knew Mr. Joseph Cottle, brother of Amos Cottle (Byron's "O! Amos
Cottle! Phoebus! what a name"), and himself a poet of some pretensions;
and he had married Mary Fricker, one of whose sisters, Edith, was
already engaged to Southey; while another, Sara, was afterwards to
become Mrs. Coleridge.

As the marriage turned out on the whole an unhappy one, the present may
be a convenient moment for considering how far its future character was
determined by previously existing and unalterable conditions, and how
far it may be regarded as the result of subsequent events. De Quincey,
whose acute and in many respects most valuable monograph on the poet
touches its point of least trustworthiness in matters of this kind,
declares roundly, and on the alleged authority of Coleridge himself,
that the very primary and essential prerequisite of happiness was
wanting to the union. Coleridge, he says, assured him that his marriage
was "not his own deliberate act, but was in a manner forced upon his
sense of honour by the scrupulous Southey, who insisted that he had
gone too far in his attentions to Miss Fricker for any honourable
retreat." On the other hand, he adds, "a neutral spectator of the
parties protested to me that if ever in his life he had seen a man
under deep fascination, and what he would have called desperately in
love, Coleridge, in relation to Miss F., was that man." One need not, I
think, feel much hesitation in preferring this "neutral spectator's"
statement to that of the discontented husband, made several years after
the mutual estrangement of the couple, and with no great propriety
perhaps, to a new acquaintance. There is abundant evidence in his own
poems alone that at the time of, and for at least two or three years
subsequently to, his marriage Coleridge's feeling towards his wife was
one of profound and indeed of ardent attachment. It is of course quite
possible that the passion of so variable, impulsive, and irresolute a