destined to be one of the longest and closest friendships of his life.
Which of the two parties--the advisers or the advised--was responsible
for the general plan of this periodical and for the arrangements for
its publication is unknown; but one of these last-mentioned details is
enough to indicate that there could have been no "business head" among
them. Considering that the motto of the _Watchman_ declared the
object of its issue to be that "all might know the truth, and that the
truth might make them free," it is to be presumed that the promoters of
the scheme were not unwilling to secure as many subscribers as possible
for their sheet of "thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely printed,
price only fourpence." In order, however, to exempt it from the stamp-
tax, and with the much less practical object of making it "contribute
as little as possible to the supposed guilt of a war against freedom,"
it was to be published on every eighth day, so that the week-day of its
appearance would of course vary with each successive week--an
arrangement as ingeniously calculated to irritate and alienate its
public as any perhaps that the wit of man could have devised. So,
however, it was to be, and accordingly with "a naming prospectus,
'Knowledge is Power,' to cry the state of the political atmosphere,"
Coleridge set off on a tour to the north, from Bristol to Sheffield,
for the purpose of procuring customers, preaching Unitarian sermons by
the way in most of the great towns, "as an hireless volunteer in a blue
coat and white waistcoat that not a rag of the woman of Babylon might
be seen on me." How he sped upon his mission is related by him with
infinite humour in the _Biographia Literaria_. He opened the
campaign at Birmingham upon a Calvinist tallow-chandler, who, after
listening to half an hour's harangue, extending from "the captivity of
the nations" to "the near approach of the millennium," and winding up
with a quotation describing the latter "glorious state" out of the
_Religious Musings_, inquired what might be the cost of the new