Henry Crabb Robinson had a busy evening on 27 January 1818: having attended William Hazlitt's lecture on Shakespeare and Milton at the Surrey Institution, he hurried over the river to the London Philosophical Society to hear the first lecture in a new course by Coleridge. He was gratified to find there 'a large and respectable audience - generally of very superior looking persons'. There was considerable activity on the London literary scene that month, for at an institution in Lincoln's Inn Fields John Thelwall was lecturing to a much less respectable audience on Shakespeare and Dr Johnson.

LRB 29 September 1988 | PDF Download