Coleridge’s final lecture series comprised fourteen lectures, ‘On Shakespeare’ and ‘On the History of Philosophy’, delivered at the Crown and Anchor public house at Seven Dials, off the Strand. Godwin attended the first, last and three intervening lectures in a series that sketched an overview of Western philosophy. The sense of occasion around the final lecture was created by advertisements in The Times and Courier that ran for weeks before the actual event, announcing the date on which ‘MR COLERIDGE WILL DELIVER HIS LAST ADDRESS AS A PUBLIC LECTURER’. In his notebook, Coleridge wrote ‘O pray Heaven, that it may indeed be the Last.’

See DNB and Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (London: HarperCollins, 1998).