_Zapolya_ came before the public in 1817. The stage fate of this piece is alluded to in the _B. L._ Mr. Gillman mentions that it was Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, then the critic for Drury Lane, who rejected the Play, and complained of its "metaphysics"--a term which is not, upon all occasions, to be strictly construed, but, when used in familiar talk, seems merely to denote whatever is too fine-spun, in the texture of thought and speech, for common wear; whatever is not readily apprehensible and generally acceptable. Schoolboys call everything in books or discourse, which is graver or tenderer than they like, "_metaphysics_." Mr. Kinnaird may have judged quite rightly that the Play was too _metaphysical_ for our theatres in their present state, though certainly plays as metaphysical were once well received on the stage. _Zapolya_, however, had a favourable audience from the public as a dramatic poem. Mr. Gillman says this Christmas Tale, which the author "never sat down to write, but dictated while walking up and down the room, became so immediately popular that 2,000 copies were sold in six weeks." The collection of poems entitled _Sibylline Leaves_, "in allusion to the fragmentary and widely scattered state in which they had been long suffered to remain," appeared in 1817, about the same time with _Zapolya_, the _Biographia Literaria_, and the first _Lay Sermon_. The _Miscellaneous Poems_ were composed at different periods of the author's life, many of them in his later years. I believe that _Youth and Age_ was written before he left the North of England in 1810,[53] when he was about seven or eight-and-thirty,--early indeed for the poet to say of himself I see these locks in silvery slips, This drooping gait, this altered size: But spring-tide blossoms on thy lips, And tears take sunshine from thine eyes. The whole of the _Poetical Works_, with the exception of a few which must be incorporated in a future edition, are contained in that in three volumes.[54] _The Fall of Robespierre_, an Historic drama, of which the first act was written by Mr. Coleridge, and published September 22, 1794, is printed in the first vol. of the _Lit. Remains_. This first act contains the Song on _Domestic Peace_. In the blank verse there are some faint dawnings of his maturer style, as in these lines: The winged hours, that scatter'd roses round me, Languid and sad, drag their slow course along, And shake big gall-drops from their heavy wings-- and in these: Why, thou hast been the mouth-piece of all horrors, And, like a blood-hound, crouch'd for murder! Now Aloof thou standest from the tottering pillar, Or, like a frighted child behind its mother, Hidest thy pale face in the skirts of--_Mercy_! but it contains scarcely anything of his peculiar original powers, and some of the lines are in schoolboy taste; for instance,