The following is Mr. Coleridge's reply.
"April 26th, 1814.
You have poured oil in the raw and festering wound of an old friend's
conscience, Cottle! but it is _oil of vitriol!_ I but barely glanced at
the middle of the first page of your letter, and have seen no more of
it--not from resentment, God forbid! but from the state of my bodily and
mental sufferings, that scarcely permitted human fortitude to let in a
new visitor of affliction.
The object of my present reply, is, to state the case just as it
is--first, that for ten years the anguish of my spirit has been
indescribable, the sense of my danger staring, but the consciousness of
my GUILT worse--far worse than all! I have prayed, with drops of agony on
my brow; trembling, not only before the justice of my Maker, but even
before the mercy of my Redeemer. 'I gave thee so many talents, what hast
thou done with them?' Secondly overwhelmed as I am with a sense of my
direful infirmity, I have never attempted to disguise or conceal the
cause. On the contrary, not only to friends, have I stated the whole case
with tears, and the very bitterness of shame; but in two instances, I
have warned young men, mere acquaintances, who had spoken of having taken
laudanum, of the direful consequences, by an awful exposition of its
tremendous effects on myself.
Thirdly, though before God I cannot lift up my eyelids, and only do not
despair of his mercy, because to despair would be adding crime to crime,
yet to my fellow-men, I may say, that I was seduced into the ACCURSED
habit ignorantly. I had been almost bed-ridden for many months, with
swellings in my knees. In a medical Journal, I unhappily met with an
account of a cure performed in a similar case, or what appeared to me so,
by rubbing in of Laudanum, at the same time taking a given dose
internally. It acted like a charm, like a miracle! I recovered the use of
my limbs, of my appetite, of my spirits, and this continued for near a
fortnight. At length the unusual stimulus subsided, the complaint
returned,--the supposed remedy was recurred to--but I cannot go through
the dreary history.
Suffice it to say, that effects were produced which acted on me by terror
and cowardice, of pain and sudden death, not (so help me God!) by any
temptation of pleasure, or expectation, or desire of exciting pleasurable
sensations. On the very contrary, Mrs. Morgan and her sister will bear
witness so far, as to say, that the longer I abstained, the higher my
spirits were, the keener my enjoyments--till the moment, the direful
moment arrived, when my pulse began to fluctuate, my heart to palpitate,
and such falling abroad, as it were, of my whole frame, such intolerable
restlessness, and incipient bewilderment, that in the last of my several
attempts to abandon the dire poison, I exclaimed in agony, which I now
repeat in seriousness and solemnity, 'I am too poor to hazard this.' Had
I but a few hundred pounds, but £200,--half to send to Mrs. Coleridge,
and half to place myself in a private mad house, where I could procure
nothing but what a physician thought proper, and where a medical
attendant could be constantly with me for two or three months, (in less
than that time, life or death would be determined) then there might be
hope. Now there is none!! O God! how willingly would I place myself under
Dr. Fox, in his establishment; for my case is a species of madness, only
that it is a derangement, an utter impotence of the volition, and not of
the intellectual faculties. You bid me rouse myself: go bid a man
paralytic in both arms, to rub them briskly together, and that will cure
him. 'Alas!' he would reply, 'that I cannot move my arms, is my complaint
and my misery.' May God bless you, and
Your affectionate, but most afflicted,