¹ Howe, Life of Hazlitt (London, 1928), pp. 439–442; Maclean, Born under Saturn (New York, 1944), pp. 362,600; Carver, “The Authorship of a Review of Christabel Attributed to Hazlitt,” JEGP, xxix (1930), 562–578; Coleridge, Unpublished Letters, ed. E. L. Griggs (New Haven, 1933), ii, 196, n. (“Hazlitt, writing of Christabel in the Edinburgh Review …,” etc.). Waller and Glover printed the article only in the notes of their edition of Hazlitt, considering the authorship uncertain; Jules Douady rejected it in his Lisle chronologique des œuvres de William Hazlitt (Paris, 1906). See also Howe's note in Vol. xvi of Hazlitt's Complete Works, pp. 419–421. The question was also discussed in Notes and Queries, Ser. 9 (1902), x, 388, 429; xi, 170, 269.

² Reminiscences of a Literary Life (London, 1836), i, 340.

³ A MS record of Cockburn, 1849. Through the courtesy of Mr. Leroy H. Buckingham I have had access to a transcript made from the original list in possession of the Earl of Rosebery.

⁴ Byron, Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero (London, 1899), iii, 232–233. This and two other pieces of useful information cited hereafter I owe to Professor Irwin Griggs of Temple University. Studies of which this paper is an offshoot have been aided also by a research grant from Temple University.

⁵ Moore, Memoirs, ed. Lord John Russell (London, 1853–56), viii, 212; ii, 101–102.

⁶ July 1816. Ibid., ii, 105.

⁷ The letters published in Moore's Memoirs are a mere selection, and it is evident that at this time as well as later there was additional correspondence with Jeffrey.

⁸ In the Examiner, Hazlitt reviewed Christabel on 2 June 1816, the first “Lay-Sermon” before its publication on 8 Sept. and again, after its publication as The Statesman's Manual on 29 Dec; he added further remarks on 12 Jan. 1817. In the Edinburgh, the disputed review of Christabel appeared in the number for Sept. 1816, and Hazlitt reviewed the first “Lay-Sermon” in the issue for Dec.

⁹ Westminster Review, xcrv (1870), 11. This letter was not reprinted by E. H. Coleridge or E. L. Griggs and has been little noticed in the controversy, though Chambers mentions it. The origin of a supposed “confession” by Hazlitt of his authorship of the Christabel review, reported vaguely many years afterwards by Gillman from Coleridge, appears in this letter. But the letter gives no indication that Hazlitt mentioned the Edinburgh; and considerations of dates, places, and the time required for transmission of Hazlitt's remarks through a third person suggest that whatever admission he may have made about attacking Coleridge more likely referred to the Examiner. Coleridge, in any case, was predisposed to attribute attacks upon himself to Hazlitt (See, for example, Howe, pp. 153–154).

¹⁰ Coleridge informed John Murray on 27 Feb. 1817 that the attack upon him in the “last” Edinburgh “was, I am assured, written by Hazlitt” (Letters [Boston, 1895], n, 669670). Through an editorial blunder of E. H. Coleridge, who so identified it, this statement became associated with the review of Christabel, though it refers actually to that of the “Lay-Sermon” in the Dec. issue, which appeared early in Feb. Hazlitt's authorship of this was known. E. H. C.'s error passed unnoticed and led Shawcross and Sir Edmund Chambers, among others, to cite this letter as evidence on the wrong article.

¹¹ Ed. Shawcross, ii, 211–212.

¹² 5 June 1817, Unpublished Letters, ii, 196–198 (my italics).

¹³ “… of the specific excellence described …, I appear to find more, and more undoubted specimens in the works of others; for instance, among the minor poems of Mr. Thomas Moore, and of our illustrious Laureate.” Biographia Literaria, ii, 77 (Ch. xx). Though not published till July 1817, this part of the book had been written and printed more than a year earlier. The “Conclusion” of the Biographia, on the other hand, was written only shortly before publication. See, for these dates, Biographia Literaria, i, xc-xcvi, ii, 131; Chambers, p. 280.

¹⁴ June 1817, Letters, ii, 672.

¹⁵ Hazlitt later reprinted them under his own name in Political Essays (1819), but his authorship had never been a secret.

¹⁶ Some portions of this passage would best fit Jeffrey or Meore. The man who “repeatedly pronounced it the finest poem in the language” suggests Hazlitt, not because he is known to have thought or said this (nothing like it is heard from any other source than Coleridge) but because Coleridge had said almost the same thing about him in his letter to Brabant. Earlier in the Biographia, however, he had cited even stronger, though more general, praise from Jeffrey during the latter's visit to Keswick (“… at no period of my life do I remember to have received so many, and such high coloured compliments in so short a space of time” i, 36); Jeffrey was said also to have urged him to publish Christabel. But poets also had praised it before its publication, as he tells us in the earlier part of the paragraph quoted above: “From almost all of our most celebrated Poets … I either received or heard of expressions of admiration that (I can truly say) appeared to myself utterly disproportionate to a work, that pretended to be nothing more than a common Faery Tale” (ii, 210–211). With all these memories of former praises floating about in an imagination heated by resentment, the original language of the praise might well have become missorted and have been variously ascribed at different times by Coleridge.

¹⁷ For the authorship of this, see Howe's note in Hazlitt's Works, xvi, 425. Jeffrey altered or added so much to this article that in his forgetful later years he claimed it as his own.

¹⁸ xxviii (Aug. 1817), 507–512.

¹⁹ Works, xix, 33–34.

²⁰ xxvii (Sept. 1816), 58–67.

²¹ Memoirs, v, 100. Moore reprinted tie squib under the same title among his poetical works.

²² Ibid., iv, 48; vii, 71–73, 50, 8. By “Genevieve” Moore may have meant the poem Love, in which the name occurs, though it is also the title of a brief early poem.

²³ Memoirs, iv, 51. Hazlitt occasionally commented on particular metrical effects. See, for example, the review “Charlemagne: ou l'Église Délivrée” (Works, xix, 26), in which he writes of Lucien Buonaparte's rejection of French heroic verse in favor of “the Italian Stanza with varying rhymes, and a little half verse in the middle, which has an agreeable effect enough in the lighter parts of the poem, but does not accord so well with the more serious and impressive.” His concern, however, was always with the expressiveness of the meter rather than with “correctness” or any other purely technical points.

²⁴ Edinburgh Review, xxiv (Nov. 1814), 58–72 passim.

²⁵ Works, xix, 33. Hazlitt thought, and said outright, that there was “something disgusting at the bottom of his subject”—something of the “charnel-house” he called it. Coleridge was certainly wrong, however, when he reported to Southey in February 1819, with reference to a different writer's attack on the poem as “obscene”: “It seems that Hazlitt from pure malignity had spread about the Report that Géraldine was a man in disguise” (Unpublished Letters, II, 247). At precisely this time—February 1819—Hazlitt in a literary lecture described Geraldine once more merely as a “witch” (Works, vi, 166). In view of his knowledge of the omitted line, as well as of the stubborn consistency of his opinions, it must be supposed that Coleridge was imagining the facts to suit his need. He may have been thinking again of the Edinburgh reviewer's innuendoes and attaching them to Hazlitt.

²⁵ Edinburgh Revieu; xxiii (Sept. 1814), 415, 423–424.

²⁷ XLV (March 1827), 326 (“Anne Boleyn—a Dramatic Poem”); lviii (Oct. 1833), 32 (“Overton's Poetical Portraiture of the Church”). In the latter article, couplet is used also in the usual sense, since the work reviewed was written in heroic couplets throughout. I have not made an exhaustive search for the word in the writings of Jeffrey and Hazlitt but have looked into the most likely passages and have gone somewhat more thoroughly through the Edinburgh between 1814 and 1816. Nowhere except in Moore's writing and the Christabel review have I seen the word used otherwise than to describe the closed rhyming couplet.

²⁸ The charge was repeated casually by others, but I know of none who professed to have any knowledge from a different source. Crabb Robinson, who generally knew Hazlitt's productions immediately, and said so, evidently had no such knowledge or suspicion about this article until after he learned Coleridge's opinion (see Howe's Life, 211, 439, and references cited there).

²⁰ Memoirs, v, 100–101. Cf., for Moore's lack of squeamishness about committing a similar “pious fraud,” ibid., viii, 184,194, 205–206. Cf. also Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, i, 414. Moore's journal was begun only in 1818 and so does not cover the period of the Christabel review.

³⁰ Works, xix, 9–25.

³¹ The known facts of the breach will be found, variously interpreted, in the following : Howe, Life, 79–81,169–174,188–189, and passim and Fortnightly Review, cxii (1919), 603615; Maclean, 196–202, 357–364; Chambers, 175–176; E. L. Griggs in MLN xlviii (1933), 173–176; R. S. Newdick in Texas Review, ix (1924), 294–300; Letters of… Wordsworth 1811–1820, ed. de Selincourt, ii, 602, 606–607, 781–782; Gfflman's Coleridge 276–277; Coleridge, Unpublished Letters, ii, 178–179, 189–190, 196–197; Times Literary Supplement, 27 Dec. 1941, p. 660 (an important letter of Wordsworth to John Scott of June 1816); Crabb Robinson, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc., pp. 38, 39; Westminster Review, loc cit. My statement that Jeffrey, as well as Hunt and Scott, had probably been told of the scandal is founded on a phrase in Coleridge's letter to Wrangham, cited earlier. After describing the scandal to Wrangham in vague but strong language, Coleridge wrote: “This man [i.e., Hazlitt] Mr. Jeffrey has sought out, knowing all this [my italics]… .” The question is: How did Jeffrey know, and how did Coleridge know that Jeffrey knew—unless by having had a hand in the telling? The story does not seem to have been common knowledge: the only accounts we know of are those that emanated from Coleridge and Wordsworth during the hostilities of 1814–17. If Jeffrey knew it, he probably heard it directly or indirectly from one of these two. Some modern writers have traced even the notorious attacks upon Hazlitt in Blackwood's Magazine to these accounts of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The veiled threats of “exposure” and Blackwood's favorite epithet for Hazlitt, “pimpled” (which under threat of libel proceedings was transferred from his face to his writings), have been thought to reflect the scandal of 1803 as reported probably by Wordsworth to John Wilson. The point is not proved, since no such communication has actually been produced. Earlier discussions of the subject assumed that the breach between Hazlitt and the poets not only was occasioned by, but also followed close upon, the episode of 1803. More recently, correspondence has come to light showing that some time after the affair Wordsworth and Southey still wrote to and about Hazlitt in most cordial terms and that as late as 1811, despite the increasing strain of political differences, Coleridge paid a purely social and voluntary visit to Hazlitt (Crabb Robinson's report). Quite possibly the rather bitter diatribe against “country people,” with which Hazlitt concluded his final article on The Excursion and which undoubtedly contains reminiscences of the 1803 affair as he remembered it, may have revived Wordsworth's and Coleridge's recollection of it and have given an impetus to their reports, which began soon afterwards.