Note 962:1 — EPIGRAMS[951:1]
Reading edition
The first and second versions are included in Essays, &c., 1850, iii. 976: the third version was first published in 1893.
In 1830 Coleridge re-wrote (he did not publish) the second version as an Epitaph on Hazlitt. The following apologetic note was affixed:—
'With a sadness at heart, and an earnest hope grounded on his misanthropic sadness, when I first knew him in his twentieth or twenty-first year, that a something existed in his bodily organism that in the sight of the All-Merciful lessened his responsibility, and the moral imputation of his acts and feelings.' MS.