Note 476 — CANTO THE FOURTH[375]

[In his speech On the Continuance of the War with France, which Pitt delivered in the House of Commons, February 17, 1800, he described Napoleon as "the child and champion of Jacobinism." At least the phrase occurs in the report which Coleridge prepared for the Morning Post of February 18, 1800, and it appears in the later edition in the Collection of Pitt's speeches. "It does not occur in the speech as reported by the Times." It is curious that in the jottings which Coleridge, Parliamentary reporter pro hac vice, scrawled in pencil in his note-book, the phrase appears as "the nursling and champion of Jacobinism;" and it is possible that the alternative of the more rhetorical but less forcible "child" was the poet's handiwork. It became a current phrase, and Coleridge more than once reverts to it in the articles which he contributed to the Morning Post in 1802. (See Essays on His Own Times, ii. 293, and iii. 1009-1019; and Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1895, i. 327, note.)]