The rest of Coleridge’s ballad work is small in quantity and may be dismissed briefly.  “Alice du Clos” has good lines, but is unimportant as a whole.  The very favourite poem “Love” is a modern story enclosing a mediaeval one.  In the moonshine by the ruined tower the guileless Genevieve leans against the statue of an armed man, while her lover sings her a tale of a wandering knight who bore a burning brand upon his shield and went mad for the love of “The Lady of the Land.” [25]

The fragment entitled “The Dark Ladie” was begun as a “sister tale” to “Love.”  The hero is a “knight that wears the griffin for his crest.”  There are only fifteen stanzas of it, and it breaks off with a picture of an imaginary bridal procession, whose “nodding minstrels” recall “The Ancient Mariner,” and incidentally some things of Chatterton’s.  Lines of a specifically romantic colouring are of course to be found scattered about nearly everywhere in Coleridge; like the musical little song that follows the invocation to the soul of Alvar in “Remorse”: 

“And at evening evermore, In a chapel on the shore, Shall the chanters sad and saintly—­ Yellow tapers burning faintly—­ Doleful masses chant for thee, Miserere Domine!”

or the wild touch of folk poesy in that marvellous opium dream, “Kubla Khan”—­the “deep romantic chasm”: 

  “A savage place, as holy and enchanted
  As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
  By woman wailing for her demon lover.”

Or the well-known ending of “The Knight’s Grave”: 

  “The knight’s bones are dust,
  And his good sword rust;
  His soul is with the saints, I trust.”

In taking account of Coleridge’s services to the cause of romanticism, his critical writings should not be overlooked.  Matthew Arnold declared that there was something premature about the burst of creative activity in English literature at the opening of the nineteenth century, and regretted that the way had not been prepared, as in Germany, by a critical movement.  It is true that the English romantics put forth no body of doctrine, no authoritative statement of a theory of literary art.  Scott did not pose as the leader of a school, or compose prefaces and lectures like Hugo and Schlegel.[26] As a contributor to the reviews on his favourite topics, he was no despicable critic; shrewd, good-natured, full of special knowledge, anecdote, and illustration.  But his criticism was never polemic, and he had no quarrel with the classics.  He cherished an unfeigned admiration for Dryden, whose life he wrote and whose works he edited.  Doubtless he would cheerfully have admitted the inferiority of his own poetry to Dryden’s and Pope’s.  He had no programme to announce, but just went ahead writing romances; in practice an innovator, but in theory a literary conservative.