Excerpts from an article published in “The Gentlemen’s Magazine” in London in 1832

“Mr. Colton was educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, and probably related, how nearly, we know not, to Rev Barfoot Colton, who was elected from Eton to the same college in 1755, and afterwards, in 1788, became a Canon Residentiary of Salisbury. Mr. Caleb Colton was elected from Eton in 1796, and was after chosen Fellow of King’s. He graduated B.A.1801, M.A.1804. In 1801 he was presented by the college to the perpetual curacy of Iverton Prior’s Quarter in Devonshire which may be held together with a Fellowship, and where he continued to reside for many years; we presume until presented by his college to the vicarage of Kew and Petersham in 1812.”
* * *
“The eccentricities, and it may be added, irregularities, by which he was afterwards distinguished, were not entirely unknown there. On one occasion he was sent to read the “Visitation of the Sick” to a dying parishioner, who had amassed great wealth in the Indies. This visit occupied him till the instant when another clergyman had concluded the afternoon prayers in the great church at Tiverton. Colton rushed from the dying man’s bedside into the pulpit, and for above an hour poured forth an extemporaneous flood of no ordinary eloquence in favor of strict morals, to the no small surprise to a numerous congregation, closing at length with ‘You wonder to hear such things from me! But if you had been where I was just now, and heard and seen what I did, you would have been convinced it is high time to reform our courses and I, for my part, am determined to begin.’ Alas, the next Sunday, he hurried over the reading of a fifteen-minute’ discourse, and immediately after, the writer saw him placing his pointers in the basket behind, and his guns beside him in his gig and driving off toward a distant manor, to be ready for the next day’s partridge-shooting.”
* * *
A writer who gave an account of him (Colton), in a defunct periodical, ‘The Literary Magazine’, was introduced to Mr. Colton by an equally eccentric personage, the well-known Walking Stewart. ‘The appearance of Mr. C. was,’ he says, ‘at once striking and peculiar. There was an indefinable something in the general character of his features, which, without being prepossessing, fixed the attention of a stranger in no ordinary degree. His keen grey eye was occasionally overshadowed by a scowl or inflexion of the brow, indicative rather of a habitual intensity of reflection than of any cynical severity of disposition. His nose was aquiline, or (to speak more correctly, if less elegantly) hooked; his cheek bones were high and protruding, and his forehead by no means remarkable either for its expansiveness, or phrenological beauty of development. There was a singular variability of expression around his mouth, and his chin was precisely what Laveter would have called an intellectual chin. Perhaps the shrewdness of his glance was indicative rather of extraordinary cunning, than of high mental intelligence.”
* * *
“His usual costume was a frock coat, sometimes richly braided and a black velvet stock: in short, his general appearance was quite military; so much so, that he was often asked if he were not in the army. I am half inclined to believe that he courted this kind of misconception; as his reply was invariably the same; ‘No, Sir, but I am an officer of the church militant.’ Before they parted, Mr. Colton gave his new acquaintance a pressing invitation to breakfast next morning, and put a card into his hand, in which the name of the street and the number of the house were explicitly mentioned. The describer went and found--a marine-store shop! And thinking that after all there must be some mistake, he walked off. On again meeting Mr. Colton, the too fastidious stranger was reproached for his breach of appointment, and invited anew. ‘The most exaggerated description of the garrets of the poets of fifty years ago,’ says the visitor, ‘would not libel Mr. Colton’s apartment. Such of the panes as were entire were begrimed with dirt. As to the only two chairs in the room, while one, apparently the property of the poet, was easy and cushioned, and differing essentially in character from the rest of the furniture, the other one, a miserable rush-bottomed one, was awfully afflicted with the rickets. On the deal table at which the host was seated, stood a broken wine-glass half filled with ink, with a steel pen, which had seen some service, laid transversely on its edge which raised him to fame. Mr. Colton insisted that he should taste his wine, and going to the piece of furniture which contained his bed, opened a large drawer near the floor, which was filled with bottles of wine ranged in saw-dust, as in a bin. His hock and white hermitage were delicious, and the poet and auditor parted faster friends than ever.”
* * *
“Toward the end of 1820 appeared “Lacon, or Many Things in Few Words”, addressed to those who think”, a thin, ill-printed seven-shilling octavo. It attracted much attention and praise. The name of Colton was thenceforth known to all, and when we find that the sixth edition of “Lacon” appeared in 1821, we need not wonder that “Lacon, Vol. II” appeared in 1822. The merits of this work are undeniable. It may be alleged, indeed, that the use of antithesis is too frequent, and that some of his ideas may be traced to “Bardon’s Materials for Thinking” (a favorite work with Mr. Colton) others are taken from a work supposed to be known to all-“Bacon’s Essays”, but still, when all deductions are made, enough will remain to place the author of Lacon far above all his contemporaries in the art of making his readers ‘think’.”
* * *
“In 1822 Mr. C. re-published his ‘Napoleon’, with extensive additions, under the title of “The Conflagration of Moscow’. The next that the public heard of him was at the time of the great sensation respecting Thurtell’s murder of Weare. The Vicar of Kew had disappeared, he was known to be a regular gamester, and to have been frequently in the company of the murderer and the murdered. It was thought that he had fallen a victim to some of those he had selected for his habitual associates, but Thurtell denied this fact. Some time elapsed before it transpired, to the public at least, that Mr. Colton‘s disappearance had been voluntary, and that he had fled from his creditors, who struck a docket against him, and gazetted him as a wine-merchant.
* * *
“In November, 1827, on the latest day allowed by law, he appeared to take possession of his living; but in 1828 he finally lost it, by lapse, and the college appointed a successor. For the next two years, he was in America, traveling through the United States; from thence he transferred his residence to the Palais Royal, ‘which is to Paris,’ says Galignani’s Guide, ‘what Paris is to Europe, the centre of pleasure and vice!’ He there expended considerable sums in forming a picture gallery, and every nook of his apartment was filled with valuable paintings. He then became known in the gaming salons of the Palais Royal and so successful was he that in a year or two he acquired the equivalent of 25,000 English pounds. But inveterate attachment to the gaming table again rendered him a beggar, and his excesses brought on a disease, to remove which a surgical operation became indispensable. The dread of this operation produced such an effect upon Mr. Colton’s mind that he became almost insane, and finally blew out his brains, in order to avoid the pain of the operation.”
* * *
“During his residence at Paris his mode of dress continued unchanged. He had only one room, kept no servant (unless a boy to take charge of his horse and cabriolet), he lighted his own fire, and performed all his other domestic offices himself. He printed at Paris, for private circulation, ‘An Ode on the Death of Lord Byron’ and continued to occupy himself in literary composition; and he has left a poem of 600 lines called ‘Modern Antiquity’ which will probably be published.”
* * *
“Colton was in many respects a most singular character; but the distinguishing feature of his mind was promptitude. Well-read to intimacy, with the ancient classics,--after dinner, his Greek and Roman lore would flow as freely as his wine, affording a delicious feast to scholars. Nor was he less an admirer of what was excellent in morals. After hearing the present occupier of the late Robert Hall’s pulpit in Cambridge, Colton introduced himself to spend the evening with the preacher;--then ‘Greek met Greek’ and brought out the stories of ancient literature and heathen and Christian ethics till after morning. “We held a sober festival--that E----ds is a worthy fellow; sound in principle as erudite in learning’. It was erroneously stated, at the moment of Mr. Colton’s death that he was in a state bordering on poverty: such was not the truth. He had been for a long time substantially assisted by his family, which is confirmed by a letter he wrote to his aged mother only a few days before the awful moment of his decease, in which he thanked her for her ample remittances.”