[5] and the Miss Frickers. This curious and
often told story cannot be even summarised here. Its immediate result
was that Coleridge left the University without taking a degree, and,
though not at once, married Sarah Fricker on October 1795. Thenceforward
he lived on literature and his friends, especially the latter. He tried
Unitarian preaching and newspaper work, of which at one time or another
he did a good deal. The curious ins and outs of Coleridge's strange
though hardly eventful life have, after being long most imperfectly
known, been set forth in fullest measure by Mr. Dykes Campbell. It must
suffice here to say that, after much wandering, being unable or
unwilling to keep house with his own family, he found asylums, first
with some kind folk named Morgan, and then in the house of Mr. Gillman
at Hampstead, where for years he held forth to rising men of letters,
and where he died on the 25th June 1834. His too notorious craving for
opium had never been conquered, though it had latterly been kept in some
check.

Despite this unfortunate failing and his general inability to carry out
any schemes of work on the great scale, Coleridge's literary production
was very considerable, and, except the verse, it has never been
completely collected or systematically edited. He began verse-writing
very early, and early found a vent for it in the _Morning Chronicle_,
then a Radical organ. He wrote _The Fall of Robespierre_ in conjunction
with Southey in 1794, and published it. Some prose pamphlets followed,
and then Cottle, the Bristol providence of this group of men of letters,
offered thirty guineas for a volume of poems, which duly appeared in
1796. Meanwhile Coleridge had started a singular newspaper called _The
Watchman_, which saw ten numbers, appearing every eighth day. The
_Lyrical Ballads_ followed in 1798, and meanwhile Coleridge had written
the play of _Osorio_ (to appear long afterwards as _Remorse_), had begun
_Christabel_, and had contributed some of his best poems to the _Morning
Post_. His German visit (see _ante_) produced among other things the
translation of _Wallenstein_, a translation far above the original. Some
poetry and much newspaper work filled the next ten years, with endless
schemes; but in 1807 Coleridge began to lecture at the Royal
Institution--a course somewhat irregularly delivered, and almost
entirely unreported. 1809 saw his second independent periodical venture,
_The Friend_, the subsequent