“Maturin’s new tragedy, ‘Manuel,’ appeared on Saturday last, and I am sorry to say that the opinion of Mr. Gifford was established by the impression made on the audience.  The first act very fine, the rest exhibiting a want of judgment not to be endured.  It was brought out with uncommon splendour, and was well acted.  Kean’s character as an old man—­a warrior—­was new and well sustained, for he had, of course, selected it, and professed to be—­and he acted as if he were—­really pleased with it....  I have undertaken to print the tragedy at my own expense, and to give the poor Author the whole of the profit.”

In 1824 Maturin died, in Dublin, in extreme poverty.

The following correspondence introduces another great name in English literature.  It is not improbable that it was Southey who suggested to Murray the employment of his brother-in-law, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from his thorough knowledge of German, as the translator of Goethe’s “Faust.”  The following is Mr. Coleridge’s first letter to Murray: 

Mr. Coleridge to John Murray.

JOSIAH WADE’S, Esq., 2, QUEEN’S SQUARE, BRISTOL. [August 23, 1814.]

Dear Sir,

I have heard, from my friend Mr. Charles Lamb, writing by desire of Mr. Robinson, that you wish to have the justly-celebrated “Faust” of Goethe translated, and that some one or other of my partial friends have induced you to consider me as the man most likely to execute the work adequately, those excepted, of course, whose higher power (established by the solid and satisfactory ordeal of the wide and rapid sale of their works) it might seem profanation to employ in any other manner than in the development of their own intellectual organization.  I return my thanks to the recommender, whoever he be, and no less to you for your flattering faith in the recommendation; and thinking, as I do, that among many volumes of praiseworthy German poems, the “Louisa” of Voss, and the “Faust” of Goethe, are the two, if not the only ones, that are emphatically original in their conception, and characteristic of a new and peculiar sort of thinking and imagining, I should not be averse from exerting my best efforts in an attempt to import whatever is importable of either or of both into our own language.

But let me not be suspected of a presumption of which I am not consciously guilty, if I say that I feel two difficulties; one arising from long disuse of versification, added to what I know, better than the most hostile critic could inform me, of my comparative weakness; and the other, that any work in Poetry strikes me with more than common awe, as proposed for realization by myself, because from long habits of meditation on language, as the symbolic medium of the connection of Thought with Thought, and of Thoughts as affected and modified by Passion and Emotion, I should spend days in avoiding what I deemed faults, though with the full preknowledge that their admission