promise that he
will wait on Lady Jerningham any day you will be pleased to appoint.
He offered to write to you, but I found it was to be done _to-morrow_,
and as I am pretty well acquainted with his to-morrows, I thought good
to let you know his determination to-day. He is in town to-day, but
as he is often going to Hammersmith for a night or two, you had better
perhaps send the invitation through me, and I will manage it for
you as well as I can. You had better let him have four or five days'
previous notice, and you had better send the invitation as soon as
you can; for he seems tolerably well just now. I mention all these
betters, because I wish to do the best I can for you, perceiving, as I
do, it is a thing you have set your heart on."

Charles was next brought in. Mr. Lucas gives his letter (I. 429) to
John Morgan, which says, "There--don't read any further, because the
letter is not intended for you, but for Coleridge, who might perhaps
not have opened it directed to him _suo nomine_. It is to invite C.,
to Lady Jerningham's on Sunday."

Finally, Coleridge went to the party, and apparently in company,
though it is not clear in whose company. This is what Lady Jerningham
thought about it:--

"My dear Miss Betham,--I have been pleased with your friends,
tho' (which is not singular) they sometimes fly higher than my
imagination can follow. I think the author ought to mix
more, I will not say with Fools, but with People of Common
Comprehension. His own intellect would be as bright, and
what emanated from it more clear. This is perhaps a very
impertinent Remark for me to venture at making, but your
indulgence invited sincerity."

That letter, I think, whose capitals are particularly graphic, throws
the whole party up in a dry light. One can see the rhapsodist talking
interminably, involving himself ever deeplier in a web of his own
spinning; the great lady gazing in wonder. It is one of the very few
impartial witnesses we have to his conversational feats. Nearly all
the evidence is tainted either by predisposition in his favour or the
reverse. Hazlitt, a mainly hostile witness, says that he talked well
on every subject; Godwin on none. One suspects antithesis there. He
reports Holcroft as saying that "he thought Mr. C. a very clever man,
with a great command of language, but that he feared he did not always
affix very precise ideas to the words he used!" Then we have
Byron, who w