In the voyage between Gibraltar and Malta they were frequently in long dead calms--"every rope of the whole ship reflected in the bright soft blue sea"--an _Ancient Mariner_ touch. They reached Valetta on 18th May, where Coleridge was the guest of John Stoddart (afterwards Sir John Stoddart), Attorney-General for Malta. Sir Alexander Ball was then governor of the Island, and was greatly pleased with Coleridge's conversation and manners, and appointed him his private secretary. The public secretary of the Island dying suddenly in January 1805, Coleridge was made interim Government secretary until the new nominee should arrive. He held the office for eight months, from 18th January to 6th September (_Letters_, 494); and he acquitted himself well as a business man in the post. What De Quincey says to the contrary is a tissue of unfounded conjectures. Dykes Campbell, one of Coleridge's most painstaking biographers, admits that there is nothing to show that Coleridge did not perform the routine work of office well. While in Malta Coleridge duly entered in his note-books his impressions of his surroundings and he records his dreamy introspections of the night watches (_Anima Poetae_). But Coleridge did not spend all his time in Malta. Dykes Campbell informs us that "early in August, the _demon of restlessness_ drove him to Sicily" (_Life_, p. 145), which may be rather interpreted that the proximity of the land of Theocritus was irresistible. He was away from the middle of August to 7th November 1804. He twice ascended Etna; and, although Dykes Campbell doubts his having attained to the summit, according to his own account he looked down the crater (Cottle's _Rem._, 318; Letter, No. 133). Very few of Coleridge's letters written in Malta are extant; on account of the precariousness of the mode of despatch in a time of war some of them never reached their destination.