And if, at that time, any one could have shown us the same Coleridge at a distance of eighteen years, the worn, depressed, prematurely aged man who took up his abode with Gillman in 1816, we should have been shocked, and yet, perhaps, have been able to utter our complacent 'I told you so.' What so far had been the achievements of the most brilliant genius of the generation: a man not only of surpassing ability, but of surpassing facility of utterance; a man whom to set going at any moment was to unlock a perpetually flowing fountain of abounding eloquence? A few newspaper articles and some courses of lectures, he said in 1817, constituted his whole publicity. It may be added that he had jotted down on the margins of books enough detached thoughts to have made some volumes of admirable reflections. But he had achieved nothing to suggest concentrated thought or sustained labour. In a shorter period Scott poured out the whole of the Waverley Novels, besides discharging official duties, and writing a number of reviews and miscellaneous works. I say nothing as to the quality. I am simply thinking of the amount of work; and Coleridge's work cost little labour, for his power of improvisation was among his most marvellous faculties. Why, then, was the work so limited in quantity? The internal facts are sufficiently significant. After his return from Germany in the autumn of 1799, he wrote some articles which certainly proved that his intellect was in full vigour, translated 'Wallenstein,' and then, in 1800, retired with his family to Keswick. Here at once ominous symptoms begin to show themselves. A strange disquiet is betrayed in his letters; there are painful complaints of ill-health; his poetic inspiration breathes its last in the 'Ode to Dejection.' He sought in vain to distract painful thought by metaphysical abstractions; he rambled off in 1804 to spend two years and a half in Malta and Italy. Returning to England, he tried lecturing at the Royal Institution, and then settled at Grasmere—separated by fifteen miles of mountain roads from his wife—and repeated his 'Watchman' experiment by writing the 'Friend.' The youthful buoyancy, even flippancy, has departed, though it shows far riper thought and richer intellectual stores. But weariness of spirit marks every page; the long sentences somehow suggest a succession of stifled groans; as the enterprise proceeds, it can only be kept up by introducing any irrelevant matter that may be on hand—such as old letters from Germany which happened to be in his portfolio, and an extravagant panegyric upon his patron at Malta, Sir Alexander Ball.