Coleridge's "Maxilian"

Abstract

Gests of Maxilian in the January 1822 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was a high point in Coleridge's relationship with Blackwood's and with reviews in general.' After the cruel review of Biographia Literaria which had appeared in Blackwood's in October 1817 and the parodies of his poems in later numbers, it seemed scarcely credible to some of his friends that Coleridge could have agreed to write for the magazine. Dorothy Wordsworth, commenting on philosophical articles published in 1821, wrote to Crabb Robinson: And are these articles really Coleridge's? It was much more pleasant to me to accuse the Blackwoodites of having libelled him than to believe that he had really been a contributor to the Magazine-.' But Blackwood's at least had the virtue of being the rival of the Whig Edinburgh Review; it had to some extent redeemed its initial error with subsequent praise of Coleridge; and one of its editors, J. G. Lockhart, had gone out of his way to express regret for the Biographia review in a book published in 1819.3 Grateful for these recent courtesies, and badly in need of money, Coleridge listened to Blackwood's offers and submitted a sonnet and marginalia in November 1819; a Letter to Peter Morris, M.D., On the