COLERIDGE, SARA English author, the fourth child and only daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his wife Sarah Fricker of Bristol, was born on Dec. 23, 1802, at Greta Hall, Keswick. Here, after 1803, the Coleridges, Southey and his wife (Mrs. Coleridge's sister), and Mrs. Lovell (another sister), widow of Robert Lovell, the Quaker poet, all lived to gether; but Coleridge was often away from home; and "Uncle Southey" was a paterfamilias. The Wordsworths at Grasmere were their neighbours. Wordsworth, in his poem, the Triad, has left us a description, or "poetical glorification," as Sara Coleridge calls it, of the three girls—his own daughter Dora, Edith Southey and Sara Coleridge, the "last of the three, though eldest born." Greta Hall was Sara Coleridge's home until her marriage ; and the little Lake colony seems to have been her only school. Guided by Southey she read by herself the chief Greek and Latin classics, and before she was 25 had learnt French, German, Italian and Spanish.
In 1822 Sara Coleridge published Account of the Abipones, a translation in three large volumes of Dobrizhoffer, undertaken in connection with Southey's Tales of Paraguay, which had been sug gested to him by Dobrizhoffer's volumes. In 1825 her second work appeared, a translation from the mediaeval French of the "Loyal Serviteur," The Right Joyous and Pleasant History of the Feats, Jests, and Prowesses of the Chevalier Bayard, the Good Knight without Fear and without Reproach: By the Loyal Servant.
In Sept. 1829, at Crosthwaite church, Keswick, after an engage ment of seven years' duration, Sara Coleridge was married to her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge (1798-1843), younger son of Captain James Coleridge (176o-1836) . He was then a chan cery barrister in London. In 1834 Mrs. Coleridge published her Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children; with some Lessons in Latin in Easy Rhyme. These were originally written for the instruction of her own children, and became very popular. In 1837 appeared Phantasmion, a Fairy Tale.
In 1843 Henry Coleridge died, leaving to his widow the un finished task of editing her father's works. To these she added some compositions of her own, among which are the Essay on Rationalism, with a special application to the Doctrine of Bap tismal Regeneration, appended to Coleridge's Aids to Reflection; a Preface to the Essays on his Own Times, by S. T. Coleridge, and the Supplement to the Biographia Literaria. During the last few years of her life Sara Coleridge was a confirmed invalid. Shortly before she died she amused herself by writing a little autobiography for her daughter. This, which reaches only to her ninth year, was completed by her daughter, and published in 1873, together with some of her letters, under the title Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge. She died in London on May 3, 1852.