November 3 1812: Coleridge's Dull Lecture

On November 3 1812,  Samuel Taylor Coleridge gives his first lecture on Belles Lettres at the Surrey Institution. Henry Crabb Robinson is in attendance and is not impressed. He writes in his diary:

At Coleridge's first lecture on Belles Lettres at Surrey Institution. It was a repetition of former lectures & dull. He enlarged on the vagueness of terms & their abuse, & in defining taste, gave the Kantian theory as to the nature of judgments of taste. He introduced, I had almost said cantingly, some pious parenthesis about religion a la Wood, & did not on the whole gratify me exceedingly.