Coleridge had browsed and expatiated over all the rich regions of literature, at home and abroad. In youth his studies had, in the first instance, been mainly in theology, he having selected the "Church" for his profession. Although he was educated in the creed and rites of the Church of England, he became for a time a Unitarian preacher, and scattered his eloquent words over many human audiences. He was fond of questions of logic, and of explaining his systems and opinions by means of diagrams; but his projects were seldom consummated; and his talk (sometimes) and his prose writing (often) were tedious and diffuse. His "Christabel," from which he derived much of his fame, remained, after a lapse of more than thirty years, incomplete at his death. He gained much reputation from the "Ancient Mariner" (which is perhaps his best poem); but his translation of Schiller's "Wallenstein" is the only achievement that shows him capable of a great prolonged effort. Lamb used to boast that he supplied one line to his friend in the fourth scene of that tragedy, where the description of the Pagan deities occurs. In speaking of Satan, he is figured as "an old man melancholy." "That was _my_ line," Lamb would say, exultingly. I forget how it was originally written, except that it had not the extra (or eleventh) syllable, which it now possesses. There is some beautiful writing in this fourth scene, which may be read after Mr. Wordsworth's equally beautiful reference to the Olympian gods and goddesses, in the fourth book of the "Excursion," entitled "Despondency Corrected." The last explains more completely than the other the attributes of the deities specially named. The most elaborate (perhaps impartial) sketches of Coleridge--his great talents, combined with his great weaknesses--may be found in Hazlitt's Essays, "The Spirit of the Age" and "My First Acquaintance with Poets;" and in the eighth chapter of Mr. Carlyle's "Life of John Sterling." In Lamb's letters it is easy to perceive that the writer soon became aware of the foibles of his friend. "Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge," is his admonition as early as 1796. In another place his remark is, "You have been straining your faculties to bring together things infinitely distant and unlike." Again, "I grieve from my very soul to observe you in your plans of life veering about from this hope to the other, and settling nowhere." Robert Southey, whose prose style was the perfection of neatness, and who was intimate with Coleridge throughout his life, laments that it is "extraordinary that he should write in so rambling and inconclusive a manner;" his mind, which was undoubtedly very pliable and subtle, "turning and winding, till you get weary of following his mazy movements."