Читать книгу The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Страница 14

Table of Contents

BIRTHPLACE OF COLERIDGE. — SLIGHT SKETCH OF HIS PARENTS. — WHIMSICAL ANECDOTES HE USED TO RELATE OF HIS FATHER, &C. — AS A PASTOR, HOW MUCH BELOVED. — HIS BROTHERS AND SISTERS ENUMERATED. — THE DEATH OF HIS FATHER. — HIS ENTRANCE AT CHRIST’S HOSPITAL. — LAMB’S ACCOUNT OF HIM WHEN AT SCHOOL. — WRITES THIS ACCOUNT UNDER THE NAME OF ELIA. — LAMB’S ADMISSION THAT HE MEANT COLERIDGE FOR THE “FRIENDLESS BOY.” — THE DELICACY OF HIS STOMACH. — HIS FIRST ATTEMPT AT MAKING VERSE WHEN A SCHOOL BOY. — AND CONTINUATION OF HIS SUFFERINGS WHEN AT SCHOOL. — HIS WATER EXCURSIONS, THE ORIGIN OF MOST OF HIS SUBSEQUENT SUFFERING.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, the subject of this memoir, was born at Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, the 21st October, 1772. His father, the Rev. John Coleridge, was vicar of Ottery, and head master of Henry VIII Free Grammar School, usually termed the King’s School; a man of great learning, and one of the persons who assisted Dr. Kennicott in his Hebrew Bible. Before his appointment to the school at Ottery he had been head master of the school at South Molton. Some dissertations on the 17th and 18th chapters of the Book of Judges, and a Latin grammar for the use of the school at Ottery were published by him. He was an exceedingly studious man, pious, of primitive manners, and of the most simple habits: passing events were little heeded by him, and therefore he was usually characterized as the “absent man”.

Many traditional stories concerning his father had been in circulation for years before Coleridge came to Highgate. These were related with mirth in the neighbourhood of Ottery, and varied according to the humour of the narrator.

To beguile the winter’s hour, which, however, was never dull in his society, he would recall to memory the past anecdotes of his father, and repeat them till the tears ran down his face, from the fond recollection of his beloved parent. The relation of the story usually terminated with an affectionate sigh, and the observation, “Yes, my friend, he was indeed an Israelite without guile, and might be compared to Parson Adams.” The same appellation which Coleridge applied to his father will also, with equal justice, be descriptive of himself. In many respects he “differed in kind” from his brothers and the rest of his family, but his resemblance to his father was so strong, that I shall continue this part of the memoir with a sketch of the parent stock from which he sprung.

The Rev. John Coleridge had been twice married; his second wife, Anne Bowdon, by whom he had a large family, was the mother of my friend, and seems to have been peculiarly fitted for the wife of a clergyman who had a large family and limited means. Her husband, not possessing that knowledge usually termed worldly wisdom, she appeared to supply the place of the friend, which such a man required in his wife. He was better fitted for the apostolic age, so primitive was he in his manners and uneducated in the fashions and changing customs surrounding him: his companions were chiefly his books, and the few scholars he had to educate. To all around him he was extremely kind and amiable, and greatly beloved by the flock over whom he presided as pastor. For each individual, whatever his rank, he had a kindly word of greeting, and in sickness or distress he was an attentive friend. His richer and more educated neighbours visited him, and shared the general pleasure and amusement excited by his simple and peculiarly absent manners.

It is said of him, that on one occasion, having to breakfast with his bishop, he went, as was the practice of that day, into a barber’s shop to have his head shaved, wigs being then in common use. Just as the operation was completed, the clock struck nine, the hour at which the bishop punctually breakfasted. Roused, as from a reverie, he instantly left the barber’s shop, and in his haste forgetting his wig, appeared at the breakfast table, where the bishop and his party had assembled. The bishop, well acquainted with his absent manners, courteously and playfully requested him to walk into an adjoining room, and give his opinion of a mirror which had arrived from London a few days previously, and which disclosed to his astonished guest the consequences of his haste and forgetfulness.

On another occasion he dined with the bishop, who had great pleasure and delight in his society, when the following ludicrous scene took place. The bishop had a maiden daughter, past the meridian of life, who was always glad to see and converse with the “dear good old man” (his usual appellation), and who was also kind enough to remind him of his little ‘Forgets’ in society, and rouse him from his absent moods. It not being the fashion in his day for gentlemen to wear braces, his small-clothes, receding from his waistcoat, left a space in his black dress, through which often appeared a portion of his linen. On these occasions, the good lady would draw his attention to this appearance, by saying in an under tone, “A little to this side, Mr. Coleridge,” or to that, as the adjustment might require. This hint was as instantly attended to as his embarrassed manner, produced by a sense of the kindness, would permit. On the day above alluded to, his kind friend sat next to him, dressed, as was then the fashion, in a smart party-going muslin apron. Whilst in earnest conversation with his opposite neighbour, on the side next the lady appeared the folds of his shirt, through the hiatus before described, so conspicuously as instantly to attract her notice. The hint was immediately given: “Mr. Coleridge, a little on the side next me;” — and was as instantly acknowledged by the usual reply, “Thank you, ma’am, thank you,” and the hand set to work to replace the shirt; but unfortunately, in his nervous eagerness, he seized on the lady’s apron, and appropriated the greater part of it. The appeal of “Dear Mr. Coleridge, do stop!” only increased his embarrassment, and also his exertions to dispose, as he thought, of his shirt; till the lady, to put a stop to the titter of the visitors, and relieve her own confusion, untied the strings, and thus disengaging herself, left the room, and her friend in possession of her apron.

Mrs. Coleridge, the mother of my friend, and of whom I have already spoken, had naturally a strong mind. She was an uneducated woman, industriously attentive to her household duties, and devoted to the care of her husband and family. Possessing none, even of the most common female accomplishments of her day, she had neither love nor sympathy for the display of them in others. She disliked, as she would say, “your harpsichord ladies,” and strongly tried to impress on her sons their little value, in their choice of wives. As a clergyman’s wife her conduct was exemplary; the father of my friend had a fortune in such a woman, and she found in him, with all his peculiarities, a kind, sweet tempered, engaging husband. She was, I should add, a very good woman, though like Martha, over careful in many things, very ambitious for the advancement of her sons in life, but wanting perhaps that flow of heart which her husband possessed so largely. But “imperfection cleaves to mortality.” Such, as given in this brief sketch, were the parents of the subject of this memoir.

I have heard Coleridge relate the following anecdote of his father. The old gentleman had to take a short journey on some professional business, which would detain him from home for three or four days: his good wife, in her care and watchfulness, had packed a few things in a small trunk, and gave them in charge to her husband, with strong injunctions that he was to put on a clean shirt every day. On his return home, his wife went to search for his linen, when, to her dismay, it was not in the trunk. A closer search, however, discovered that the vicar had strictly obeyed her injunctions, and had put on daily a clean shirt, but had forgotten to remove the one underneath. This might have been the pleasantest and most portable mode of carrying half a dozen shirts in winter, but not so in the dog-days.

As a preacher, he was peculiar: it is said, that the poor idolized, and looked upon him with great reverence; and when death removed this distinguished and eminent scholar from among them, his successor had little chance of pleasing to the same extent. In their great admiration of him, they would often say, “How fine he was in his discourse, for he gave us the very words the spirit spoke in,” viz. the Hebrew, with which he frequently indulged them in his sermons, and which seems greatly to have attracted the notice of the agricultural population, who flocked from the neighbourhood, to the town in which he resided. Excited and stimulated by curiosity, this class of persons might attend the church, and in listening for the Hebrew they would perhaps be more attentive, and carry away some useful portions of the English from this amiable and accomplished pastor.

As a schoolmaster his singularities were of the same character, manifesting the same simplicity and honesty of purpose. I have before stated that he wrote a Latin Grammar for the use of his school, and instead of the word ablative, in general use, he compounded three or four Latin words as explanatory of this case. Whether the mothers were startled at the repetition of these words, and thought of the hardships their sons would have to endure in the acquirement of this grammar, I can only conjecture; but it seems he thought it his duty to explain to the ladies, in justice to their feelings, his learned reasons for the alteration he had made in the name of this case.

I had often pressed him to write some account of his early life, and of the various circumstances connected with it. But the aversion he had to read or write any thing about himself was so great, that I never succeeded, except in obtaining a few notes, rather than a detailed account. There would be little either useful or interesting in any account of Coleridge’s life, which a stranger to him could give; therefore, from the best authorities with which I am acquainted, and from an intimacy of nearly twenty years, is this memoir of my late lamented friend compiled. He commences one of the notes above alluded to, with his early childhood.

“I was,” says he, “the last child, the youngest child of ten by the same mother, that is to say, John, William (who died in infancy), James, William, Edward, George, Luke, Ann, Francis, and myself, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, beneficially abridged Esteese [Greek: estaesae], i.e. S. T. C., and the thirteenth, taking in three sisters by my dear father’s first wife, — Mary, afterwards Mrs. Bradley, — Sarah, who married a seaman and is lately dead, and Elizabeth, afterwards Mrs. Phillips — who alone was bred up with us after my birth, and whom alone of the three I was wont to think of as a sister, though not exactly, yet I did not know why, the same sort of sister, as my sister Nancy.

Being the youngest child, I possibly inherited the weakly state of health of my father, who died at the age of 62, before I had reached my seventh year; and from certain jealousies of old Molly, my brother Frank’s dotingly fond nurse, (and if ever child by beauty and loveliness deserved to be doted on, my brother Francis was that child,) and by the infusions of her jealousy into my brother’s mind, I was in earliest childhood huffed away from the enjoyments of muscular activity from play, to take refuge at my mother’s side, on my little stool, to read my little book, and to listen to the talk of my elders. I was driven from life in motion, to life in thought and sensation. I never played except by myself, and then only acting over what I had been reading or fancying, or half one, half the other, with a stick cutting down weeds and nettles, as one of the seven champions of Christendom. Alas! I had all the simplicity, all the docility of the little child, but none of the child’s habits. I never thought as a child, never had the language of a child. I forget whether it was in my fifth or sixth year, but I believe the latter, in consequence of some quarrel between me and my brother, in the first week in October, I ran away from fear of being whipped, and passed the whole night, a night of rain and storm, on the bleak side of a hill on the Otter, and was there found at daybreak, without the power of using my limbs, about six yards from the naked bank of the river.”

“In my seventh year, about the same time, if not the very same time, i.e. Oct. 4th, my most dear, most revered father, died suddenly. O that I might so pass away, if like him I were an Israelite without guile. The image of my father, my revered, kind, learned, simple-hearted father is a religion to me!”

Judge Buller who had been educated by his father, had always promised to adopt the son, at least to educate him, foreseeing that Samuel, the youngest, was likely to be left an orphan early in life. Soon after the death of the Rev. John Coleridge, the Judge obtained from John Way, Esq., one of the governors of Christ’s Hospital, a presentation to that school, and young Coleridge was sent by the Judge and placed there on the 18th July, 1782. “O! what a change!” he goes on in the note above quoted.

“Depressed, moping, friendless, poor orphan, half starved; (at that time the portion of food to the Bluecoats was cruelly insufficient for those who had no friends to supply them).”

In the late Mr. Charles Lamb’s “Works” published in 1818, there is an account of the school, entitled “Recollections of Christ’s Hospital.” In 1823 there is a second essay on the same subject by Lamb, under the assumed title of “Elia,” — Elia supposed to be intimate with Lamb and Coleridge. This second account, entitled “Christ’s Hospital five-and-thirty years ago,” gave umbrage to some of the “Blues,” as they termed themselves, as differing so much from the first in full praise of this valuable foundation, and particularly as a school from which he had benefited so much. In the preface to the second series, Elia says,

“What he (Elia) tells of himself is often true only (historically) of another; when under the first person he shadows forth the forlorn state of a country boy placed at a London school far from his friends and connexions,”

which is in direct opposition to Lamb’s own early history. The second account, under the personification of Elia, is drawn from the painful recollections and sufferings of Coleridge while at school, which I have often heard him relate.

Lamb told Coleridge one day that the friendless school boy in his “Elia,” (soon after its publication) was intended for him, and taken from his description of the Bluecoat school. After Coleridge’s death, Lamb related the same circumstance to me, that he had drawn the account from Coleridge’s feelings, sufferings, &c., Lamb having himself been an indulged boy and peculiarly favoured through the instrumentality of a friend:

“I remember,” says Elia, “Lamb at school, and can well recollect that he had some peculiar advantages, which I and others of his schoolfellows had not. His friends lived in town and were at hand, and he had the privilege of going to see them almost as often as he wished, through some invidious distinction which was denied to us. The present treasurer of the Inner Temple can explain how it happened. He had his tea and hot rolls in the morning, while we were battening upon our quarter of penny loaf — our ‘crug’ moistened with attenuated small beer in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was poured from. On Monday’s milk porritch, blue and tasteless, and the pease-soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched for him with a slice of ‘extraordinary bread and butter,’ from the hot-loaf of the Temple. The Wednesday’s mess of millet, somewhat less repugnant — (we had three banyan to four meat-days in the week) — was endeared to his palate with a lump of double-refined, and a smack of ginger, (to make it go down the more glibly) or the fragrant cinnamon. In lieu of our ‘half-pickled’ Sundays, or ‘quite fresh’ boiled beef on Thursdays, (strong as caro equina), with detestable marigolds floating in the pail to poison the broth — our scanty mutton crags on Fridays — and rather more savoury, but grudging, portions of the same flesh, rotten-roasted or rare, on the Tuesdays (the only dish which excited our appetites, and disappointed our stomachs, in almost equal proportion) he had his hot plate of roast veal, or the more tempting griskin (exotics unknown to our palates), cooked in the paternal kitchen.

“I (Coleridge) was a poor friendless boy, my parents, and those who should have cared for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of their’s, which they could reckon upon being kind to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, which they had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I thought them few enough; one after another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among six hundred playmates — O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The yearnings which I used to have towards it in those unfledged years! How in my dreams would my native town come back (far in the west) with its churches and trees and faces! To this late hour of my life, and even to the end of it did Coleridge trace impressions left by the painful recollection of these friendless holidays. The long warm days of summer never return but they bring with them a gloom from the haunting memory of those ‘whole day’s leave’, when by some strange arrangement, we were turned out for the live-long day, upon our own hands whether we had friends to go to or none. I remember those bathing excursions to the New River, which Lamb recalls with such relish, better, I think, than he can — for he was a home-seeking lad, and did not care for such water-parties. How we would sally forth into the fields; and strip under the first warmth of the sun; and wanton like young dace in the streams; getting appetites for the noon; which those of us that were penny less (our scanty morning crust long since exhausted) had not the means of allaying — while the cattle, and the birds, and the fishes were at feed about us, and we had nothing to satisfy our cravings; the very beauty of the day, and the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of liberty setting a keener edge upon them! How faint and languid, finally, we would return toward nightfall to our desired morsel, half-rejoicing, half-reluctant, that the hours of uneasy liberty had expired.

“It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowling about the streets objectless; shivering at cold windows of print-shops, to extract a little amusement; or haply, as a last resort, in the hope of a little novelty, to pay a fifty times repeated visit (where our individual faces would be as well known to the warden as those of his own charges) to the lions in the Tower, to whose levee, by courtesy immemorial, we had a prescriptive right of admission.”

In short, nearly the whole of this essay of Elia’s is a transcript of Coleridge’s account of the school. ‘Never was a friend or schoolfellow more fondly attached to another than Lamb to Coleridge. The latter from his own account, as well as from Lamb and others who knew him when at school, must have been a delicate and suffering boy. His principal ailments he owed much to the state of his stomach, which was at that time so delicate, that when compelled to go to a large closet (shoe-bin, its school name,) containing shoes, to pick out a pair easy to his feet, which were always tender, and he required shoes so large that he could walk in them, rather than with them, and the smell, from the number in this place, used to make him so sick, that I have often seen him shudder, even in late life, when he gave an account of it. In this note, continuing an account of himself at school, he says,

“From eight to fourteen I was a playless daydreamer, a ‘helluo librorum’, my appetite for which was indulged by a singular incident: a stranger, who was struck by my conversation, made me free of a circulating library in King Street, Cheapside.”

The incident, indeed, was singular: going down the Strand, in one of his daydreams, fancying himself swimming across the Hellespont, thrusting his hands before him as in the act of swimming, his hand came in contact with a gentleman’s pocket; the gentleman seized his hand, turning round and looking at him with some anger, “What! so young, and so wicked?” at the same time accused him of an attempt to pick his pocket; the frightened boy sobbed out his denial of the intention, and explained to him how he thought himself Leander, swimming across the Hellespont. The gentleman was so struck and delighted with the novelty of the thing, and with the simplicity and intelligence of the boy, that he subscribed, as before stated, to the library, in consequence of which Coleridge was further enabled to indulge his love of reading.

In his bathing excursions he had greatly injured his health, and reduced his strength; in one of these bathing exploits he swam across the New River in his clothes, and dried them in the fields on his back: from these excursions commenced those bodily sufferings which embittered the rest of his life, and rendered it truly one of sickness and suffering. When a boy he had a remarkably delicate, white skin, which was once the cause of great punishment to him.

His dame had undertaken to cure him of the itch, with which the boys of his ward had suffered much; but Coleridge was doomed to suffer more than his comrades, from the use of sulphur ointment, through the great sagacity of his dame, who with her extraordinary eyes, aided by the power of glasses, could see the malady in the skin deep and out of common vision; and consequently, as often as she employed this miraculous sight, she found or thought she found fresh reasons for continuing the friction, to the prolonged suffering and mortification of her patient. This occurred when he was about eight years of age, and gave rise to his first attempt at making a verse, as follows:

”O Lord, have mercy on me!

For I am very sad!

For why, good Lord? I’ve got the itch,

And eke I’ve got the ‘tad’,”

the school name for ringworm. He was to be found during play-hours often with the knees of his breeches unbuttoned, and his shoes down at the heel, walking to and fro, or sitting on a step, or in a corner, deeply engaged in some book. This had attracted the notice of Middleton, at that time a deputy grecian, and going up to him one day, asked what he was reading; the answer was “Virgil.” “Are you then,” said M. “studying your lesson?” “No,” said C., “I am reading it for pleasure;” for he had not yet arrived at Virgil in his class studies. This struck Middleton as something so peculiar, that he mentioned it to the head master, as Coleridge was then in the grammar school (which is the lower part of the classical school), and doing the work of the lower boys. The Rev. James Bowyer, who was at that time head master, a quick discerning man, but hasty and severe, sent for the master of the grammar school, and inquired about Coleridge; from him he learnt that he was a dull and inapt scholar, and that he could not be made to repeat a single rule of syntax, although he would give a rule in his own way.

This brought Coleridge before Bowyer, and to this circumstance may be attributed the notice which he afterwards took of him: the school and his scholars were every thing to him, and Coleridge’s neglect and carelessness never went unpunished. I have often heard him say, he was so ordinary a looking boy, with his black head, that Bowyer generally gave him at the end of a flogging an extra cut; “for,” said he, “you are such an ugly fellow!”

When, by the odd accident before mentioned, he was made a subscriber to the library in King Street,

“I read,” says he, “‘through’ the catalogue, folios and all, whether I understood them, or did not understand them, running all risks in skulking out to get the two volumes which I was entitled to have daily. Conceive what I must have been at fourteen; I was in a continual low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner, and read, read, read; fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe’s island, finding a mountain of plumb-cake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the shapes of tables and chairs — hunger and fancy!”

In his lad-hood he says,

“My talents and superiority made me for ever at the head in my routine of study, though utterly without the desire to be so; without a spark of ambition; and, as to emulation, it had no meaning for me; but the difference between me and my form-fellows, in our lessons and exercises, bore no proportion to the measureless difference between me and them in the wide, wild, wilderness of useless, unarranged book-knowledge and book-thoughts. Thank Heaven! it was not the age nor the fashion of getting up prodigies; but at twelve or fourteen I should have made as pretty a juvenile prodigy as was ever emasculated and ruined by fond and idle wonderment. Thank Heaven! I was flogged instead of flattered. However, as I climbed up the school, my lot was somewhat alleviated.”

When Coleridge arrived at the age of fifteen, he was, from the little comfort he experienced, very desirous of quitting the school, and, as he truly said, he had not a spark of ambition. Near the school there resided a worthy, and, in their rank of life, a respectable middle-aged couple. The husband kept a little shop, and was a shoemaker, with whom Coleridge had become intimate. The wife, also, had been kind and attentive to him, and this was sufficient to captivate his affectionate nature, which had existed from earliest childhood, and strongly endeared him to all around him. Coleridge became exceedingly desirous of being apprenticed to this man, to learn the art of shoemaking; and in due time, when some of the boys were old enough to leave the school, and be put to trade, Coleridge, being of the number, tutored his friend Crispin how to apply to the head master, and not to heed his anger should he become irate. Accordingly, Crispin applied at the hour proposed to see Bowyer; who, having heard the proposal to take Coleridge as an apprentice, and Coleridge’s answer and assent to become a shoemaker, broke forth with his favourite adjuration, “‘Ods my life, man, what d’ye mean?” At the sound of his angry voice, Crispin stood motionless, till the angry pedagogue becoming infuriate, pushed the intruder out of the room with such force, that Crispin might have sustained an action at law against him for an assault. Thus, to Coleridge’s mortification and regret, as he afterwards in joke would say,

“I lost the opportunity of supplying safeguards to the understandings of those, who perhaps will never thank me for what I am aiming to do in exercising their reason.

“Against my will,” says he, “I was chosen by my master as one of those destined for the university; and about this time my brother Luke, or ‘the Doctor,’ so called from his infancy, because being the seventh son, he had, from his infancy, been dedicated to the medical profession, came to town to walk the London Hospital, under the care of Sir William Blizard. Mr. Saumarez, brother of the Admiral Lord Saumarez, was his intimate friend. Every Saturday I could make or obtain leave, to the London Hospital trudged I. O the bliss if I was permitted to hold the plasters, or to attend the dressings. Thirty years afterwards, Mr. Saumarez retained the liveliest recollections of the extraordinary, enthusiastic blue-coat boy, and was exceedingly affected in identifying me with that boy. I became wild to be apprenticed to a surgeon. English, Latin, yea, Greek books of medicine read I incessantly. Blanchard’s Latin Medical Dictionary I had nearly by heart. Briefly, it was a wild dream, which gradually blending with, gradually gave way to a rage for metaphysics, occasioned by the essays on Liberty and Necessity in Cato’s Letters, and more by theology. After I had read Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, I sported infidel! but my infidel vanity never touched my heart:”

nor ever with his lips did he for a few months only support the new light given him by Voltaire.

“With my heart,” says he, “I never did abandon the name of Christ.”

This reached Bowyer’s ears, and he sent for him: not to reason with him, as teachers and parents do too often, and by this means as often increase the vanity of these tyro-would-be-philosophers; but he took the surest mode, if not of curing, at least of checking the disease. His argument was short and forcible.

“So, sirrah, you are an infidel, are you? then I’ll flog your infidelity out of you;”

and gave him the severest flogging he had ever received at his hands. This, as I have often heard Coleridge say, was the only just flogging he had ever given him: certainly, from all I ever heard of him, Bowyer was strictly a flogging master. Trollope, in his History of Christ’s Hospital, page 137, says of him,

”His discipline was exact in the extreme, and tinctured, perhaps, with

more than due severity.”

Coleridge, in his ‘Biographia Literaria’, after paying a just compliment to Bowyer as a teacher, says,

“The reader will, I trust, excuse this tribute of recollection to a man, whose severities, even now, not seldom furnish the dreams by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the mind the painful sensation of distempered sleep, but neither lessen nor diminish the deep sense of my moral and intellectual obligations.”

He had his passionate days, which the boys described as the days he wore his Passy wig (passy abbreviated from passionate). “Sirrah! I’ll flog you,” were words so familiar to him, that on one occasion, some female relation or friend of one of the boys entered his room, when a class stood before him and inquired for Master — ; master was no school title with Bowyer. The errand of this lady being to ask a short leave of absence for some boy, on the sudden appearance in town of his country cousin, still lingering at the door, after having been abruptly told to go, Bowyer suddenly exclaimed, “Bring that woman here, and I’ll flog her!”

Coleridge’s themes in his fifteenth year, in verse as well as prose, marked him as a boy of great talent, but of talent only according to his own definition of it (vide “Friend,” vol. iii. edit. 1818). His verse was good, his prose powerful, and language correct, and beyond his years in depth of thought, but as yet he had not manifested, according to the same test, anything of genius. I met among some of his notes, written at the age of fifty-one, the following critique on one of his schoolboy themes:

“This theme was written at the age of fifteen: it does not contain a line that any schoolboy might not have written, and like most school-poetry, there is a putting of thoughts into verse. Yet such verses as a striving of mind and struggles after the intense and vivid, are a fair promise of better things.”

The same observation might be made in the intense application of his intellectual powers in search of truth, at the time he called himself an infidel; in this struggle of mind was the “fair promise of better things.” It was the preparation necessary for such a mind; the breaking up and tilling of the soil for the successful germination of the seeds of truth.

The sleeping powers of thought were roused and excited into action.

Perhaps this may be considered, as entering too early into the history of his mind in boyhood: to this I reply, that the entire man so to speak, is to be seen even in the cradle of the child.

The serious may be startled at the thought of a young man passing through such an ordeal; but with him it was the exercise of his strength, in order that he might “fight the good fight,” and conquer for that truth which is permanent, and is the light and the life of every one who comes into the world, and who is in earnest search of it.

In his sixteenth year he composed the allegory of “Real and Imaginary Time,” first published in the Sibylline Leaves, having been accidentally omitted in the Juvenile Poems, —

”On the wide level of a mountain’s head,

(I knew not where, but ‘twas some fairy place)

Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread,

Two lovely children run an endless race,

A sister and a brother!

That far outstripped the other;

Yet ever runs she with reverted face,

And looks and listens for the boy behind;

For he, alas! is blind!

O’er rough and smooth with even step he passed,

And knows not whether he be first or last.”

in which may be traced the first dawnings of his genius. He pictures to himself a boy returning to school after the holidays; in his daydreams making plans for the future, and anticipating the pleasure he is to enjoy on his return home; his vivid thoughts, and sanguine expectations “far outstripping” the reality of time as marked by the watch or almanack. Real time is personified as a blind boy steadily pursuing his path; whilst imaginary time is represented as a fleeting girl, looking back and listening for her brother whom she has outrun. Perhaps to Mr. Bowyer’s excellent method of instruction may be attributed this early developement of his genius. Coleridge remarks of him,

“He was an admirable educer, no less than educator of intellect; he taught me to leave out as many epithets as would make eight syllable lines, and then ask if the exercise would not be greatly improved.”

Although in this year he began to indulge in metaphysical speculations, he was wedded to verse, and many of his early poems were planned; some of which he finished, and they were published in the “Juvenile Poems,” on his entry into life; but as many more were scattered among his friends, who had greatly increased in number. About this time he became acquainted with a widow lady,

“whose son,” says he, “I, as upper boy, had protected, and who therefore looked up to me, and taught me what it was to have a mother. I loved her as such. She had three daughters, and of course I fell in love with the eldest. From this time to my nineteenth year, when I quitted school for Jesus, Cambridge, was the era of poetry and love.”

It has been observed, that about this sixteenth year, he first developed genius, and that during this early period of his life, his mind was incessantly toiling in the pursuit of knowledge. His love of reading seemed to have increased in proportion to his acquirements, which were equally great: his representing himself as an infidel was better perhaps understood by his master, who believed it to be only puerile vanity; and therefore Coleridge considered the flogging he received on this occasion, a just and appropriate punishment; and it was so, for as a boy he had not thought deep enough on an equally important point, viz., what is Fidelity, and how easily, he particularly might mistake the genuineness of sincere ‘fidelity’ for mere outward forms, and the simple observance of customs. Perhaps I might have been disposed to pass over this era with a slighter notice, which he in his simplicity of character thought it right to record. He was always honest in every thing concerning himself, and never spared self-accusation, often, when not understood, to his own injury. He never from his boyhood to his latest life, received kindness without grateful feelings, and, when he believed it coupled with love, without the deepest sense of its value; and if the person possessed sensibility and taste, he repaid it tenfold. This was the experience of nearly twenty years intimate knowledge of his character.

His description of his first love was that of a young poet, recording the first era of the passion, the fleeting dream of his youth — but not that love which he afterwards records in the Geneviève when he says,

”All thoughts, all passions, all delights,

Whatever stirs this mortal frame,

All are but ministers of love,

And feed his sacred flame.”

First love, so seldom the mature love of future days, is a flower of premature growth and developement, on which fancy exercises itself in castle-building, and is in unison with that age when youth flings his limbs about in the air, as an exercise to rid himself of the superfluous volition, the accumulation of which gives him a sensation of uneasiness; and these simple and unreserved accounts of Coleridge’s infidelity, and also of his first love-fit, should be put down merely as mental exercises. The lines above quoted, belong, I have said, to the maturer mind; they are thoughts which, unlike the sportive dace on the surface of some calm lake, may rather be compared to the inhabitants of the deep waters beneath.

“How often will the loving heart and imaginative spirit of a young man mistake the projected creature of his own moral yearning, seen in the reflecting surface of the first not repulsive or vulgar female who treats him affectionately, for the realization of his idea. Reversing the order of the Genesis, he believes the female the original, and the outward reality and impressment of the self-constructed ‘image’, of the ideal! He most sincerely supposes himself in love — even in cases where the mistake might have been suspected by one curious fact — that his strongest emotions on love, were when absent from the imagined object. But the time comes, or may come, when the same feeling exists equally in presence and absence, in health and in sickness; when he verily ‘is’ in love. And now he ‘knows’ himself to be so, by the ‘so’ being — he can even prove it to his own mind by his certainty, his ‘intuition’ of the essential difference, as actually as it is uncommunicable, between it and its previous subjective counterfeits, and anticipations. Even so it is with friends. — O it is melancholy to think how the very forms and geniality of my affections, my belief of obligation, consequent gratitude and anxious sense of duty were wasted on the shadows of friendship. With few exceptions, I can almost say, that till I came to H —— , I never ‘found’ what FRIENDS were — and doubtless, in more than one instance, I sacrificed substances who loved me, for semblances who were well pleased that I should love ‘them’, but who never loved nor inwardly respected ought but themselves. The distinction between ‘the’ friends and ‘the’ love is, that the latter we discover by itself to ‘be’, alone itself — for it is in its nature unique and exclusive. (See Improvvisatore in the ‘Amulet’ of 1826 or 7).

“But of the former we discover the genuineness by comparison and experience — the reason is obvious — in the instances in which the person imagined himself to ‘be in love’ with another (I use this phrase ‘be in love with’ for the want of any other; for, in fact, from the absence in our language of any appropriate exponent of the thing meant), it is a delusion in toto. But, in the other instance, the one half (i.e. the person’s own feelings and sense of duty with acts accordant) remains the same (ex. gr. S.T.C. could not feel more deeply, nor from abatement of nervous life by age and sickness so ‘ardently’) he could not feel, think, and act with a ‘more’ entire devotion, to I.G. or to H.G. than he did to W.W. and to R.S., yet the latter were and remain most honourable to his judgment. Their characters, as moral and intellectual beings, give a dignity to his devotion; and the imperishable consciousness of his devout and almost enthusiastic attachment to them, still sanctifies their names, and makes the men holy and revered to him.”

Had Coleridge in early or even in later life paid an insincere, because undeserved, deference to outward show, and to the surface opinions counterfeiting depth, so attractive to the superficial observer — added to which, had he possessed a portion of that self-regarding policy which frequently aids success — he might have been idolized where he was neglected, and rewarded, if I might so profane this word, with high worldly honours in other quarters. But it was otherwise; and could a crown of gold have been offered him for the crown of glory of which he was in earnest search, he would have refused the exchange. The difference between time and eternity had already taken root, and he felt the mighty import of these words too strongly to have lost sight of their practical use; all that his health and powers would allow him to acquire he did acquire, and freely gave all he had for the benefit of others.

He says, “From the exuberance of my animal spirits, when I had burst forth from my misery and moping and the indiscretions resulting from those spirits — ex. gr. swimming over the New River in my clothes, and remaining in them; — full half the time from seventeen to eighteen was passed in the sick-ward of Christ’s Hospital, afflicted with jaundice and rheumatic fever.” From these indiscretions and their consequences may be dated all his bodily sufferings in future life: in short, rheumatism sadly afflicting him, while the remedies only slightly alleviated his sufferings, without hope of a permanent cure; though confined to his bed, his mind, ever active, still allowed him time to continue the exercise of his intellectual powers, and afforded him leisure for contemplation. Medical men are too often called upon to witness the effects of acute rheumatism in the young subject: in some, the attack is on the heart, and its consequences are immediate; in others, it leaves behind bodily sufferings, which may indeed be palliated, but terminate only in a lingering dissolution.

I have often heard Coleridge express regret that he had not cultivated mathematics, which he believed would have been of important use in life, particularly had he arrived so far as to have mastered the higher calculus; but he was, by an oversight of the mathematical master, stopped on the threshold. When he was commencing Euclid, among some of its first axioms came this:—”A line is length without breadth.” “How can that be?” said the scholar, (Coleridge); “A line must have some breadth, be it ever so thin.” This roused the master’s indignation at the impertinence of the scholar, which was instantly answered by a box on the ear, and the words, hastily uttered, “Go along, you silly fellow;” and here ended his first tuition, or lecture. His second efforts afterwards were not more successful; so that he was destined to remain ignorant of these exercises of the logic of the understanding.[A] Indeed his logical powers were so stupendous, from boyhood, as never to require such drilling. Bowyer, his classical master, was too skilful in the management of youth, and too much interested in the success of his scholars to overlook what was best fitted for them. He exercised their logical powers in acquiring and comparing the different classics. On him, as a teacher, Coleridge loved to dwell; and, with his grateful feelings, ever ready to acknowledge the sense of his obligations to him, particularly those relating to his mental improvement, he has, in his Biog. Lit. vol. i. p. 7, expressed himself in these words:

“He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, (in such extracts as I then read,) Terence, and, above all, the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and brazen ages; but with even those of the Augustan æra: and, on grounds of plain sense and universal logic, to see and assert the superiority of the former in the truth and nativeness, both of their thoughts and diction. At the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons; and they were lessons too, which required most time and trouble to ‘bring up’ so as to escape his censure. I learnt from him that Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes.”

In early life he was remarkably joyous; nature had blessed him with a buoyancy of spirits, and even when suffering, he deceived the partial observer. He delighted many of the strangers he met in his saunterings through the cloisters, arrested and riveted the attention of the passer by, whom, like his “Ancient Mariner,” he held by a spell. His schoolfellow, Lamb, has mentioned him, when under the influence of this power, as the delight of his auditors. In the Elia, he says,

“Come back into memory like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope, like a fiery column before thee, the dark pillar not yet turned … How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration, (while he weighed the disproportion between the ‘speech’ and the ‘garb’ of the mirandula,) to hear thee unfold, in deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus or Plotinus, (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts); or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar, while the walls of the old Grey-Friars re-echoed to the accents.”

Middleton was not prepared to sympathise in these flights, considering them subversive of the dignity of a Grecian. Middleton was then on the threshold of the College, and lads in this situation seemed called upon, to preserve with dignity their honours, and with more outward forms than suited their age. This at the time rendered them stiff and unfamiliar, so much so, that within the walls, and in the neighbourhood, it was mistaken for pride, and the words “Proud as a Grecian,” were proverbial. These boys had the dignity of their rising prospects therefore to support — they were the aristocracy of the school. This was a task ill suited to Coleridge; and his flights of fancy, as Lamb termed them, would only produce a shrug of Middleton’s shoulders, and a dread at the prospect of the falling dignity of the school. Middleton’s Poem, in Mr. Trollope’s History of Christ’s Hospital, and its companion that of Coleridge, characterize the two youths, and plainly point out that the selection of these poems was influenced more by a merit belonging purely to talent than from any display of genius in either. The verses of Middleton are more indicative of strength than of power; they are the verses of a well-tutored youth, of commanding talents. Those of Coleridge show more of fancy, but do not exhibit the power he possessed at that age, which will be seen by comparing this poem with many written by him at an earlier period, and now published among his “Juvenile Poems.” Middleton being older than Coleridge was elected first, viz. 26th September, 1788, to Pembroke College, Cambridge. Coleridge left Christ’s Hospital for Jesus’ College, Cambridge, 7th September, 1790, taking leave of his schoolfellows in the following sonnet: —

Farewell, parental scenes! a sad farewell!

To you my grateful heart still fondly clings,

Tho’ fluttering round on Fancy’s burnish’d wings,

Her tales of future joy Hope loves to tell.

Adieu, adieu! ye much loved cloisters pale!

Ah! would those happy days return again,

When ‘neath your arches, free from every stain,

I heard of guilt, and wonder’d at the tale!

Dear haunts! where oft my simple lays I sang,

Listening meanwhile the echoings of my feet,

Lingering I quit you, with as great a pang,

As when ere while, my weeping childhood, torn

By early sorrow from my native seat,

Mingled its tears with hers — my widow’d parent lorn.

‘Poetical Works’, vol. i. p. 31.

[Footnote 1: Bishop Berkeley, in his work (“Siris”) commences with a dissertation on Tar Water, and ends with the Trinity. The Rev. John Coleridge commences his work, entitled “A miscellaneous Dissertation arising from the 17th and 18th chapters of the Book of Judges,” with a well written preface on the Bible, and ends with an advertisement of his school, and his method of teaching Latin.]

[Footnote 2: In 1809, the above whimsical stories were related to me by a gentleman, born in the town of Ottery, and by marriage closely related to the Rev. John Coleridge. While Coleridge resided at Highgate, he also repeated the stories which had grown up with him from boyhood as here related, himself believing them true; but a near relation has lately assured the writer, that some of these stories are told of another most respectable clergyman, residing at that time in the neighbourhood, and ‘he’ believes that they properly belong to him. It is commonly remarked that very studious men, either from inattention, or from ignorance of the conventional forms of society, are regardless of what passes before them. Paying, perhaps, too much attention to their inward feelings or thoughts, seemingly daydreaming — and this may frequently give rise to the stories to be found in many towns besides Ottery. Still, however, thoughtful and contemplative persons are often the quickest observers of the weaknesses of human nature, and yet as they usually make the greatest allowances for every infirmity, they are often impartial judges, and judicious counsellors. The Rev. John Coleridge, though sometimes an absent man, was a most valuable pastor, and on all fitting occasions a good man of business, having conducted several difficult matters of controversy for his parish with great satisfaction to the parties.]

[Footnote 3: Such at least were the recollections of this extraordinary boy of seven years of age.]

[Footnote 4: Quale — quare — quidditive.]

[Footnote 5: He had, before he was six years old, read three times through the Arabian Nights, or rather one of the volumes. — See “‘The Friend’,” vol. i. p. 252, ed. 1818.]

[Footnote 6: I insert a similar observation on his feelings when he first left home. “When I was first plucked up and transplanted from my birth place and family, at the death of my dear father, whose revered image has ever survived in my mind, to make me know what the emotions and affections of a son are, and how ill a father’s place is likely to be supplied by any other relation. Providence (it has often occurred to me) gave the first intimation, that it was my lot, and that it was best for me, to make or find my way of life a detached individual, a Terræ Filius, who was to ask love or service of no one on any more specific relation than that of being a man, and as such to take my chance for the free charities of humanity.”]

[Footnote 7: Whatever might have been his habits in boyhood, in manhood he was ‘scrupulously’ clean in his person, and especially took great care of his hands by frequent ablutions. In his dress also he was as cleanly as the liberal use of snuff would permit, though the clothes-brush was often in requisition to remove the wasted snuff. “Snuff,” he would facetiously say, “was the final cause of the nose, though troublesome and expensive in its use.”]

[Footnote 8: “Jemmy Bowyer,” as he was familiarly called by Coleridge and Lamb, might not inaptly be termed the “plagosus orbilius” of Christ’s Hospital.]

[Footnote 9: In his biographical sketch of his literary life, he informs us that he had translated the eight Hymns of Synesius from the Greek, into English Anacreontica, before his fifteenth year.]

[Footnote 10:

… the childhood shews the man, As morning shews the day …

‘Paradise Regained’, book iv. v. 220.]

[Footnote 11: Aldine Edition, Vol. i. p. 6. — Pickering, London, 1834.]

[Footnote 12: Extract of a note written Dec. 1829.]

[Footnote 13:

“‘Thought’ and ‘attention’ very different things. — I never expected the German (viz. selbst-mühige Erzeugung dessen, wovon meine Rede war) from the readers of the ‘Friend’. — I did expect the latter, and was disappointed.”

“This is a most important distinction, and in the new light afforded by it to my mind, I see more plainly why mathematics cannot be a substitute for Logic, much less for Metaphysics — i.e. transcendental Logic, and why therefore Cambridge has produced so few men of genius and original power since the time of Newton. — Not only it does ‘not’ call forth the balancing and discriminating powers (‘that’ I saw long ago), but it requires only ‘attention’, not ‘thought’ or self-production.

“In a long-brief Dream-life of regretted regrets, I still find a noticeable space marked out by the Regret of having neglected the Mathematical Sciences. No ‘week’, few ‘days’ pass unhaunted by a fresh conviction of the truth involved in the Platonic Superstition over the Portal of Philosophy,

[Greek: Maedeis ageométraetos eisíto].

But surely Philosophy hath scarcely sustained more detriment by its alienation from mathematics.”

MS. Note.]

[Footnote 14:

“In my friendless wanderings on our leave-days, i.e. the Christ Hospital phrase, not for holidays altogether, but for those on which the boys are permitted to go beyond the precincts of the school (for I was an orphan, and had scarce any connexions in London), highly was I delighted, if any passenger, especially if he drest in black, would enter into conversation with me; for soon I found the means of directing it to my favourite subjects —

Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,

Fix’d fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,

And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.”]

[Footnote 15: The upper boys of the school selected for the University are so termed, though wearing the same coloured dress, but made of more costly materials.]

[Footnote 16: In a note on the History, p. 192, Mr. Trollope makes the following observation:

“From this book” (a book in which the boys were allowed to copy their verses when considered good) “the verses referred to in the text were inscribed.”

They will be found in the Literary Remains, vol. i, p.33. Trollope says,

”These verses are copied not as one of the best, but of the earliest

productions of the writer.”]

[Footnote 17: Entered at Jesus’ College, Feb. 5th, 1791, at the age of 19. — College Books.]