In the summer of 1816, Coleridge took a holiday at Muddiford, near Christchurch in Hampshire. Back in Highgate, he projected more work, and being in better health, carried on brisk quarrels with publishers. Under Gillman's care he was becoming more temperate, but his system was suffering from lack of its accustomed stimulant. By the spring of 1817, the _Metropolitan Encyclopædia_ was projected, and Coleridge was to be a liberal contributor as well as assistant editor in return for £500 a year, but he wanted so much down on account that the publishers, who probably knew their man, broke off negotiations, and Coleridge wrote nothing but his well-known paper, "Preliminary Treatise on Method," for which he received sixty guineas. In March 1817, the publication of the _Biographia Literaria_, a glorified scrap-book, full of profound thoughts that dazzled many a thinking man, led to bitter criticism in the _Edinburgh_ and _Blackwood's_. The philosophical prose of Coleridge is of importance, but no attempt will be made to deal with it here, in a sketch that has no other aim than to present a great figure in our literary history to those who need such an introduction. The _Biographia Literaria_ and the _Æsthetical Essays_ have been published as recently as 1907 by the Oxford University Press. They supply a complete reprint of the 1817 edition, and have been edited with a masterly introduction by Mr. J. Shawcross. In this year (1817) Coleridge renewed his work in the _Courier_ and upheld Southey's reputation in connection with the pirated publication of that poet's twenty-five-year-old indiscretion, "Wat Tyler." This was generous vindication of a severe critic. In the same year he started his stimulating friendship with Joseph Henry Green, philosopher and surgeon. In the autumn he again sought the sea, going this time to Littlehampton in Sussex, where he met the Rev. H. F. Cary, translator of _Dante_, and Charles Augustus Tulk, afterwards member for Sudbury. It is to the efforts of Coleridge that Mr. Cary owed the first acceptance of his remarkable work. _Zapolya_ sold well towards the close of this year, and the sale helped to stimulate the author. It would seem that residence at Highgate was doing something at last to build up the poet's shattered nervous system, that the bonds of opium were being loosened, that self-respect was coming, however late, into his life. Lectures on Shakespeare and Poetical Literature delivered at Flower-de-Luce Court in Fetter Lane occupied the opening months of the new year, and while engaged on these addresses, Coleridge made a new and valued friend, Thomas Allsop, with whom he maintained for several years an important correspondence. A further course of lectures was delivered in the last weeks of 1818 and for some months in the following year, but although they were doubtless remarkably good, there was no money in them. The year 1819 was a disastrous one financially. Not only was little profit