Sara Coleridge the "Essays on his Own Times, by S. T. Coleridge", and the Introduction to the "Biographia Literaria". In 1850, Coleridge discovered a lump in her breast. Her physician decided not to operate, prescribing cod liver oil and opium. Knowing there was no cure, she waited for the disease to take its course. "I live in constant fear," Coleridge wrote, "like the Ancient Mariner with the Albatross hung about his neck, I have a weight always upon me." Shortly before she died she amused herself by writing a little autobiography for her daughter. This, which reaches only to her ninth year,
William Wales (astronomer) a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1776. Amongst Wales' pupils at Christ's Hospital were Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb. It has been suggested that Wales' accounts of his journeys might have influenced Coleridge when writing his poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The writer Leigh Hunt, another of Wales' pupils, remembered him as "a good man, of plain simple manners, with a heavy large person and a benign countenance". He was appointed as Secretary of the Board of Longitude in 1795, serving in that position until his death in 1798. He was nominated by the First Lord