than the poet may claim, for he could always command a living wage in
journalism. The trouble with him was not to get money for his work, but
to give work in return for other people's money.
From Cambridge the poet drifted to London, journalism, and the
delightful company of Charles Lamb. He wrote sonnets for the _Morning
Chronicle_, and took his glass and pipe with Elia in long-forgotten
taverns until Southey hunted him up and carried him back to Bristol and
Sarah Fricker, to Pantisocracy and lecturing and the company of Burnett,
with whom both Coleridge and Southey lived in College Street. In 1796
Cottle, the Bristol publisher, paid Coleridge thirty guineas for poems,
including the "Monody on the Death of Chatterton" and "Religious
Musings." Southey lost faith in Pantisocracy and went to live with his
mother. Coleridge lost faith in Southey, the friends quarrelled, and for
some time were not on speaking or writing terms. Cottle, who had a sure
eye for promising work, offered to buy all the verse Coleridge could
write at the price of one and a half guineas per hundred lines, and on
the strength of this, Coleridge married Sarah Fricker in October 1795,
and settled in a little cottage at Clevedon near Bristol, in company
with Burnett and another of Sarah's sisters. The men shared in the
labour of the house, but it was too far from town to serve for purposes
of work in days when the circulating library was still unknown, and,
early in their married life, Mr. and Mrs. Coleridge moved to Redcliffe
Hill. There Coleridge decided to start a paper called _The Watchman_, to
be published on every eighth day, and he has left on record an account
of his northern pilgrimage in search of subscribers. He found enough to
justify publication; the paper lived to reach its tenth number, when it
departed from life, leaving its editor-proprietor stranded, though his
_Poems on Various Subjects_, with additions by Charles Lamb, Robert
Southey, and Mr. Favell, had been published in March by Cottle, and had
been favourably received. Thomas Poole, as good a friend as ever poet
had, came to the rescue with forty pounds, and Coleridge spent a happy
fortnight at Nether Stowey; with him, as soon as a trouble was over it
could be forgotten. But something had to be done; negotiations for the
post of co-editor of the _Morning Chronicle_ were opened, and fell
through. Following this came another plan, to educate the children of a
wealthy Derbyshire lady, who changed her mind at the eleventh hour,
giving the poet £95, and his wife a welcome gift of baby linen instead.
In the meantime the prodigal son had visited Ottery St. Mary and been
reconciled to his family. Proposals to establish a school in Derby came
to nothing, and there is matter for regret here, for the poet would have
made an admirable schoolmaster. In September his responsibilities were
increased by the arrival of David Hartley Coleridge, born while the poet
was on a visit to the Lloyds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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