Apparently no meeting took place, as yet another letter, dated 7th May, relates how instead of going to New Cavendish Street, where Miss Betham lived, he went to Old Cavendish Street, where she did not.  “I knocked at every door in Old Cavendish Street, not unrecompensed for the present pain by the remembrances of the different characters of voice and countenance with which my question was answered in all gradations, from gentle and hospitable kindness to downright brutality.”  Further promises and assurances are given, and in July, as we learn from a letter of Southey’s, the good Matilda was still high in hopes that her sitter would eventually sit.  Her hopes could not have come from Southey, who had none.  “You would have found him the most wonderful man living in conversation, but the most impracticable one for a painter, and had you begun the picture it is ten thousand to one that you must have finished it from memory.”  He was right.  When his lectures were over, in June, Coleridge went to Bury St. Edmunds, and by the 9th September he was in Cumberland.  “Coleridge has arrived at last, about half as big as the house,” Southey writes to his brother on that day.  There he cogitated and there began The Friend, and 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.