The following correspondence introduces another great name in English
literature. It is not improbable that it was Southey who suggested to
Murray the employment of his brother-in-law, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
from his thorough knowledge of German, as the translator of Goethe's
"Faust." The following is Mr. Coleridge's first letter to Murray:

_Mr. Coleridge to John Murray_.

JOSIAH WADE'S, Esq., 2, QUEEN'S SQUARE, BRISTOL. _[August_ 23, 1814.]

Dear Sir,

I have heard, from my friend Mr. Charles Lamb, writing by desire of Mr.
Robinson, that you wish to have the justly-celebrated "Faust" of Goethe
translated, and that some one or other of my partial friends have
induced you to consider me as the man most likely to execute the work
adequately, those excepted, of course, whose higher power (established
by the solid and satisfactory ordeal of the wide and rapid sale of their
works) it might seem profanation to employ in any other manner than in
the development of their own intellectual organization. I return my
thanks to the recommender, whoever he be, and no less to you for your
flattering faith in the recommendation; and thinking, as I do, that
among many volumes of praiseworthy German poems, the "Louisa" of Voss,
and the "Faust" of Goethe, are the two, if not the only ones, that are
emphatically _original_ in their conception, and characteristic of a new
and peculiar sort of thinking and imagining, I should not be averse from
exerting my best efforts in an attempt to import whatever is importable
of either or of both into our own language.

But let me not be suspected of a presumption of which I am not