Though it is generally unfair to divorce lines from their context, it is permissible here, just to show what passed current as legitimate poetic expression, and we have to remember that within ten years of the writing of the sonnet, the poet in Coleridge had given place to the critic, after enriching poetry with many immortal lines. Clearly one may not hope, save in certain inspired moments, for much in the way of beauty of untrammelled form; the thought must be sought beneath the cumbrous wrapping, and modern readers have less leisure for this than was granted to Coleridge's contemporaries. The "Lines on an Autumnal Evening," written perhaps three years later than the sonnet, show a marked improvement: the poet is beginning to prove stronger than the formal limitations that beset him, but the spirit of the time is displayed through a curious incident. The poem was first printed in the little volume offered to the public in 1796, and is accompanied by an apology for printing such "intolerable stuff" as lines 57-70. At the same time he declares that he has not imitated Rogers' "Pleasure of Memory" in certain other lines (27-36), and suggests that Rogers himself had borrowed his story from "Lochleven," a poem by Michael Bruce. In a second edition Coleridge gives reasons for "reprieving his own poem from immediate oblivion," and proceeds to apologise to Rogers in terms of which the following are part: "No one can see more clearly the _littleness_ and futility of imagining plagiarisms in the works of men of genius; but _nemo omnibus horis sapit_; and my mind at the time of writing that note was sick and sore with anxiety and weakened through much suffering. I have not the most distant knowledge of Mr. Rogers save as a correct and elegant poet. If any of my readers should know him personally, they would oblige me by informing him that I have expiated a sentence of unfounded detraction by an unsolicited and self-originating apology." One can hardly resist the temptation of applying to the youthful writer of such stuff as this his own opening line of the address "To a Young Ass," written one year after the lines to the Autumnal Evening, and three years earlier than the above apology: "Poor little foal of an oppressed race."