Chapter XV: The Friend

[During the Spring of 1808, Coleridge, while delivering his lectures, had some correspondence with Matilda Betham between March and July. Matilda Betham was a portrait painter, and Coleridge had consented to sit for her. The letters to Matilda Betham are probably dated thus: I, (March) 1808; II, 4th April 1808; III, (April 1808); IV, 7th May 1808; V, (---- 1808). _Fraser's Magazine_, 1878.

After paying a visit to the Clarkson's, at Bury St. Edmunds, Coleridge went back to Grasmere and lived with the Wordsworths, now at Allan Bank. Coleridge felt that lecturing was not a permanent form of employment, and now projected a journal to disseminate what he called the Permanent Principles of Politics, Morality, and Religion. In a letter written about this time to his old friend Josiah Wade, he repudiates the accusation that he had lived to little purpose.