Hitherto no attempt has been made to publish a collection of Coleridge's Letters. A few specimens were published in his lifetime, both in his own works and in magazines, and, shortly after his death in 1834, a large number appeared in print. Allsop's Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, which was issued in 1836, contains forty-five letters or parts of letters; Cottle in his Early Recollections (1837) prints, for the most part incorrectly, and in piecemeal, some sixty in all, and Gillman, in his Life of Coleridge (1838), contributes, among others, some letters addressed to himself, and one, of the greatest interest, to Charles Lamb. In 1847, a series of early letters to Thomas Poole appeared for the first time in the Biographical Supplement to the Biographia Literaria, and in 1848, when Cottle reprinted his Early Recollections, under the title of Reminiscences of Coleridge and Southey, he included sixteen letters to Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood. In Southey's posthumous Life of Dr. Bell, five letters of Coleridge lie imbedded, and in Southey's Life and Correspondence (1849-50), four of his letters find an appropriate place. An interesting series was published in 1858 in the Fragmentary Remains of Sir H. Davy, edited by his brother, Dr. Davy; and in the Diary of H. C. Robinson, published in 1869, a few letters from Coleridge are interspersed.
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