there was not one of the many who had so many years together spoken so warmly in its praise who gave it the least positive furtherance after its publication.  It was openly asserted that the Quarterly Review did not wish to attack it, but was ashamed to say a word in its favor.  Thank God! these things pass from me like drops from a duck’s back, except as far as they take the bread out of my mouth; and this I can avoid by consenting to publish only for the present times whatever I may write.  You will be so kind as to acknowledge the receipt of the L50 in such manner as to make all matters as clear between us as possible; for, though you, I am sure, could not have intended to injure my character, yet the misconceptions, and perhaps misrepresentations, of your words have had that tendency.  By a letter from R. Southey I find that he will be in town on the 17th.  The article in Tuesday’s Courier was by me, and two other articles on Apostacy and Renegadoism, which will appear this week.

Believe me, with respect, your obliged,

S.T.  COLERIDGE.

The following letter completes Coleridge’s correspondence with Murray on this subject: 

Mr. Coleridge to John Murray.

[Highgate], March 29, 1817.

Dear Sir,

From not referring to the paper dictated by yourself, and signed by me in your presence, you have wronged yourself in the receipt you have been so good as to send me, and on which I have therefore written as follows—­“A mistake; I am still indebted to Mr. Murray L20 legally (which I shall pay the moment it is in my power), and L30 from whatever sum I may receive from the ‘Christabel’ when it is finished.  Should Mr. Murray decline its publication, I conceive myself bound in honor to repay.”  I strive in vain to discover any single act or expression of my own, or for which I could be directly or indirectly responsible as a moral being, that would account for the change in your mode of thinking respecting me.  But with every due acknowledgment of the kindness and courtesy that I received from you on my first coming to town,

I remain, dear Sir, your obliged, S.T.  COLERIDGE.

Leigh Hunt was another of Murray’s correspondents.  When the Quarterly was started, Hunt, in his Autography, says that “he had been invited, nay pressed by the publisher, to write in the new Review, which surprised me, considering its politics and the great difference of my own.”  Hunt adds that he had no doubt that the invitation had been made at the instance of Gifford himself.  Murray had a high opinion of Hunt as a critic, but not as a politician.  Writing to Walter Scott in 1810 he said: 

John Murray to Mr. Scott,

“Have you got or seen Hunt’s critical essays, prefixed to a few novels that he edited.  Lest you should not, I send them.  Hunt is most vilely wrongheaded in politics, and has thereby been turned away from the path of elegant criticism, which might have led him to eminence and respectability.”