—­“The famished father’s cry
    From the dark dungeon of the tower time-rent,”

and wish that he might behold the bard himself, wandering at eve—­

    “Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood.”

Coleridge was destined to make the standard translation of “Wallenstein”; and there are motives borrowed from “The Robbers” and “The Ghost-Seer” in his own very rubbishy dramas, “Zapolya”—­of which Scott made some use in “Peveril of the Peak”—­and “Osorio” (1797).  The latter was rewritten as “Remorse,” put on at Drury Lane January 23, 1813, and ran twenty nights.  It had been rejected by Sheridan, who expressed a very proper contempt for it as an acting play.  The Rev. W. L. Bowles and Byron, who had read it in manuscript and strangely overvalued it, both made interest with the manager to have it tried on the stage.  “Remorse” also took some hints from Lewis’ “Monk.”

But Coleridge came in time to hold in low esteem, if not precisely “The Robbers” itself, yet that school of German melodrama of which it was the grand exemplar.  In the twenty-third chapter of the “Biographia Literaria” (1817) he reviewed with severity the Rev. Charles Robert Maturin’s tragedy “Bertram, or the Castle of St. Aldobrand,"[40] and incidentally gave the genesis of that whole theatric species “which it has been the fashion, of late years, at once to abuse and to enjoy under the name of the German Drama.  Of this latter Schiller’s ‘Robbers’ was the earliest specimen, the first-fruits of his youth. . .  Only as such did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate the play.”  Coleridge avows that “The Robbers” and its countless imitations were due to the popularity in Germany of the translations of Young’s “Night Thoughts,” Hervey’s “Meditations,” and Richardson’s “Clarissa Harlowe.”  “Add the ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, the flesh-and-blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine of a modern author[41] (themselves the literary brood of the ‘Castle of Otranto,’ the translations of which, with the imitations and improvements aforesaid, were about that time beginning to make as much noise in Germany as their originals were making in England), and, as the compound of these ingredients duly mixed, you will recognize the so-called German Drama,” which “is English in its origin, English in its materials, and English by readoption; and till we can prove that Kotzebue, or any of the whole breed of Kotzebues, whether dramatists or romantic writers or writers of romantic dramas, were ever admitted to any other shelf in the libraries of well-educated Germans than were occupied by their originals . . . in their mother country, we should submit to carry our own brat on our own shoulders.”