CHAPTER CLII.

ODD OPINIONS CONCERNING BIOGRAPHY AND EDUCATION. THE AUTHOR MAKES A SECOND HIATUS AS UNWILLINGLY AS HE MADE THE FIRST, AND FOR THE SAME COGENT REASON.

Ya sabes—pero es forzoso
Repetirlo, aunque lo sepas.
                                  CALDERON.

Unwillingly, as the Reader may remember, though he cannot possibly know with how much unwillingness, I passed over fourteen years of Daniel Dove's youth, being the whole term of his adolescence, and a fifth part of that appointed sum, beyond which the prolongation of human life is but labour and sorrow. Mr. Coleridge has said that “the history of a man for the nine months preceding his birth would probably be far more interesting, and contain events of greater moment than all the threescore and ten years that follow it.” Mr. Coleridge was a philosopher, in many points, of the first order, and it has been truly said by one of the antients that there is nothing so absurd but that some philosopher has advanced it. Mr. Coleridge however was not always in earnest when he said startling things; and they who suppose that the opinions of such a man are to be collected from what he says playfully in the freedom of social intercourse to amuse himself, and perhaps to astonish others, may as well expect to hold an eel by the tail.

There were certain French legislators in the days of Liberty and Equality, who held that education ought to begin before birth, and therefore they proposed to enact laws for the benefit of the homunculus during that portion of its existence to which Mr. Coleridge is said to have attached such metaphysical, or in his own language such psychological importance. But even these Ultra-philosophers would not have maintained that a biographer ought to begin before the birth of his subject. All antecedent matter belongs to genealogical writers; astrologers themselves are content to commence their calculations from the hour and minute of the nativity. The fourteen years over which I formerly passed for the reasons stated in the 25th Chapter of this Opus, would have supplied more materials than any equal portion of his life, if the Doctor had been his own historian; for in those years his removal from home took place, his establishment at Doncaster, and his course of studies at Leyden, the most momentous events in his uneventful history, except the great one of marriage,—which either makes or mars the happiness of both parties.

From the time of that “crowning event” I must pass over another but longer interval, and represent the Doctor in his married state, such as he was when it was my fortune in early life to be blessed with his paternal friendship, for such it might be called. Age like his, and Youth might well live together, for there was no crabbedness in his age. Youth therefore was made the better and the happier by such society. It was full of pleasure instead of care; not like winter, but like a fine summer evening, or a mild autumn, or like the light of a harvest moon,

“Which sheds o'er all the sleeping scene
  A soft nocturnal day.”1

1 JAMES MONTGOMERY.