Laudator Temporis Acti

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, letter to Robert Southey (December 31, 1801):

We all "die daily." Heaven knows that many and many a time I have regarded my talents and requirements as a porter's burthen, imposing on me the capital duty of going on to the end of the journey, when I would gladly lie down by the side of the road, and become the country for a mighty nation of maggots. For what is life, gangrened, as it is with me, in its very vitals, domestic tranquillity?

Hat tip: Eric Thomson, who remarks:

Earl Leslie Griggs, ed., Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. II: 1801-1806, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 427 makes no mention of it, and it isn't absolutely clear, but I wouldn't be surprised if the mention of 'maggots' and 'porter's burthen' in the letter didn't spring from a memory of Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part 2, Canto 3 (see lines 378, 389):

Beside all this, he serv'd his master
In quality of poetaster;
And rhimes appropriate could make
To ev'ry month i' th almanack        360
What terms begin and end could tell,
With their returns, in doggerel;
When the exchequer opes and shuts,
And sowgelder with safety cuts
When men may eat and drink their fill,        365
And when be temp'rate, if they will;
When use and when abstain from vice,
Figs, grapes, phlebotomy, and spice.
And as in prison mean rogues beat
Hemp for the service of the great,        370
So WHACHUM beats his dirty brains,
T' advance his master's fame and gains
And, like the Devil's oracles,
Put into doggrel rhimes his spells,
Which, over ev'ry month's blank page        375
I' th' almanack, strange bilks presage.
He would an elegy compose
On maggots squeez'd out of his nose;
In lyrick numbers write an ode on
His mistress, eating a black-pudden:        380
And when imprison'd air escap'd her,
It puft him with poetic rapture.
His sonnets charm'd th' attentive crowd,
By wide-mouth'd mortal troll'd aloud,
That 'circl'd with his long-ear'd guests,        385
Like ORPHEUS look'd among the beasts.
A carman's horse could not pass by,
But stood ty'd up to poetry:
No porter's burthen pass'd along,
But serv'd for burthen to his song.        390