Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, London, to William Godwin, 1811 March 26 : autograph manuscript signed.

Mentioning that Henry Grattan called on him on Sunday afternoon and left his card, but Coleridge was out at the time and he is too unwell to return the call today, "tho' it is a grief even for a brace of days to appear insensible of so much kindness & condescension;" quoting several lines in Italian from Gabriello Chiabrera in reference to Grattan; saying that he had heard from Charles Lamb that Godwin had written to Wordsworth, asking him to put a tale into verse, and that Wordsworth had declined the project; adding that he had told Mary Lamb about his idea for "a complete plan of a Poem with little plates for children" inspired in part by Salomon Gessner's Der erste Schiffer; describing the premise of the poem and saying Gessner has made very little out of the idea ("I once translated into blank verse about half the poem, but gave it up under the influence of a double disgust, moral & political") and that his own development of it would be original; summarizing it: "the tale will contain the cause, the occasions, the process, with all it's failures & ultimate success, of the construction of the first Boat, and of the undertaking of the first naval expedition;" adding that if Godwin and his wife Mary Jane approved of the idea, as publishers, the next question would be "whether it should be written in prose, or in verse - & if the latter, in what metre - Stanzas, or 8 syllable Iambics, with rhymes (for in rhyme it must be) now in couplets and now in quatrains, in the manner of [John Gilbert] Cooper's admirable Translation of the Ververt of Gresset;" saying that he has also had an idea for a schoolbook in the manner of Plutarch's Lives, but which would compare ancient and modern individuals to each other ("Num[a] with Alfred, Cicero with Bacon, Hannibal with Gustavus Adolphus, & Julius Cæsar with Buonaparte"), or a "series of Lives from Moses to Buonaparte of all those great Men, who in states or in the mind of man had produced great revolutions;" apologizing for not having paid back a loan of £2; explaining that he has lost his book of accounts and has therefore been unable to collect the money owed to him by subscribers to The Friend: "Not one half of the Subscribers, scarcely more than a third, have payed me - a job however has been offered me to day, & I shall soon be able to repay you with convenience to myself;" sending his love and "kindest wishes" to Godwin and his wife.