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COLE—COLERIDGE
the School of Design, which by a series of transformations became in 1853 the Department of Science and Art. Under its auspices the South Kensington Museum was founded in 1855 upon land purchased out of the surplus of the Exhibition, and Cole practically became its director, retiring in 1873. His proceedings were frequently criticized, but the Museum owes everything to his energy. Indefatigable, genial, and masterful, he drove everything before him, and by all sorts of schemes and devices built up a great institution, whose variety and inequality of composition seemed imaged in the anomalous structure in which it was temporarily housed. He also, though to the financial disappointment of many, conferred a great benefit upon the metropolis by originating the scheme for the erection of the Royal Albert Hall. He was active in founding the national training schools for cookery and music, the latter the germ of the Royal College of Music. He edited the works of his benefactor Peacock; and was in his younger days largely connected with the press, and the author of many useful topographical handbooks published under the pseudonym of “Felix Summerly.” He died on 18th April 1882. (r. g.) Cole, Vicat (1833-1893), English painter, born at Portsmouth on 17th April 1833, was the son of the landscape painter, George Cole, and in his practice followed his father’s lead with marked success. He exhibited at the British Institution at the age of nineteen, and was first represented at the Royal Academy in 1853. His election as an Associate of this institution took place in 1870, and he became an Academician ten years later. He died in London on 6th April 1893. The wide popularity of his work was due partly to the simple directness of his technical method, and partly to his habitual choice of attractive material. Most of his subjects were found in the counties of Surrey and Sussex, and along the banks of the Thames. One of his largest pictures, “ The Pool of London,” was bought by the Chantrey Fund Trustees in 1888, and is now in the National Gallery of British Art. See Egbert Chignell. The Life and Paintings of Vicat Cole, E.A. London, 1899. Colenso, John William (1814-1883), Bishop of Natal, was born at St Austell, Cornwall, on 24th January 1814. His family were in embarrassed circumstances, and he was indebted to relatives for the means of university education. Second Wrangler at Cambridge, and Fellow of St John’s College, his mathematical distinction led him to be invited to Harrow in 1837, but the step proved an unfortunate one. The school was just then at the lowest ebb under an unpopular headmaster, and Colenso not only got few pupils, but lost most of his property by a fire which destroyed his house. He went back to Cambridge, and in a short time paid off heavy debts by diligent tutoring, and the proceeds of his marvellously successful series of manuals of algebra and arithmetic, which were adopted all over England. In 1846 he became rector of Forncett St Mary, Norfolk, and in 1853 was appointed Bishop of Natal. Full of zeal, he devoted himself on his arrival to acquiring the native language, of which he compiled a grammar and dictionary, and into which he translated the New Testament and other portions of Scripture. His ardour, however, was soon diverted into another channel by the puzzling objections of natives, who convinced him that the verbal inspiration and Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch could not be maintained. Colenso brought his arithmetical attainments to bear upon the question, and published his conclusions, positive and negative, in a series of treatises on
the Pentateuch, extending from 1862 to 1879. His conclusions were naturally disputed with a fervour of conviction equal to his own. While controversy raged in England, the South African bishops, whose suspicions Colenso had already incurred by the liberality of his views respecting polygamy among native converts and a commentary upon Romans alleged to savour of heresy, met in conclave to condemn him, and pronounced his deposition (December 1863). Colenso, who had refused to appear before their tribunal otherwise than as sending a protest by proxy, appealed to the Privy Council, which pronounced that the Cape Town Metropolitan had no coercive jurisdiction and no authority to interfere with the Bishop of Natal. No decision, therefore, was given upon the merits of the case; but it is significant that although many eminent clergymen have since expressed views agreeing in essentials with Bishop Colenso’s, no prosecution has been instituted against any of them. His adversaries, though unable to obtain his condemnation, succeeded in causing him to be generally inhibited from preaching in England, and set up a rival bishop in Natal, who, however, assumed a different title. The contributions of the missionary societies were withdrawn, but an attempt to deprive him of his episcopal income was frustrated by a decision of the Courts. Colenso, encouraged by a handsome testimonial raised in England, to which many clergymen subscribed, returned to his diocese, and devoted the latter years of his life to further labours as Biblical commentator and translator, and especially to the defence of the natives against what he considered oppression and wrong. By this course he made more enemies among the colonists than he had ever made among the clergy. He died at Durban on 20th June 1883. The character of the man and of his works are summed up in ten words of Jowett: “ He has made an epoch in criticism by his straightforwardness.” (r. g.) Coleraine, a maritime town and urban sanitary district, in the county of Londonderry, Ireland, on the river Bann and the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway, 145 miles north of Dublin. It ceased to be a parliamentary borough in 1885. The harbour has been much improved from grants by the Irish Society of London and from a loan under the River Bann Navigation Act, 1879. In all 420 vessels of 46,526 tons entered in 1899, and 256 of 32,631 tons cleared. The number of persons employed in the salmon fishery district in 1899 was 731. Population (1881), 6694 ; (1891), 6845; (1901), 6929. Coleridge, John Duke Coleridge, 1st Baron (1820-1894), Lord Chief Justice of England, was the eldest son of Sir John Taylor Coleridge (see Ency. Brit., 9th edition, vol. vi. p. 135). He was born at Heath’s Court, Ottery St Mary, on the 3rd of December 1820. He was educated at Eton, an institution which, as managed in the ’thirties, sent most of its pupils into the world slenderly enough equipped for the battle of life. It was otherwise in the case of Coleridge, the system then prevailing, with its worship of Latin verses and the elegancies of classic scholarship in general, being just suited to bring out the rhetorical talents which did so much to make his fame; but he owed even more to his innate love of letters than he did to any formal teaching. He gained a scholarship at Balliol, and entered that college at a very auspicious moment, for the scholars’ table there has never been occupied by a more brilliant company. The late Principal Shairp of St Andrews published in the year 1873 a poem called “The Balliol Scholars from 1840-43,” which well described it.
