Coleridge was seventeen when the French Revolution broke out; he was forty-three when Napoleon was sent to St.Helena.He saw the whole career of the greatest political upheaval and of the greatest military genius of the modern world.

Fox, Pitt, and Burke,--the greatest Liberal orator, the greatest Parliamentary leader, and the greatest philosophic statesman that England has produced--were at the height of their glory when Coleridge went up to Cambridge in 1791.
In literature--naturally, since literature is but an interpretation of life--the age was not less remarkable.

Dr.Johnson was still alive when Coleridge came up to school at Christ's Hospital, Goldsmith had died eight years before.

But a new spirit was abroad in the younger generation.

Macpherson's "Fingal," alleged to be a translation from the ancient Gaelic poet Ossian, had appeared in 1760; Thomas Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," a collection of folk-ballads and rude verse-romances such as the common people cherished but critics had long refused to consider as poetry, was published in 1765.