Coleridge, (David) Hartley (1796-1849)

English poet, eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His verse lacks power but is expressive and fine in places. He wrote biographies of and edited the works of the Jacobean dramatists Philip Massinger and John Ford in 1840. He was a delicate and suggestive critic; his essays are quaintly humorous, resembling those of Charles Lamb.

He was born in Clevedon, Somerset, and after the separation of his parents was brought up by the poet Robert Southey's family in the Lake District. He lived for some time in London and later in Leeds, producing a biographical work, Lives of Illustrious Worthies of Yorkshire (1835), with F E Bingley, a publisher in whose house he stayed. By 1838 he had moved to Grasmere, Cumbria, where the poet Wordsworth was living.