Coleridge, the literary spy

In his personal essay about language and identity, Trekteacher writes that he followed his grandfather's footsteps to study the life and works of Coleridge:

I grew up in a literary household—my mother was a nature columnist for the newspaper, and my father was, although an engineer by profession, entranced with language as only a British man of letters can be. My paternal grandfather was a don at Oxford for many years before retiring to Malta, where he continued to study the literary figure around whom I did my graduate work: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. My blue-blooded grandmother raised me in the appreciation of opera, Wagner specifically, and the Tolstoi and Chekov school of literary thought. I inherited, along with the slight intellectual guilt of a wealthy and scholarly upbringing, a sense of reverence for the language and the skillful use of words for effect, so it is natural that my graduate degrees in English are in rhetoric and language and that I take a particular delight in a well-crafted sentence. I know, after all, how hard they can be to create.

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According to this profile Coleridge came to Malta in 1804 to spy for the English King

From Coleridge's biography in Wikipedia:

From 1804 to 1806, Coleridge lived in Malta and travelled in Sicily and Italy, in the hope that leaving Britain's damp climate would improve his health and thus enable him to reduce his consumption of opium. For a while he had a civil-service job as the Public Secretary of the British administration of Malta, assisting governor Sir Alexander John Ball. Thomas de Quincey alleges in his Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets that it was during this period that Coleridge became a full-blown opium addict, using the drug as a substitute for the lost vigour and creativity of his youth. It has been suggested, however, that this reflects de Quincey's own experiences more than Coleridge's.