I wrote a long letter to you concerning the sophistications of your system at present in vogue, the inevitable consequences on the whole mass of moral feelings, even of the dissenters themselves, and the courage as well as fortitude, required for the effort to do one's duty. But I asked myself why I should give you pain, and destroyed it. Yet come what will, the subject shall be treated fully, intrepidly, and by close deduction from settled first principles, in the first volume of the recommencing _Friend_, which I hope to bring out early in the spring, on a quarterly or four-monthly plan, in partnership with a publisher who is personally my friend, and who will take on himself all the _business_, and leave me exclusively occupied in the composition. Even to this day I have not received nearly one-half of the subscriptions for the former numbers, and am expiating the error by all sorts of perplexities and embarrassments. A man who has nothing better than prudence is fit for no world to come; and he who does not possess it in full activity, is as unfit for the present world. What then shall we say? Have both prudence and the moral sense, but subordinate the former to the latter; and so possess the flexibility and address of the serpent to glide through the brakes and jungles of this life, with the wings of the dove to carry us upward to a better!
May the Almighty bless and preserve you, my dear Sir! With most unfeigned love and honour, I remain--and till I lose all sense of my better being, of the veiled immortal within me, ever must remain, your obliged and grateful friend,
[26] [See _Letters_, p. 590, and Professor Knight's _Life of Wordsworth_, ch. XXV, for full account of the misunderstanding.]
Here[28] I may best introduce the remarks which have been made, and details which have been given, respecting Mr. Coleridge's services to _The Morning Post_ and _The Courier_, spoken of by him in Chapter X of the _Biographia Literaria_. That representation has been excepted against by Mr. Stuart, who was Editor of the former Paper when my Father wrote for it, and half proprietor of the other. The view which he takes of the case he has already made public;[29] he seems to be of opinion, that the language used by Mr. Coleridge in this work is calculated to give an impression of the amount of his actual performances on behalf of those papers beyond what the facts warrant; I have not thought it necessary or proper to withdraw that portion of Chapter X of which he complains, nor do I see that it must necessarily bear a construction at variance with his own statements: but neither would I republish it, without giving Mr. Stuart's account of matters to which it refers, extracted from letters written by him to Mr. Coleridge's late Editor. He writes as follows from Wykham Park, on the 7th of October, 1835.