"Good Lord! do they? What odd men they must be!" said the young woman.
Such is the intelligence of the common people of the west, and in many other parts of England. Is it any wonder that the parents of these people took Coleridge for a spy, and Wordsworth for a dark traitor? But these young women were very civil, if not very enlightened. As I returned through the house, the young landlady, evidently desirous to enter into further discourse, came smiling up, and said, "It's very pleasant to see relations addicting to the old place." Not knowing exactly what she meant, but supposing that she imagined I had come to see the house because the poet was a relation of mine, I said, "Very; but I was no relation of the poet's."
"No! and yet you come to see the house; and perhaps you have come a good way?"
"Yes, from London."
"From London! what, on purpose?"
"Yes, entirely on purpose."
Here the amazement of herself, her sister, and the men drinking, grew astoundingly. "Ah!" I added, "he was a great man—a very great man—he was a particular friend of Mr. Poole's."
"Oh, indeed!" said they. "Ay, he must have been a gentleman, then, for Mr. Poole was a very great man, and a justice."
Having elevated the character of Coleridge from that of a poet into the friend of a justice of the peace, I considered that I had vindicated his memory, and took my leave.
In September, 1798, Coleridge quitted Stowey and England, in company with Wordsworth, for a tour in Germany. His two wealthy friends, Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood, the great Staffordshire potters, had settled on him £150 a-year, for life, which, with other slight means, enabled him to undertake this journey, with Wordsworth and his sister. The Wedgwoods were Unitarians, and now looked on Coleridge as the great champion of the cause, for he preached at Taunton and other places in the chapels of that denomination; and in his journey on account of the Watchman, had done so in most of the large manufacturing towns, entering the pulpit in a blue coat and white waistcoat, that not a rag of the woman of Babylon might be seen on him. These are his own words, in his Biographia Literaria. Thomas Wedgwood either died long before Coleridge, and so the annuity died with him, or he might have withdrawn his moiety when Coleridge ceased to fulfill his religious hopes: it did, however, cease; but the £75 from Josiah Wedgwood was paid punctually to the day of his death.