was advised and actually persuaded to set up a printer, to buy and lay in a stock of paper, types, etc., instead of resorting to some printer already established at a nearer place--as, for instance, Kendal, which was ten miles nearer, and connected with Coleridge's then place of residence by a daily post, whereas at Penrith there was no post at all. Having thus studiously and severely handicapped himself, the projector of the new periodical set to work, upon the strength of what seems to have been in great measure a fancy list of subscribers, to print and, so far as his extraordinary arrangements permitted, to circulate his journal. With _naïve_ sententiousness he warns the readers of the _Biographia Literaria_ against trusting, in their own case, to such a guarantee as he supposed himself to possess. "You cannot," he observes, "be certain that the names on a subscription list have been put down by sufficient authority; or, should that be ascertained, it still remains to be known whether they were not extorted by some over-zealous friend's importunity; whether the subscriber had not yielded his name merely from want of courage to say no! and with the intention of dropping the work as soon as possible." Thus out of a hundred patrons who had been obtained for the _Friend_ by an energetic canvasser, "ninety threw up the publication before the fourth number without any notice, though it was well known to them that in consequence of the distance and the slowness and irregularity of the conveyance" [it is amusing to observe the way in which Coleridge notes these drawbacks of his own creation as though they were "the act of God"] "I was compelled to lay in a stock of stamped paper for at least eight weeks beforehand, each sheet of which stood me in fivepence previous to its arrival at my printer's; though the subscription money was not to be received till the twenty-first week after the commencement of the work; and, lastly, though it was in nine cases out of ten impracticable for me to receive the money for two or three numbers without paying an equal sum for the postage."