d
finally reached Vauxhall.

"At Vauxhall I took a boat for Somerset House: two mere
children were my Charons; however, though against tide, we
sailed safely to the landing-place, when, as I was getting
out, one of the little ones (God Bless him!) moved the boat.
On turning halfway round to reprove him, he moved it again,
and I fell back on the landing-place. By my exertions I should
have saved myself but for a large stone which
I struck against just under my crown and unfortunately in the
very same place which had been contused at Melton (_sic_) when
I fell backward after learning suddenly and most abruptly of
Captain Wordsworth's fate in the _Abergavenny_, a most dear
friend of mine. Since that time any great agitation has
occasioned a feeling of, as it were, a _shuttle_ moving from
that part of the back of my head horizontally to my forehead,
with some pain but more confusion."

The unction of that blessing called down upon his persecutor is
truly Coleridgian. "Melton" is the Editor's rendering of Malta, where
Coleridge was when he heard of John Wordsworth's drowning in 1805. He
had then kept his bed for a fortnight, or so he told Mrs. Coleridge.

Apparently no meeting took place, as yet another letter, dated 7th
May, relates how instead of going to New Cavendish Street, where Miss
Betham lived, he went to Old Cavendish Street, where she did not. "I
knocked at every door in Old Cavendish Street, not unrecompensed for
the present pain by the remembrances of the different characters
of voice and countenance with which my question was answered in
all gradations, from gentle and hospitable kindness to downright
brutality." Further promises and assurances are given, and in July, as
we learn from a letter of Southey's, the good Matilda was still high
in hopes that her sitter would eventually sit. Her hopes could not
have come from Southey, who had none. "You would have found him the
most wonderful man living in conversation, but the most impracticable
one for a painter, and had you begun the picture it is ten thousand
to one that you must have finished it from memory." He was right. When
his lectures were over, in June, Coleridge went to Bury St. Edmunds,
and by the 9th September he was in Cumberland. "Coleridge has arrived
at last, about half as big as the house," Southey writes to his
brother on that day. There he cogitated and there began _The Friend_,
and