The middle period of Coleridge's life is marked by great desultoriness. It opened with much promise. After a journey to Germany (September 1798 to September 1799), in company with Wordsworth, he returned to England, where his first work was his brilliant translation of Schiller's (Wallenstein,) usually regarded as one of the masterpieces of English translation. That same year and the following year he wrote a number of able articles for the Morning Post condemning, on the one hand, the policy of Pitt, and, with equal zeal for the cause of lib-. erty, the aggressions of Bonaparte. The im pulse was short-lived. Failing health and growing restlessness caused him to go to Malta in 1804. It is known that at this period he was taking opium; whether strictly for the alleviation of pain, or whether to opium was due the cause of his failing health, is not defi nitely known. He made the acquaintance of the drug nearly 10 years before and the severest of his critics, Mr. Robertson, maintains that all his most brilliant poems were written under its influence, but the whole matter is in some un certainty, except for the fact that for a matter of 12 years he was, except at rare intervals, in capacitated from doing sustained work. From 1804 to 1816 he lived in great depression. A residence of two years and a half at Malta, where he was secretary to Governor Sir Alex ander Ball, was of no benefit to his health, and on the whole he showed a weakening of pur pose, as was natural to a man of weak will when removed from the guiding influence of friends. On his return his life was desultory and nomadic and he found himself in hard cir cumstances. Gradually becoming estranged from his friends and family, he finally sep arated from his wife, and in 1810 left the Lake region for good. From that. year till 1816 he lived at Hammersmith, London, and at Caine, in Wiltshire, with an old friend, John Morgan, by whom he was treated with the utmost kind ness. Early in 1816, however, the Morgans, owing to loss of property, were obliged to give up the task, and, moreover, Coleridge, to whom the six years had been the most futile of his life, felt obliged to take some more energetic measures to redeem himself. Accordingly, in April 1816, a home was found for him with Dr. Gillman, in Highgate, London, where his health might be watched with care and firmness, and here he remained the rest of his life.
Up to 1818, as has been said, Coleridge was chiefly interested in criticism, but his work was, naturally, of a desultory nature. His first pub lic utterances, after the articles in the Morning Post, were a series of 18 lectures on 'Poetry and the Fine Arts,' delivered at the Royal In stitution in London, from January to May 1808. He had previously projected a course of lec tures on the same subject, but they had come to nothing. The lectures of 1808 were very poorly given and were unsuccessful ; De Quincey has a vivid picture of the miserable figure that Coleridge presented as he faced his audience. Three courses in the winter of 1811-12, chiefly on Shakespeare and Milton, had a better fate, and, from accounts, must have made a great impression. These courses were recast into two which were badly delivered at Bristol in the winter of 1813-14. In 1818, Coleridge closed his career as a lecturer with a course on the history of literature, which added much to his reputation. These various talks were published for the first time in 1836, in Vols. I and II of Coleridge's 'Literary Remains.' In their pres ent shape they are fragmentary; some are pretty complete, others merely marginal jottings, and others exist only in name.
Considered as a whole, these lectures at tempted to define poetry, to trace in some de tail the course of literature, to exalt to an unprecedented height the name and fame of Shakespeare and to give his readers material for a sound critical judgment. Concerning the last of these points he said, for example, in the course of 1818, that he desired "To convey, in a form best fitted to render them impressive at the time, and remembered afterwards, rules and principles of sound judgment, with a kind and degree of connected information such as the hearers carmot generally be supposed likely to form, collect, and arrange for themselves by their own unassisted studies," and he added, °I hope to satisfy many an ingenious mind, seriously interested in its own development and cultivation, how moderate a number of volumes, if only they be judiciously chosen, will suffice for the attainment of every wise and desirable purpose; that is, in addition to those which he studies for specific and professional purposes."
Among the many great names which he chose to illustrate this oft-repeated idea, Shakespeare, in all the courses of lectures, occupied the chief place. His chief thesis, that Shakespeare is a poet of consummate poetical power and that his Judgment is equal to his genius, he iilustrated and illuminated with copious analysis and crit icism, chiefly by running interpretation of the different plays and by pregnant statements of the fundamental differences in dramatic inter est in the different types of play. Generally speaking his point of view is that of a man in terested in works that express the soul, the rea son and the imagination, rather than outward situation, intelligence, fancy or wit. More nar rowly, it is the criticism of a man who gloried in the superiority of the literature of his own country, and of the moralist who abhorred the quality of the (Decameron) and the misanthropy of Swift, and who praised the moral !essons of (Robinson Crusoe) and (Macbeth.) Nearly all his criticism in these lectures shows a love of fundamental distinctions, as, for example, the chivalric spirit of Spenser as compared with the universal, impersonal spirit of Shakespeare; or the distinctions between the witty, the droll, the odd, the humorous, etc., as illustrated by Rabelais, Swift, Sterne and others. This idea of drawing fundamental distinctions has had a great influence on succeeding criticism.
Even more characteristic of the Coleridge of this period was the series of essays called