In addition to some definite relief from financial stress, Coleridge was entering upon a mental phase of infinite comfort to his remaining years. The transcendentalist became suddenly convinced of the efficacy of prayer, of the existence of a personal God, and of other tenets peculiar to Christianity. We cannot indicate the gradual processes by which the brilliant mind reached harbour in the last days. It may be that the futility of his own struggles was becoming apparent, that his reasoning faculties, strengthened by relief from drugs, reverted to the faith of earlier times at Ottery St. Mary when, a little boy with the page of his life fair and unstained, he listened to the teachings of his father, a man of godly ways and simple belief. It may have been the final sense of defeat in the long struggle to realise ambitions, to justify the hopes of friends, and to silence those whose doubts were openly expressed. Whatever the cause, the result was eminently satisfactory; the last years saw the poet baffled and beaten by the world, but for once strong in failure, full of a conviction that there lay beyond the grave that which should atone for unsuccess. There is more dignity and less querulousness in the years that followed publication of _Aids to Reflection_ than in almost any of those that had passed since Coleridge left Cambridge; and for this spell of comparative tranquillity his latter-day admirers must needs be grateful. There would be interesting matter for speculation, if we had any data to assist us, how far the late-found faith of Coleridge enabled him to atone to his conscience for what seem to us the least reputable incidents of his career, and many remain to be explained away. He was too shrewd a critic, too sound a judge of life and character, to have overlooked his own failings, above all he must have been haunted by fear of his son Hartley's future and known that his own lack of self-discipline had, in all human probability, set yet another soul wandering along the paths of trouble. Perhaps we should be careful to remember, in considering the life of Coleridge, that all his faults were open to the eye. His friends discussed them with the greatest freedom and even set them down in cold print. History has turned a far more careful eye to the blemishes in a strange character than to the virtues that must have been present by their side. The worst foes of Coleridge have never denied the extraordinary influence he spread around him, or doubted that it was for good. They bear witness to the intense theoretical devotion to unattainable ideals, the respect for virtue, even in hours of backsliding, the belief in his own ability ultimately to overcome the faults that beset him and to rebuild the shattered fabric of personal honour. He was ever fighting against his own little company of devils, for ever being worsted, and yet it would be wrong to say that he abandoned the struggle for long. Doubtless, when he looked