drag forth their names that we may gloat over their infirmities. We pity them for their sad fall. We acknowledge the strength of their temptations, and, walking backwards, would throw a mantle over their frailties. But these men are needed, also, as warnings. The moral world must have its light-houses. Thousands of young men are running down upon the same rocks on which they were cast away. If the light of their genius has made them conspicuous, let us then use their conspicuity, and throw a ray from them, as from a beacon, far out upon the dim and perilous sea.
Hartley Coleridge was the eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet and metaphysician. He had some of his father's gifts, particularly his captivating conversational power, and his propensity for novel and profound speculation. He had also his father's infirmity of purpose. In the case of the son, the reason, as the world is now informed in a biography written by his brother, was that he early became the slave of intemperate habits, from which no aspirations of his own heart, no struggles with the enslaving appetite, and no efforts of sympathizing and sorrowful friends, could ever deliver him. He gained a fellowship in Oriel College, Oxford, and forfeited it in consequence of these habits. He then cast himself, as a literary adventurer, into the wild vortex of London life; failed sadly in all his projects; drank deep of the treacherous wine-cup, often to his own shame and the chagrin of his friends, from whom he would sometimes hide himself in places where restraint was unknown
