“P.S.  You need not be in any apprehension or grief on my account:  were I to be beaten down by the world and its inheritors, I should have succumbed to many things, years ago.  You must not mistake my not bullying for dejection; nor imagine that because I feel, I am to faint:—­but enough for the present.

“I am sorry for Sotheby’s row.  What the devil is it about?  I thought it all settled; and if I can do any thing about him or Ivan still, I am ready and willing.  I do not think it proper for me just now to be much behind the scenes, but I will see the committee and move upon it, if Sotheby likes.

     “If you see Mr. Sotheby, will you tell him that I wrote to Mr.
     Coleridge, on getting Mr. Sotheby’s note, and have, I hope, done
     what Mr. S. wished on that subject?”

* * * * *

It was about the middle of April that his two celebrated copies of verses, “Fare thee well,” and “A Sketch,” made their appearance in the newspapers:—­and while the latter poem was generally and, it must be owned, justly condemned, as a sort of literary assault on an obscure female, whose situation ought to have placed her as much beneath his satire as the undignified mode of his attack certainly raised her above it, with regard to the other poem, opinions were a good deal more divided.  To many it appeared a strain of true conjugal tenderness, a kind of appeal, which no woman with a heart could resist:  while by others, on the contrary, it was considered to be a mere showy effusion of sentiment, as difficult for real feeling to have produced as it was easy for fancy and art, and altogether unworthy of the deep interests involved in the subject.  To this latter opinion, I confess my own to have, at first, strongly inclined; and suspicious as I could not help regarding the sentiment that could, at such a moment, indulge in such verses, the taste that prompted or sanctioned their publication appeared to me even still more questionable.  On reading, however, his own account of all the circumstances in the Memoranda, I found that on both points I had, in common with a large portion of the public, done him injustice.  He there described, and in a manner whose sincerity there was no doubting, the swell of tender recollections under the influence of which, as he sat one night musing in his study, these stanzas were produced,—­the tears, as he said, falling fast over the paper as he wrote them.  Neither, from that account, did it appear to have been from any wish or intention of his own, but through the injudicious zeal of a friend whom he had suffered to take a copy, that the verses met the public eye.