expressions" that the employment was neither fit for him nor he for the
employment. They insisted that at any rate "he should make no more
applications in person, but carry on the canvass by proxy," a
stipulation which we may well believe to have been prompted as much by
policy as by good nature. The same hospitable reception, the same
dissuasion, and, that failing, the same kind exertions on his behalf,
he met with at Manchester, Derby, Nottingham, and every other place he
visited; and the result of his tour was that he returned with nearly a
thousand names on the subscription list of the _Watchman_,
together with "something more than a half conviction that prudence
dictated the abandonment of the scheme." Nothing but this, however, was
needed to induce him to persevere with it. To know that a given course
of conduct was the dictate of prudence was a sort of presumptive proof
to him at this period of life that the contrary was the dictate of
duty. In due time, or rather out of due time,--for the publication of
the first number was delayed beyond the day announced for it,--the
_Watchman_ appeared. Its career was brief--briefer, indeed, than
it need have been. A naturally short life was suicidally shortened. In
the second number, records Coleridge, with delightful _naivete_,
"an essay against fast-days, with a most censurable application of a
text from Isaiah [2] for its motto, lost me near five hundred
subscribers at one blow." In the two following numbers he made enemies
of all his Jacobin and democratic patrons by playing Balaam to the
legislation of the Government, and pronouncing something almost like a
blessing on the "gagging bills"--measures he declared which, "whatever
the motive of their introduction, would produce an effect to be desired
by all true friends of freedom, as far as they should contribute to
deter men from openly declaiming on subjects the principles of which
they had never bottomed, and from pleading to the poor and ignorant
instead of pleading for them." At the same time the editor of the