From Lichfield, towards the close of the canvassing tour, he wrote to Wade a letter concluding thus characteristically:

"I verily believe no poor fellow's idea-pot ever bubbled up so vehemently with fears, doubts, and difficulties, as mine does at present. Heaven grant it may not boil over and put out the fire! I am almost heartless. My past life seems to me like a dream, a feverish dream all one gloomy huddle of strange actions, and dim-discovered motives; friendships lost by indolence, and happiness murdered by mismanaged sensibility. The present hour I seem in a quick-set hedge of embarrassments. For shame! I ought not to mistrust God; but, indeed, to hope is far more difficult than to fear. Bulls have horns, lions have talons :

"The fox and statesman subtle wiles ensure,

The cit and polecat stink and are secure ;

Toads with their venom, doctors with their drug,
The priest and hedgehog in their robes are snug.
Oh, Nature! cruel stepmother and hard
To thy poor naked, fenceless child, the bard!
No horns but those by luckless Hymen worn,
And those, alas! not Amalthæa's horn!
With aching feelings and with aching pride,
He bears the unbroken blast on every side ;
Vampire booksellers drain him to the heart,
And scorpion critics cureless venom dart.

"S. T. C."

At Lichfield he would make no effort to get subscribers, because he might thereby injure the sale of The Iris, "the editor of which," he writes, "a very amiable and ingenious young man of the name of James Montgomery, is now in prison for a libel on a bloody-minded magistrate there. Of course I declined publicly advertising or disposing of The Watchman. in that town."

On returning to Bristol Coleridge spent February in getting ready his first volume of poems. Mr. Cottle of Bristol had given him thirty guineas for the copyright. At the same time he was preparing the first number of The Watchman, to be issued on the 1st of March. And his wife was ill. On the 22d of February, 1796, he writes to his friend Cottle a plaintive, despondent, touching letter, which opens thus: "It is my duty and business to thank God for all his dispensations, and to believe them the best possible; but, indeed, I think I should have been more thankful if he had made me a journeyman shoemaker instead of an author by trade." After a few lines he continues: "I am forced to write for bread-write the flights of poetic enthusiasm, when every minute I am hearing

a groan from my wife! Groans, and complaints, and sickness! The present hour I am in a quick-set hedge of embarrassment, and, whichever way I turn, a thorn runs into me! The future is cloud and thick darkness. Poverty, perhaps, and the thin faces of them that want bread looking up to me! Nor is this all. My happiest moments for composition are broken in upon by the reflection that I must make haste. I am too late.' 'I am already months behind.' I have received my pay beforehand.' O wayward and desultory spirit of Genius, ill canst thou brook a taskmaster ! The tenderest touch from the hand of obligation wounds thee like a scourge of scorpions ! "

The letter concludes as follows: "If I have written petulantly, forgive me. God knows I am sore all over. God bless you! and believe me that, setting gratitude aside, I love and esteem you, and have your interest at heart full as much as my own."

The Watchman mounted guard over the public welfare punctually on the 1st of March. On its score Coleridge soon began to receive anonymous letters. One of these ran thus: "Sir, I detest your principles; your prose I

think so so; but your poetry is so beautiful that I take in your Watchman solely on account of it. In justice, therefore, to me and some others of my stamp, I entreat you to give us more verse, and less democratic scurrility. Your admirer, not esteemer."

Alas! The Watchman kept its high watch for hardly three months. With the tenth number it ceased to appear. Just before its decease Coleridge wrote to his friend Thomas Poole: "O Watchman, thou hast watched in vain said the prophet Ezekiel, when, I suppose, he was taking a prophetic glimpse of my sorrow-sallowed cheeks."

Poole was to Coleridge not only a sympathizing and generous, but an intellectually responsive, friend, to whom he pours out his thoughts and feelings so confidentially and freely that his letters to Poole have the frankness and fullness and the naïveté of a man thinking aloud or speaking to himself, From one written in November, 1796, the following is an important passage:

"I wanted such a letter as yours, for I am very unwell. On Wednesday night I was seized with an intolerable pain from my right temple to the tip of my right shoulder, includ

ing my right eye, cheek, jaw, and that side of the throat. I was nearly frantic, and ran about the house almost naked, endeavoring by every means to excite sensation in different parts of my body, and so to weaken the enemy by creating a division. It continued from one in the morning till half-past five, and left me pale and fainty. It came on fitfully, but not so violently, several times on Thursday, and began. severer threats towards night; but I took between sixty and seventy drops of laudanum, and sopped the Cerberus just as his mouth began to open. On Friday it only niggled, as if the Chief had departed, as from a conquered place, and merely left a small garrison behind, or as if he had evacuated the Corrica, and a few straggling pains only remained. But this morning he returned in full force, and his name is Legion. Giant-Fiend of a hundred hands, with a shower of arrowy death-pangs he transpierced me, and then he became a Wolf and lay gnawing my bones! I am not mad, most noble Festus! but in sober sadness I have suffered this day more bodily pain than I had before a conception of. My right cheek has certainly been placed with admirable exactness under the focus of some invisible burn