My original intention was, to prepare a memoir as a contribution to Mr. Gillman's "Life of Mr. Coleridge." On my sending the MS. to Mr. Southey, he observed, in his reply, "I apprehend if you send what you have written about Coleridge and opium, it will not be made use of, and that Coleridge's biographer will seek to find excuse for the abuse of that drug." I afterwards sent the MS. to my friend Mr. Foster, who had ever taken a deep interest in all that concerns Mr. Coleridge. On returning it he thus wrote. "Stapleton, Dec. 19, 1835. My dear sir, I have read through your MS. volume, very much to the cost of my eyes, but it was impossible to help going on, and I am exceedingly obliged to you for favouring me with it;--the more so as there is no prospect of seeing any large proportion of it in print. It is I think about as melancholy an exhibition as I ever contemplated. Why was such a sad phenomenon to come in sight on earth? Was it to abase the pride of human intellect and genius? You have done excellently well to collect into a permanent substance what must else have gone into oblivion, for no one else could have exhibited even a shadow of it. But now, my dear sir, I hope you are prepared with the philosophy, or by whatever name I should designate the fortitude,--that can patiently bear the frustration of the main immediate purpose of your long and earnest labour.--For you may lay your account that the compiler of the proposed life of Coleridge will admit but a very minor part of what you have thus furnished at his request:--that especially he will not admit what you feel to be the most important, as an emphatic moral lesson, and what it has cost you the most painful resolution to set faithfully forth. No, my dear sir, the operator of the work will not, will not, will not, let the illustrious philosopher, genius, and poet, so appear. He will get over that stage with a few general expressions, and a few indistinctly presented facts. And then as to the dreadful tragical parts, he will promptly decide that it would be utter profanation to expose them to view in any such unveiled prominence as you have exhibited in your narrative. And then the solemn warning and example will be nearly kept out of sight. Quite naturally that this would be the course adopted, unless the compiler were, like yourself, intent, as his first and highest obligation, on doing faithful homage to truth, virtue, and religion. How I despise biography, as the business is commonly managed. I cannot believe that Coleridge's dreadful letters of confession will be admitted in their own unmodified form; though they ought to be. Most truly yours, John Foster." These combined intimations led me to stipulate that, whatever else was omitted, the opium letters should be printed verbatim. But this being promptly refused, I determined to throw my materials into a separate work.