there the separation from his wife was finally made.

After the separation, very characteristically, he was less separated
from Mrs. Coleridge than he had been for many years. In 1810 he was
still in the Lakes, in the summer of which year his wife gives news of
him to the poetess. "Coleridge has been with me for some time past,
in good health, spirits and humour, but the _Friend_ for some
unaccountable reason, or for no reason at all, is utterly silent.
This, you will easily believe, is matter of perpetual grief to me, but
I am obliged to be silent on the subject, although ever uppermost in
my thoughts, but I am obliged to bear about a cheerful countenance,
knowing as I do by sad experience that to expostulate, or even to
hazard one anxious look, would soon drive him hence." Then comes a
sidelight on the Wordsworths. "Coleridge sends you his best thanks for
the elegant little book; I shall not, however, let it be carried
over to Grasmere, for _there_ it would soon be _soiled_, for the
Wordsworths are woeful destroyers of good books, as our poor library
will witness."

But all this was too good to last, and as everybody knows, it did not.
In October Coleridge left the Lakes with the Montagues, and almost
immediately after that the rupture with the Wordsworths occurred,
which involved also the family at Keswick. Southey's letter to Miss
Betham giving her an account of the affair has been published by
Mr. Dykes Campbell, and is misplaced in _A House of Letters_. The
unfortunate philosopher set up his rest with the Morgans, friends of
the Lambs, at Hammersmith; and there he was in February, 1811, when
Miss Betham conceived her project of getting him as a lion at the
party of her friend Lady Jerningham.

Lady Jerningham, blue mother of a bluer daughter (Lady Bedingfield)
and sister-in-law of the "Charming Man" of Walpole's and the Misses
Berry's acquaintance, was a friend of Miss Betham's of old standing.
Several letters of hers are in _A House of Letters_, but many more
of her daughter's. Whether it was her ladyship's or Miss Betham's
proposal there's no telling now; but Miss Betham, at any rate, did
not feel equal to the job, and called in Charles and Mary Lamb to help
her. Mary, in the first instance, sounded the philosopher, and with
success. I quote from Mr. Lucas's edition of the Lamb letters, as
the editor of Miss Betham's misreads and misprints his original.
"Coleridge," she writes, "has given me a very cheerful