THE youngest of a very numerous family, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on the 21st of October 1772, at Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire. His father was the vicar of this small place, and Head Master in the King's School; a devout and learned and eminently simple-hearted man, whose extreme absence of mind brought him at times into positions in which a less genuine person would have been ridiculous. His illustrious son was wont in after years to compare him to Parson Adams. By his first wife he had three daughters, and ten children by his second. Anne Bowdon, the mother of the future poet, was an uneducated but sensible and domestic woman, of a practical turn of mind. It would seem that Samuel inherited much more from his father than from his mother. The Reverend John Coleridge died before his youngest son was seven years of age; in about two years, the mother followed him to the tomb, and the family was left in straitened circumstances. Samuel was sent to Christ Hospital, London, in 1782: one of his schoolfellows there was Charles Lamb. Mr. Bowyer-a learned and capable ruffian who, instead of enduring a rapid recurrence of committals to the treadmill for savageries perpetrated upon unhappy boys, was remembered by Coleridge long afterwards with respect tempering the hauntings of fear-was the preceptor in chief. Friendless in London, ill fed, and harshly used, poor little Coleridge could scarcely help being a melancholy boy, though not wanting in a certain buoyancy of spirits : he joined in no sports, but revelled in books. There are few more curious anecdotes than that which tells us that the forlorn Bluecoat Boy, strolling one day through a crowded London thoroughfare, was thrusting out his arms and hands in an abstracted mood, when his fingers touched a gentleman's waistcoat. Accused on the instant of pocket-picking intentions, he explained that he had been fancying himself Leander in the act of swimming across the Hellespont. Such a response was well calculated to take his questioner aback; the result was that the latter goodnaturedly paid for Coleridge as subscriber to a circulating library, whence the youth drank many a deep draught of bookish delight. Meanwhile he was making very great classical progress: before his fifteenth year he had translated the hymns of Synesius into English anacreontics. He was already deep in metaphysical and theologic controversy. History did not interest him at all, nor even poetry and romance much. He rose to be Deputy Grecian at Christ Hospital, and was selected by the bloodthirsty but discerning Bowyer for a scholarship in Cambridge University. The book which decisively roused Coleridge's feeling for poetry was one whose title will surprise readers of the present day-the sonnets of the Rev. Mr. Bowles. He had indeed shown a certain versifying tendency before-having written at the early age of eight some lines still preserved for the lettered enquirer. Among his poems of good literary calibre, several also belong to a very youthful period; Real and Imaginary Time, for instance, was composed in his sixteenth year. About this latter age he fell in love with the sister of a schoolfellow. In boyhood he laid also the seeds of much future suffering. Imprudent exposure, in swimming and otherwise, brought on a good deal of illness at the age of seventeen to eighteen, and left him a prey to rheumatism ever after. In February 1791 Coleridge was entered at Jesus College, Cambridge. He paid no attention to mathematics; nor, even in classics, did he distinguish himself to the extent that might have been anticipated. He obtained a prize for a Greek ode, but did. not, after all, take a degree. A debt which he had incurred for college-furniture caused him a deal of trouble: to this, and to his comparative failure as a student, and possibly (as some writers have said) to a disappointment in love, may be attributed the strange step which he took, in the second year of his university career, in suddenly leaving Cambridge. He came up to London, and wandered desolately about the streets; and next, without more ado, enlisted in the Fifteenth Light Dragoons under the assumed name of Comberback. This occurred on the 3d of December 1793. Private Comberback was treated with kindness in the troop, but showed (as one might well have guessed) no military aptitude, never getting out of the awkward squad. One day a Cambridge man recognized him in the streets of Reading, where he was quartered. Soon also one of the officers noticed his classical knowledge, elicited his story, and communicated with his friends, who made no delay in procuring his discharge on the 10th of April 1794. Coleridge returned to Jesus College, but not for long. He has left it on record that his course of life, while at the university, was nearly correct in a moral point of view, although it was his weakness to affect to be more lax than he really was. Coleridge had now become acquainted with Robert Southey, and was bent upon joining him in a literary course of life. He went off to Bristol, where his friend lived: both of them gave some public lectures on politics. Everybody has heard tell of the project which the two young men schemed out for themselves of what they termed a pantisocracy, or community where all the members should be absolutely equal: it was to be set up at Susquehannah in America-a place which they pitched upon because its euphonious name hit their fancy. But neither Coleridge nor Southey was destined to be a resident at Susquehannah, nor yet a pantisocrat-though, after all the many cachinnations with which their not highly practical scheme has |