my College life. As I went to Cambridge innocent, so I dare affirm,
from the first week of my acquaintance with Robert Southey to this
hour, Southey himself cannot stand more clear of all intention at
violations of the moral law: but, in fact, even during my career at
Jesus, the heaviest of my offences consisted in the folly of assuming
the show of vices, from which I was all but free, and which in the
comparatively few exceptions left loathing and self-disgust on my
mind. Were I, indeed, to fix on that week of my existence, in which my
moral being would have presented to a pitying guardian angel the most
interesting spectacle, it would be that very week [13] in London, in
which I was believed by my family to have abandoned myself to
debauchery of all kinds, and 'thus' to have involved myself in
disreputable pecuniary embarrassments. God knows, so intense was my
mental anguish, that during the whole time I was physically incapable
even of a 'desire'. My whole body seemed stunned and insensate, from
excess of inward suffering--my debts were the 'cause', not the effect;
but that I know there can be no substitute for a father, I should
say,--surely, surely, the innocence of my whole 'pre' and 'post'
academic life, my early distinction, and even the fact, that my
Cambridge extravagations did not lose me, nor cool for me, the esteem
and regard of a single fellow collegiate, might have obtained an
amnesty from worse transgressions."

Coleridge, who had desponded at the fate of Middleton, after the
unsuccessful attempts he made to obtain a fellowship, lost all hope of
procuring an income from the college, and as, through the
instrumentality of Frend, with whom an intimacy had now taken place, he
had been converted to what in these days is called Unitarianism, he was
too conscientious to take orders and enter the Established Church. These
circumstances opened to him new views, and effected a complete change in