contributions to the press, whatever he committed to paper
during these years exists only, if at all, in a fragmentary form. And
his restlessness, continually on the increase, appears by the end of
1802 to have become ungovernable. In November of that year he eagerly
accepted an offer from Thomas Wedgwood to become his companion on a
tour, and he spent this and the greater part of the following month in
South Wales with some temporary advantage, it would seem, to his health
and spirits. "Coleridge," writes Mr. Wedgwood to a friend, "is all
kindness to me, and in prodigious favour here. He is quite easy,
cheerful, and takes great pains to make himself pleasant. He is
willing, indeed desirous, to accompany me to any part of the globe."
"Coll and I," he writes on another occasion, the abbreviation of name
having been suggested to him by Coleridge himself, "harmonise
amazingly," and adds that his companion "takes long rambles, and writes
a great deal." But the fact that such changes of air and scene produced
no permanent effect upon the invalid after his return to his own home
appears to show that now, at any rate, his fatal habit had obtained a
firm hold upon him. And his "writing a great deal resulted" only in the
filling of many note-books, and perhaps the sketching out of many of
those vast schemes of literary labour of which he was destined to leave
so remarkable a collection at his death. One such we find him
forwarding to Southey in the August of 1803--the plan of a Bibliotheca
Britannica, or "History of British Literature, bibliographical,
biographical, and critical," in eight volumes. The first volume was to
contain a "complete history of all Welsh, Saxon, and Erse books that
are not translations, but the native growth of Britain;" to accomplish
which, writes Coleridge, "I will with great pleasure join you in
learning Welsh and Erse." The second volume was to contain the history
of English poetry and poets, including "all prose truly poetical." The
third volume "English prose, considered as to style, as to eloquence,