ABSTRACT
Mr. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s conversation at all times required attention, because what he said was so individual and unexpected. It may well be imagined that a style of conversation so continuous and diffused as that which I have just attempted to describe, presented remarkable difficulties to a mere reporter by memory. It is easy to preserve the pithy remark, the brilliant retort, or the pointed anecdote; these stick of themselves, and their retention requires no effort of mind. So peculiar were the flow and breadth of Mr. Coleridge’s conversation, that the author is very sensible how much those who can best judge will have to complain of his representation of it. The reader will in most instances have little difficulty in understanding the course which the conversation took, although the author's recollections of it are thrown into separate paragraphs for the sake of superior precision.
