Hugh James Rose (1795-1838), classical scholar and theologian. Some doubt must cling to this anecdote (which obviously refers to Coleridge's early married life) owing to the fact that the Hugh James Rose to whom Coleridge went `in great trouble' was born in 1795—the same year as Coleridge married Sara Fricker—and so could not have been more than a boy when the poet and his wife finally agreed to live apart. It is reasonable to suppose, however, that Rose merely passed on the story to Collier as something he had been told, and that Collier, then in his eighties, erred only in making Rose a participant in the incident. As Sir Edmund Chambers put it (Coleridge (1938), p. 144),
'This narrative reads to me more like an old man's muddle than a deliberate fabrication.'
Note from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Literary Anecdotes