"MY DEAR POOLE,

་་ 30th March, 1796

"FOR the neglect in the transmission of The Watchman, you must blame George Burnet, who undertook the business. I however will myself see it sent this week with the preceding Numbers. I am greatly obliged to you for your communication-(on the Slave Trade in No. V.). -it appears in this Number. I am anxious to receive more from you, and likewise to know what you dislike in The Watchman, and what you like, but particularly the former. You have not given me your opinion of The Plot Discovered.

"Since you last saw me I have been well nigh distracted. The repeated and most injurions blunders of my printer out of doors, and Mrs. Coleridge's danger at home-added to the gloomy prospect of so many mouths to open and shut, like puppets, as I move the string in the eating and drinking way;-but why complain to you? Misery is an article with which every market is so glutted that it can answer no one's purpose to export it.

"I have received many abusive letters, post-paid, thanks to the friendly malignants! But I am perfectly callous to disapprobation, except when it tends to lessen profit. Then indeed I am all one tremble of sensibility, marriage having taught me the wonderful uses of that vulgar commodity, yclept Bread. The Watchman succeeds so as to yield a bread-and-cheesish profit. Mrs. Coleridge is recovering apace, and deeply regrets that she was deprived of the pleasure of seeing you. We are in our new house, where there is a bed at your service whenever you will please to delight us with a visit. Surely in Spring you might force a few days into a sojourning with us.

"Dear Poole, you have borne yourself towards me most kindly with respect to my epistolary ingratitude. But I know that you forbade yourself to feel resentment towards me, because you had previously made my neglect ingratitude. A generous temper endures a great deal from one whom it has obliged deeply.

My poems are finished. I will send you two copies the moment they are published In No. III. of The Watchman there are a few lines entitled, 'The Hour when we shall meet again' ('Dim Hour! that sleep'st on pillowing clouds afar,") which I think you will like. I have received two or three letters from different Anonymi, requesting me to give more poetry. One of them writes thus:

"Sir, I detest your principles; your prose I think very so so; but your poetry is so beautiful that I take in your Watchman solely on ac

2 Remains, i., p. 43.

Poems, single vol., p. 49. S. C.

count of it. In justice therefore to me and some others of my stamp, 1 entreat you to give us more verse, and less democratic scurrility. Your Admirer, not Esteemer.'

"Have you read over Dr. Lardner on the Logos? It is, I think, scarcely possible to read it, and not be convinced. I find that The Watchman comes more easy to me, so that I shall begin about my Christian Lectures" (meaning a publication of the course given in the preceding year). "I will immediately order for you, unless you immediately countermand it, Count Rumford's Essays; in No. V. of The Watchman you will see why." (That number contained a critique on the Essays.) "I have enclosed Dr. Beddoes's late pamphlets, neither of them as yet published. The Doctor sent them to me. * * * My dutiful love to your excellent Mother, whom, believe me, I think of frequently and with a pang of affection. God bless you. I'll try and contrive to scribble a line and half every time the man goes with The' Watchman to you.

"N.B. The Essay on Fasting I am ashamed of "-(in No. II. of The Watchman);" but it is one of my misfortunes that I am obliged to publish ex tempore as well as compose. God bless you.

"S. T. COLERIDGE."

Two days afterwards, Mr. Coleridge wrote to Mr. B. Flower, then the editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer, with whom he had been acquainted at the University :

"DEAR SIR,

April 1, 1796.

"I TRANSMITTED to you by Mr. B- a copy of my Conciones ad Populum, and of an Address against the Bills" (meaning The Plot Discovered). "I have taken the liberty of enclosing ten of each, carriage paid, which you may, perhaps, have an opportunity of disposing of for me; if not, give them away. The one is an eighteen-penny affair-the other, ninepence. I have likewise enclosed the Numbers which have been hitherto published of The Watchman ;-some of the Poetry may, perhaps, be serviceable to you in your paper. That sonnet on the rejection of Mr. Wilberforce's Bill in your Chronicle the week before last was written by Southey, author of Joan of Arc, a year and a half ago, and sent to me per letter ;-how it appeared with the late signature, let the plagiarist answer. * I have sent a copy of my Poems"(they were not yet published):-" will you send them to Lunn and Deighton, and ask of them whether they would choose to have their names on the title-page as publishers; and would you permit me to have

*

yours? Robinson and, I believe, Cadell, will be the London publishers. Be so kind as to send an immediate answer.

"Please to present one of each of my pamphlets to Mr. Hall"—(the late Robert Hall, the Baptist). "I wish I could reach the perfection of his style. I think his style the best in the English language; if he have a rival, it is Mrs. Barbauld.

You have, of course, seen Bishop Watson's Apology for the Bible It is a complete confutation of Paine; but that was no difficult matter. The most formidable Infidel is Lessing, the author of Emilia Galotti ;— I ought to have written was, for he is dead. His book is not yet translated, and is entitled, in German, Fragments of an Anonymous Author.' It unites the wit of Voltaire with the subtlety of Hume and the profound erudition of our Lardner. I had some thoughts of translating it, with an Answer, but gave it up, lest men, whose tempers and hearts incline them to disbelief, should get hold of it; and, though the answers are satisfactory to my own mind, they may not be equally so to the minds of others.

"I suppose you have heard that I am married. I was married on the 4th of October.

"I rest all my poetical credit on the Religious Musings. Farewell; with high esteem, yours sincerely,

"I HAVE sent the 5th, 6th, and part of the 7th Number-all as yet printed. Your censures are all right: I wish your praises were equally

The Essay on Fasts I am ashamed of. It was conceived in the spirit, and clothed in the harsh scoffing, of an Infidel. You wish to have one long essay-so should I wish; but so do not my subscribers wish. I feel the perplexities of my undertaking increase daily. In London and Bristol The Watchman is read for its original matter,-the news and debates barely tolerated. The people of Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, &c., take it as a newspaper, and regard the essays and poems as intruders unwished for and unwelcome. In short, each subscriber, instead of regarding himself as a point in the circumference entitled to some one diverging ray, considers me as the circumference, and himself as the centre, to which all the rays ought to converge. To tell you the truth, I do not think The Watchman will succeed. Hitherto I have scarcely sold enough to pay the expenses ;-no wonder, when

tell you that on the two hundred which Parsons in Paternoster Row sells weekly he gains eight shillings more than I do Nay, I am convinced that, at the end of the half year, he will have cleared considerably more by his two hundred than I by the proprietorship of the whole work.

"Colson has been indefatigable in my service, and writes with such zeal for my interests, and such warmth of sorrow for my sufferings, as if he wrote with fire and tears. God bless him! I wish above all things to realize a school. I could be well content to plod from morning to night, if only I could secure a secure competence; but to toil incessantly for uncertain bread weighs me down to earth.

"Your Night-Dream has been greatly admired. Dr. Beddoes spoke in high commendation of it. Your thoughts on Elections I will insert whenever Parliament is dissolved. I will insert them as the opinions of a sensible correspondent, entering my individual protest against giving a vote in any way or for any person. If you had an estate in the swamps of Essex, you could not prudently send an aguish man there to be your manager, he would be unfit for it; you could not honestly send a hale, hearty man there, for the situation would, to a moral certainty, give him the ague. So with the Parliament: I would not send a rogue there; and I would not send an honest man, for it is twenty to one that he will become a rogue.

66

Count Rumford's Essays you shall have by the next parcel. I thank you for your kind permission with respect to books. I have sent down to you Elegiac Stanzas by Bowles; they were given to me, but are altogether unworthy of Bowles. I have sent you Beddoes's Essay on the merits of William Pitt; you may either keep it, and I will get another for myself on your account, or, if you see nothing in it to libraryize it, send it me back next Thursday, or whenever you have read it. My own Poems you will welcome. I pin all my poetical credit on the Religious Musings. In the poem you so much admired in The Watchman, for 'Now life and joy,' read New life and joy.'" (From The Hour when we shall meet again.) "Chatterton shall appear modernized. Dr. Beddoes intends, I believe, to give a course of Chemistry in a most elementary manner, the price, two guineas. I wish, ardently wish, you could possibly attend them, and live with we. My house is most beautifully situated; an excellent room and bed are at your service. If you had any scruple about putting me to additional expense, you should pay seven shillings a week, and I should gain by you.

"Mrs. Coleridge is remarkably well, and sends her kind love. Pray, my dear, dear Poole, do not neglect to write to me every week. Your critique on Joan of Arc and the Religious Musings I expect. Your dear mother I long to see. Tell her I love her with filial respectfulness

Excellent woman! Farewell; God bless you and your grateful and affectionate "S. T. COLERIDGE."

Mr. C.'s first volume of poems was published by Mr. Cottle in the beginning of April, 1796, and his sense of the kind conduct of the latter to him throughout the whole affair, was expressed in the following manner, on a blank leaf in a copy of the work:

"DEAR COTTLle,

"On the blank leaf of my Poems I can most appropriately write my acknowledgments to you for your too disinterested conduct in the purchase of them. Indeed, if ever they should acquire a name and character, it might be truly said the world owed them to you. Had it not been for you, none, perhaps, of them would have been published, and some not written.

"Your obliged and affectionate friend,

"Bristol, April 15, 1798.

To Mr. Cottle.

"S. T. COLERIDGE."

April, 196

"MY EVER DEAR COTTLE,

"I WILL wait on you this evening at nine o'clock, till which hour I am on 'Watch.' Your Wednesday's invitation I, of course, accept, but I am rather sorry that you should add this expense to former liberalities.

"Two editions of my Poems would barely repay you. Is it not possible to get 25 or 30 of the Poems ready by to-morrow, as Parsons, of Paternoster Row, has written to me pressingly about them? People are perpetually asking after them. All admire the poetry in the Watchman,' he says. I can send them with 100 of the first number, which he has written for. I think if you were to send half a dozen Joans of Arc (4to., £1 1s. Od.), on sale or return, it would not be amiss. To all the places in the North we will send my Poems, my Conciones, and the Joans of Arc together, per wagon. You shall pay the carriage for the London and Birmingham parcels; I for the Sheffield, Derby, Nottingham, Manchester, and Liverpool.

"With regard to the Poems I mean to give away, I wish to make it a common interest; that is, I will give away a sheet full of Sonnets. One to Mrs. Barbauld; one to Wakefield; one to Dr. Beddoes; one to Wrangham-a college acquaintance of mine,-an admirer of me, and a pitier of my principles; one to George Augustus Pollen, Esq.; one to C. Lamb; one to Wordsworth; one to my brother George, and one to