As soon as I can, I shall leave Calne for Bristol, and if I can procure any day pupils, shall immediately take cheap lodgings near you. My plan is to have twenty pupils, ten youths or adults, and ten boys. To give the latter three hours daily, from eleven o'clock to two, with exception of the usual school vacations, in the Elements of English, Greek, and Latin, presenting them exercises for their employment during the rest of the day, and two hours every evening to the adults (that is from sixteen and older) on a systematic plan of general knowledge; and I should hope that £15 a year would not be too much to ask from each, which excluding Sundays and two vacations, would be little more than a shilling a day, or six shillings a week, for forty-two weeks.
To this I am certain I could attend with strictest regularity, or indeed to any thing mechanical.
But composition is no voluntary business. The very necessity of doing it robs me of the power of doing it. Had I been possessed of a tolerable competency, I should have been a voluminous writer. But I cannot, as is feigned of the Nightingale, sing with my breast against a thorn. God bless you,
To the first of these letters Cottle replied with a five-pound note; but he now believed that all Coleridge's earnings went to fill what he calls the "Circean chalice" (_Rem._, 391). He believed that Coleridge was spending £2 10_s._ a week on opium. It is as likely that Coleridge was now keeping the home of the Morgans going; although they oftener kept him than he kept them. We know that he gave them the money received for the _Christabel_ volume.
From the first letter to Cottle it will be seen that Coleridge had been collecting his poems with a view to publication, afterwards given to the world as _Sibylline Leaves_. On 3rd April 1815, he writes to Lady Beaumont requesting a copy of the Poem to Wordsworth composed on hearing the Prelude (_Coleorton Mem._, ii, 175). Wordsworth had just published the _Excursion_, and on 30th May Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth criticising that poem (Knight's _Life of Wordsworth_, ii, 255) in a long letter, which, with other notes (_Anima Poetae_) of 1802, contained the germs of the Critique of the _Biographia Literaria_. The _Biographia_ was at first merely intended as an Introduction to the _Sibylline Leaves_; but in the writing it swelled so much that it had to be published as a separate work (see Dykes Campbell's _Life_, pp. 212-14).