attend to the intricacies of sectarian peculiarities; be a good man, retain a pure heart, but oh! avoid alike the Quaker and the Libertine, the Methodist and the Atheist.' In another letter, dated November 29, 1795, thirteen months later, a more miscellaneous course of reading was prescribed for the Saffron Walden apprentice. Charles began thus: 'I am convinced that nothing tends so much to narrow the mind as sectarian and confin'd notions of religion and morality. The pure ardour of universal benevolence does not abate at the sight of a Lutheran or a Quaker, a Catholic or an Unbeliever. No! it considers all the petty, paltry distinctions of parties and sects, which would separate man from man and brother from brother, as originating in the weaknesses and prejudices of mankind; it despises them all, and simply seeks by active usefulness, not by unintelligible dogmas, to diffuse good and enlarge the confin'd limit of human felicity.' The following volumes were then recommended: Holcroft's Anna St. Ives,' Godwin's Political Justice,' Priestley's 'Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever' and ' History of Christianity' (this might be either the History of the Corruptions of Christianity,' or 'A General History of the Christian Church,' of which only the first two volumes were then in existence), Paley's Evidences,' Lindsey's 'Apology' (for Unitarianism), and Conversations' on the same subject. 'When you have read these, all of which I am convinc'd it will be to your advantage to peruse, I shall then gladly point out other works.' Finally came the advice to read Volney's Ruins of Empire,' but ' with caution.' Is it matter for surprise that the writer of these letters became the enthusiastic disciple of Coleridge, when that prophet, glowing with youth and belief in the power and lustre of his. projected Watchman,' visited Birmingham early in 1796? One eloquent man is more, to young inquirers, than all the books in the Bodleian, and Charles Lloyd had been waiting for years to meet with such a mind as Coleridge'sglowing and confident, tireless and persuasive -and he fell completely under the spell. A few months later Coleridge again stopped in Birmingham, on his return from Derby, where a school was in preparation for him, and the adoration of the young visionary (younger than Coleridge by two years) in tensified. Charles Lloyd was then again living at home, building castles in the air which bore as little resemblance as might be to the family bank; for, as Joseph Cottle wrote in his Early Recollections,' 'the tedious and unintellectual occupation of adjusting pounds shillings and pence' suits those alone who have never,' eagle-like, gazed at the sun or bathed their temples in the dews of Parnassus.' Charles Lloyd desired with all his soul to lead the exalted existence of a philosopher and poet; and already having written a number of sonnets of a meditative and melancholy cast, forsworn the paternal creed, and passed through a stage of acute Rousseauism, he was perhaps entitled to his dream. The first step to the consummation of this ambition was domestication with Coleridge as pupil and friend; and Coleridge, when the plan was suggested to him, seems to have been agreeable. It was, of course, a flattering proposal, likely to please any man, particularly a 'Pantisocratist' of twenty-three. He even addressed to Charles Lloyd a poem describing some of the delights of their projected companionship : Together thus, the world's vain turmoil left, Stretch'd on the crag, and shadow'd by the pine, |