his return by cutting off his supplies. And many who, like Coleridge,
merely watched from afar shared his faith that a new order of things was
to be established, wherein Love should be Law and man's inhumanity to
man become but a memory of things outworn.

Less generous men, with a selfish interest in established privileges;
timid men, who looked with terror upon any prospect of change; older and
wiser men, who better understood the foundations of social order and the
nature of man--all these looked with distrust upon the revolutionary
idealism that was spreading from France through the younger generation
of Englishmen. The new notions of liberty, it was felt, threatened not
only the vested rights of property and the prescriptions of rank, but
the Church, too, and religion. Some of the would-be reformers were
avowed atheists; some (Coleridge and his friends, for instance, in the
Pantisocracy period) were communists. In general, they ascribed all the
evils of society to "institutions," and wanted them abolished.

Just how far Coleridge had gone in this direction by the autumn of 1793
we do not know; far enough at least to disturb his view of the future,
to worry his elder brother George, a clergyman and school-teacher, who
had in some measure filled a father's place to the young genius, and,
most important of all, to alarm and distress a gentle girl in London.
For before he left Christ's Hospital for Cambridge he had become
intimate at the house of a Mrs. Evans, and most of the letters preserved
from his first two years at the University were addressed to her or to
one of her two daughters, Anne and Mary. With the latter Coleridge was
in love; and that she had some regard for him is apparent from a letter
she sent him in 1794. Before that, however, Coleridge had taken a step
that seemed likely to close at once his college career and his prospects
of literary fame. The reasons have not been recorded: probably pecuniary