insufficient. What was to be done? A bold measure was determined upon.
Mr. Coleridge, conceiving that his means of subsistence depended upon the
success of this undertaking, armed himself with unwonted resolution, and
expressed his determination to travel over half England and take the
posse comitatus by storm.

In conformity with such resolution, he obtained letters of introduction
to influential men in the respective towns he meant to visit, and, like a
shrewd calculator, determined to add the parson's avocation to that of
the political pamphleteer. The beginning of Jan. 1796, Mr. Coleridge,
laden with recommendatory epistles, and rich in hope, set out on his
eventful journey, and visited in succession, Worcester, Birmingham,
Nottingham, Lichfield, Derby, Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, &c. and
as a crowning achievement, at the last, paid his respects to the great
metropolis; in all which places, by bills, prospectuses, advertisements,
and other expedients, the reading public were duly apprised of the "NEW
REVIEW, NEWSPAPER, and ANNUAL REGISTER," about to be published.

The good people, in all the towns through which Mr. Coleridge passed,
were electrified by his extraordinary eloquence. At this time, and during
the whole of his residence in Bristol, there was, in the strict sense,
little of the true, interchangeable conversation in Mr. C. On almost
every subject on which he essayed to speak, he made an impassioned
harangue of a quarter, or half an hour; so that inveterate talkers, while
Mr. Coleridge was on the wing, generally suspended their own flight, and
felt it almost a profanation to interrupt so impressive and mellifluous a
speaker. This singular, if not happy peculiarity, occasioned even Madame
de Stael to remark of Mr. C. that "He was rich in a Monologue, but poor
in a Dialogue."