Note 377 — Chapter I · WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE: THEIR COMPANIONS AND ADVERSARIES.

The question—a puzzle like other Quæstiones Estesianæ—about the exact numbers and dates of Coleridge’s Shakespearian courses is not for us. It is enough to say that our extant materials (consisting, in regard to some lectures, of notes and reports from several different sources) chiefly, if not wholly, concern two courses delivered in London (1811-12 and 1818), and one at Bristol, 1813-14. Of the Royal Institution Lectures of 1806-7, on which he relied (throwing them even farther back) to prove his priority to Schlegel, nothing at all, unluckily, is preserved. Indeed Mr Dykes Campbell insisted, and seems to have almost proved, that none at all were delivered till Jan. 1808. And of these we have only Crabb Robinson’s brief references.