January 1798.
Sir,
I hope this letter may arrive time enough to answer its purpose. I cannot help considering myself as having been placed in a very ridiculous light by the gentlemen who have remarked, answered, and rejoined concerning my "Monody on Chatterton". I have not seen the compositions of my competitors (unless indeed the exquisite poem of Warton's, entitled "The Suicide", refer to this subject), but this I know, that my own is a very poor one. It was a school exercise, somewhat altered; and it would have been omitted in the last edition of my poems but for the request of my friend Mr. Cottle, whose property those poems are. If it be not in your intention to exhibit my name on any future month, you will accept my best thanks, and not publish this letter. But if Crito and the Alphabet-men should continue to communicate on this subject, and you should think it proper for reasons best known to yourself to publish their communications, then I depend on your kindness for the insertion of my letter; by which it is possible those your correspondents may be induced to expend their remarks, whether panegyrical or vituperative, on nobler game than on a poem which was, in truth, the first effort of a young man, all whose poems a candid critic will only consider as first efforts.
Yours, with due respect,
S. T. COLERIDGE.
Shrewsbury.
Coleridge, even at this date, shows signs of a Catholicism in literary taste beyond the average man of his time; but it is an Intellectual Hospitality to all sorts and conditions of minds and men rather than a wide or deep enlightenment.
He already manifested a tendency to read the most abstruse and out-of-the-way books. He commissioned Thelwall to purchase for him Iamblichus, Proclus, Sidonius Apollinaris, Plotinus, Ficino; and he read Dupuis' huge "Origine de tous les Cultes", a fantastic work tracing the genesis of all religions to the worship of the stars ("Letters", 181-2). This love of recondite lore remained with him through life; but it was his meeting with William and Dorothy Wordsworth that helped most at this juncture to develop the possibilities within him. Wordsworth was one of those who are lofty rather than wide, but who, by their self concentration, act as a healthy corrective to the over-diffusiveness of the Shakespearian type of mind.)