To the life-long list of disappointments another was added in 1827, when the post of Paymaster of the Gentlemen Pensioners, a sinecure long since abolished, became vacant by the death of William Gifford. A big effort was made by Hookham Frere to obtain this office for Coleridge, but it was not to be. The industrious, steady, resolute Wordsworth had his sinecure, and it seems a little hard, if such things were to exist, that poor Coleridge, whose necessities were not inconsiderable and whose means of satisfying them were so scanty, should have failed to gain one. Happily he still had his pension of one hundred guineas from the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1828 an edition of three hundred copies of his poems was published in three volumes and sold out. William Pickering of London was the publisher, and the preface, with a few unimportant alterations, is a reprint of the one attached to the edition of 1803, published by Longman and Rees, which in its turn was taken from the edition of 1797. Another edition with some added verses was published in 1829. When the volumes of the 1828 edition had been passed for press, Coleridge joined William Wordsworth and his favourite child, Dora, who married Mr. Quillinan and predeceased her father, and the three went to Belgium and Germany. The journey lasted six weeks, and at Bonn the travellers met some of the leading writers of Germany, including Schlegel and Niebuhr. The German visit is recorded by Thomas Colley Grattan, the author of _Beaten Paths_, and by Julian Young, son of Charles Mayne Young, the actor. Although the warmth of attachment between Wordsworth and Coleridge had undoubtedly suffered since the days when the former wrote his ill-advised letter to Basil Montague, nearly twenty years before, the admiration of the one poet for the other was quite unfeigned. Wordsworth's delight in a great intellect had never faltered; he could always distinguish between a man's gifts and weaknesses, admiring the one while he condemned or regretted the other. The journey refreshed Coleridge in body and mind. He was in high spirits, and the point of his pen was still very keen; witness his lines to Cologne, written when he and his fellow-travellers had passed through that malodorous city in July: "In Koln, a town of monks and bones And pavements fang'd with murderous stones, And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches; I counted two and seventy stenches, All well defined, and several stinks! Ye Nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks, The river Rhine, it is well known Doth wash your city of Cologne; But tell me, Nymphs! what power divine Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?"