Among the literary influences which gave shape to Coleridge’s poetry, Percy’s ballads and Chatterton’s “Rowley Poems” are obvious and have already been mentioned.  In his first volume of verse (1796), there is manifest a still stronger impulse from the sonnets of the Rev. William Lisle Bowles.  We have noticed the reappearance of this discarded stanza form in the work of Gray, Mason, Edwards, Stillingfleet, and Thomas Warton, about the middle of the last century.[6] In 1782 Mrs. Charlotte Smith published a volume of sonnets, treating motives from Milton, Gray, Collins, Pope’s “Eloisa” and Goethe’s “Werther.”  But the writer who—­through his influence upon Wordsworth more especially—­contributed most towards the sonnet revival, was Bowles.  In 1789 he had published a little collection of fourteen sonnets,[7] which reached a second edition with six pieces additional, in the same year.  “His sonnets came into Wordsworth’s hands (1793),” says Brandl, “just as he was leaving London with some friends for a morning’s excursion; he seated himself in a recess on Westminster Bridge, and was not to be moved from his place till he had finished the little book.  Southey, again, owned in 1832 that for forty years, he had taken the sweet and artless style of Bowles for a model.” [8] In the first chapter of his “Biographia Literaria” (1817) Coleridge tells how, when he had just entered on his seventeenth year, “the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented” to him by his school-fellow at Christ’s Hospital, Thomas Middleton, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta.  “It was a double pleasure to me . . . that I should have received, from a friend so revered, the first knowledge of a poet by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and inspired.  My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal with which I laboured to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed, of whatever rank and in whatever place.  As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those who had in any way won my regard.  And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following publications of the same author.”  To Bowles’ poems Coleridge ascribes the credit of having withdrawn him from a too exclusive devotion to metaphysics and also a strengthened perception of the essentially unpoetic character of Pope’s poetry.  “Among those with whom I conversed there were, of course, very many who had formed their taste and their notions of poetry from the writings of Pope and his followers; or, to speak more generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by English understanding, which had predominated from the last century.  I was not blind to the merits of this school, yet