Nor must the _Letters_[418] be omitted in any sufficient survey of Coleridge’s criticism. That at one early period[419] he apparently thought Schiller more sublime than Milton is not in the least to his discredit. He was twenty-two; he was, I think, demonstrably in love with _three_ ladies[420] at once, and extremely uncertain which of two of them he should marry—a state of mind neither impossible nor unnatural, but likely to lead to considerable practical difficulties, and to upset the judgment very decidedly. His minor critical remarks at this very time on Southey’s poems are excellent. That Bowles should be “divine” and Burke “sad stuff”[421] does not matter—we can explain both statements well enough. But how many men of three- or four-and-twenty (or for that matter of three- or four-and-seventy) were there, are there, have there ever been, who could ask, “Why pass an _Act of Uniformity_ against poets?”[422] one of the great critical questions of the world, and never, so far as I remember, formulated so pertinently before. It is odd that he should have forgotten (if he knew) Sidney, in his singular and pedantic complaint that to give the name Stella to a woman is “unsexing” it, and his supposition that “Swift is the authority.”[423] But another astonishing critical truth is that “Poetry ought not always to have its _highest_ relish”;[424] and yet another in the contrast[425] of himself with Southey, “I think too much to be a poet; he too little to be a great poet,” unjust as the application is in the first half; and yet again on metre itself “_implying_ a passion,”[426] a passage worth comparing with, and in some points better than, the _Biographia_ (with which compare also pp. 386, 387). Nor these alone, but many others later—the criticism on Wordsworth’s “Cintra” pamphlet;[427] that on the inadequacy of one style for all purposes;[428] the remarks on stage illusion,[429]—might be cited. [Sidenote: _The Coleridgean position and quality._]