MEMORIES OF THE AUTHORS OF THE Mediator," and earnestly and devoutly

AGE.

BY 8. C. HALL AND MRS. S. C. HALL.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

teaching "thanksgiving and adoring love," ending his last will and testament with these memorable words, "HIS STAFF AND HIS ROD ALIKE COMFORT ME."

seem to hear the melodious voice, and look upon the gentle, gracious, and loving countenance of "the old man eloquent," as I write this Memory.

"POETRY has been to me its own 'ex- It is a rare privilege to have known ceeding great reward;' it has soothed such a man. The influence of one so my afflictions, it has multiplied and re- truly good as well as great can not have fined my enjoyments, it has endeared been transitory. It is a joy to me now solitude, it has given the habit of wishing-thirty years after his departure. I to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me." These eloquent and impressive words preface a book of poems bearing date "May, 1797," and up to a summer morning in 1834, when, "under the pressure of long and painful disease," he yielded to the universal conqueror, and joined the beatified spirits who praise God without let or hindrance from earth, the comfort and consolation thence derived had brought continual happiness to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Yet was the joy of his heart and mind drawn from a far higher source. He lived and died a Christian, seeking NEW SERIES-VOL. I., No. 6.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born at St. Mary Ottery, on the 21st October, 1772, and was thus a native of my own beautiful county-the county of Devon. His father, the Rev. John Coleridge, Vicar of Ottery, and head-master of Henry VIII's Free Grammar School"the King's School "-was a man of considerable learning, and also of much eccentricity. It is told of him that, once going a journey, his wife had supplied

41

him with a sufficient number of shirts, and on his return found they were all on his back; when he put on a clean one, he had forgotten to remove its prede

cessor.

The

Lamb and, later, Leigh Hunt.
friendship with Lamb, then commenced,
endured unchangingly through life. In
one of the pleasantest of his essays he
recalls to memory "the evenings when
we used to sit and speculate at our old
Salutation Tavern upon pantisocracy and
golden days to come on earth." Words-
worth told Judge Coleridge that many of
his uncle's sonnets were written from the
"Cat and Salutation," where Coleridge
had "imprisoned himself for some time;"
and Talfourd tells us it was there Lamb
and Coleridge used to meet, talking of
poets and poetry, or, as Lamb says, "be-
guiling the cares of life with poetry-
"Our lonely path to cheer, as travelers use,
With merry song, quaint tale, or roundelay."

Coleridge was a solitary child, the youngest of a large family. Of weakly health, "huffed away from the enjoyments of muscular activity," "driven from life in motion to life in thought and sensation," he had "the simplicity and docility of a child, but not the child's habits," and early sought solace and companionship in books. In "The Friend," he informs us he had read one volume of "The Arabian Nights" before his fifth birthday. Through the interest of Judge Buller, one of his father's pupils, he obtained a presentation to Christ's HospiYet full draughts of knowledge Coletal, and was placed there on the 18th ridge certainly took in at Christ's HosJuly, 1782. Christ's Hospital-the Bluepital. Before his fifteenth year he “had coat School-was in 1782 very different from what it is in 1865. The hideous sius from the Greek into English anacretranslated the eight hymns of Synedress is now the only relic of the old ontics;" he became captain of the school, management that made "such boys as and in learning soon outstripped all comwere friendless, depressed, moping, halfstarved, objects of reluctant and degrad-writes, "I was a playless day-dreamer, "From eight to eighteen," he petitors. ing charity." There is little doubt that the treatment he received there induced clumsy, slovenly, heedless of dress, and "a weakness of stomach" that was the ed with severity by an unthinking mascareless as to personal appearance, treatparent of much after misery. The head-ter, yet ever luxuriating in books, wooing master was the Rev. James Bowyer. the muse, and wedded to verse.” Coleridge writes of him: He was "a sensible, though a severe master," to whom "lute, harp, and lyre, muses and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene, were abominations." De Quincey considers his great idea was to "flog;' "the man knouted his way through life from bloody youth up to truculent old age." And Mr. Gillman relates that to And Mr. Gillman relates that toege" such a pitch did he carry this habit, that once when a lady called 66 him on upon visit of intercession," and was told to go away, but lingered at the door, the master exclaimed, "Bring that woman here, and I'll flog her " Leigh Hunt thus describes the tyrant of the school: "His eye was close and cruel;" "his hands hung out of the sleeves of his coat as if *In the several memoirs of Coleridge and of ready for execution." He states that Lamb, the Inn is described as being in SmithColeridge, when he heard of the man's field; I believe it was in Newgate Street, No. 17. Peter Cunningham so states. There is still a death, said, "it was lucky the cherubim Salutation Inn (though probably not the old howho took him to heaven were nothing tel) in Newgate Street. Cunningham adds, that but faces and wings, or he would infalli-"here Southey found out Coleridge, and sought bly have flogged them by the way." Among his schoolfellows were Charles

66

At the age of eighteen, on the 7th of February, 1790, after much discomfort and misery, he left Christ's Hospital for Jesus College, Cambridge. His fellowscholars even then anticipated for him the fame which many of them lived to see. "The friendly cloisters, and happy groves of quiet, ever-honored Jesus College" he quitted without a degree, although he obtained honors-poetical honors, that is to say. His reading was too desultory; in mathematics he made ehance of the University providing him no way; there was consequently little with an income, and he had to take his chance in the world. During his resi

to move him from the torpor of inaction." Lamb, in his famous letter to Southey, reminds him of their meetings at the old tavern.