Coleridge died in 1861 at the early age of 31, from consumption brought on my a chill caused by sitting in damp clothes during a Philological Society lecture. When he was told that he would not recover he is reported to have exclaimed, 'I must begin Sanskrit tomorrow', and he died working on the Dictionary to the last, with quotation slips and word-lists spread on the quilt of his bed.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, October 08, 2010
I Must Begin Sanskrit Tomorrow
K.M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (1977; rpt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 136 (on Herbert Coleridge):