To his “dear Cottle” he wrote, October 6th, 1795: “Pray send me a riddle, slice, a candle-box, two ventilators, two glasses for the washstand, one tin dust-pan, one small tin tea-kettle, one pair of candlesticks, one carpet-brush, one flour dredge, three tin extinguishers, two mats, a pair of slippers, a cheese toaster, two large tin spoons, a Bible, a keg of porter, coffee, raisins, currants, catsup, nutmegs, allspice, cinnamon, rice, ginger, and mace.” [Illustration: COLERIDGE’S COTTAGE, CLEVEDON.] The imagination readily pictures the essentially unpractical Samuel Taylor Coleridge, certainly not well versed in domestic economy, taking down this list of household small gear from his “pensive Sara”; prepared, with the receipt of them, to open his campaign for existence against an indifferent world. He sang the praises of that early home in no uncertain manner: Low was our pretty cot; our tallest rose Peeped at the chamber window. We could hear At silent noon, and eve, and early morn, The sea’s faint murmur. In the open air Our myrtle blossomed; and across the porch Thick jasmins twined: the little landscape round Was green and woody, and refreshed the eye. It was a spot which you might aptly call The Valley of Seclusion! You might indeed so call it now, if inclined to poetry, but you would be wholly wrong. The painful fact must be recorded that “Myrtle Cottage” stands beside the road, directly on the busiest route between the railway-station and the sea-front (such as the sea-front is), and that flys, “charleybanks,” wagonettes, motor-cars, and all conceivable traffic come this way. Indeed, this cottage and its trim fellow are now almost the only vestiges in the road left of the Clevedon that Coleridge knew. What little remained of the rocky bluff at the back is now being actively blasted and quarried away by the local authority, in its attempt—highly successful, too—at matching the place with the London district of Notting Hill. Property owners have already filled Clevedon with stuccoed semi-“Italian” villas on the Ladbroke Grove model, that became discredited a generation ago; the kind of property that has dismal semi-underground dungeons called “breakfast-rooms” (by way of a penitential beginning of the day), and long flights of stone steps to the front door, alleged to be ornamental, and certainly excessively tiring. This is a kind of property that never, or rarely, lets nowadays; and Clevedon has many empty villas.