"It is not of comparative utility I speak; for as to what has been actually done, and in relation to useful effects produced--whether on the minds of individuals or of the public--I dare boldly stand forward, and (let every man have his own, and that be counted mine which but for and through me would not have existed) will challenge the proudest of my literary contemporaries to compare proofs with me of usefulness in the excitement of reflection, and the diffusion of original or forgotten yet necessary and important truths and knowledge; and this is not the less true because I have suffered others to reap all the advantages. But, O dear friend, this consciousness, raised by insult of enemies and alienated friends, stands me in little stead to my own soul--in how little, then, before the all-righteous Judge! who, requiring back the talents he had entrusted, will, if the mercies of Christ do not intervene, not demand of me what I have done, but why I did not do more; why, with powers above so many, I had sunk in many things below most!" In 1814 he returned to Bristol, and here the painful narrative of Mr. Cottle comes in: "Is it expedient, is it lawful, to give publicity to Mr. Coleridge's practice of inordinately taking opium; which to a certain extent, at one part of his life, inflicted on a heart naturally cheerful the stings of conscience, and sometimes almost the horrors of despair? "In the year 1814, all this, I am afflicted to say, applied to Mr. Coleridge. Once Mr. Coleridge expressed to me, with indescribable emotion, the joy he should feel if he could collect around him all who were 'beginning to tamper with the lulling but fatal draught,' so that he might proclaim as with a trumpet, 'the worse than death that opium entailed.' "When it is considered, also, how many men of high mental endowments have shrouded their lustre by a passion for this stimulus, would it not be a criminal concession to unauthorized feelings to allow so impressive an exhibition of this subtle species of intemperance to escape from public notice? In the exhibition here made, the inexperienced in future may learn a memorable lesson, and be taught to shrink from opium as they would from a scorpion, which, before it destroys, invariably expels peace from the mind, and excites the worst species of conflict--that of setting a man at war with himself.