents and slipped away, beyond trace or understanding, into ‘the holy jungle of transcendental metaphysics.’  ‘If I know myself,’ he told his nephew when he wrote at two o’clock in the morning to congratulate him on resigning from the ‘Quarterly,’ ‘I can truly declare that all I ever wished to see in a Review, was a fair account of the work I had written—how far it had the character of originality, and how far the less doubtful merit of truth and importance.  I wanted no disquisitions on myself or my genius, but a fair statement of my objects and of my agreements and to be set right when the reviewer conceived me to have gone wrong.’  Here he asserts his own standard of intellectual and critical integrity—a standard that makes him one of the few great critics England has produced.  That kind of criticism is what every serious writer desires and what most writers need.  But there never has been and never will be a time when a writer can be certain that his work will receive criticism of that order, that it will not be contaminated by the personal and political animosities of the everyday world.  The nineteenth-century ‘Quarterly’ is not the only review that has failed to supply self-effacing nourishment for great minds.