events, Coleridge indulged in later life many pathetic reminiscences of the wretchedness of his school-days. He thought himself ill-conditioned as to material comforts, and quite out of the range of that sympathy of which a shy, sensitive child of an affectionate disposition stands in need. It was one of the regulations of the school that an entire holiday, or leave-day, should be given at intervals. This was a privilege to such of the boys as had friends living in London; but it was often a punishment to such as had no friends there. Whatever the weather might be on the periodical leave-day, the gates of the school were closed on every pupil from early morning until sunset. Coleridge was homeless, and, according to his own account, friendless in London, and these holidays were not unmixed blessings to him. In fine weather he would indulge the one athletic pleasure in which he had any skill, that of swimming, in the New River. In wet weather he would tramp round and round the Newgate market, waiting for the school gates to re-open. There is reason to think that at this time he had somewhat outgrown the delicate health of his very early boyhood, but he was still a child, and entirely cut off from home associations. It would be folly to suppose that when in after-life he spoke of his wretchedness at Christ's Hospital as a shy, shrinking boy, exposed to many discomforts and out of the range of solace, he drew a fancy picture. Pleasures of many kinds he no doubt enjoyed. His temperament was naturally joyous, and above all else it was affectionate. He was a creature made to love and to be beloved. Though distinctly the reverse of a boyish boy, though fonder of books than of play, though prone to indulge the medita

tive tendency to a degree that boys do not usually consider heroic, Coleridge must have been a boy that other boys would like. He was fond of solitude, but he was sociable too. There was healthy humour, and, in a less dubious sense than that of the friend who said so, there was a good deal of fun in Coleridge. He must have been a likeable lad, and that implies that he must have been to some extent a happy one. But there ought to be no hesitation in accepting his assurance that, on the whole,* Christ's Hospital was a sufficiently stern home for an orphan boy of ten.

He remained between eight and nine years at school, and during that period he never entirely conquered his loneliness, and his yearning for some sort of home. Five years after leaving Ottery, he made the acquaintance, while rambling through the city on his enforced leave-day, of a shoemaker and his wife, and the good people showed the boy some kindness. This suggested to him the idea of being apprenticed to shoemaking, and so fixed was the lad's intention that the honest shoemaker called on the master to make the necessary arrangements. It is probable that Coleridge was willing to desert Christ's Hospital in favour of the shoemaker's home without any sanction from authority. Although it was customary to put the boys to trades as opportunities arose, Coleridge's request was not granted. The master got into a great rage, knocked the lad down, and pushed the shoemaker out of the room. In reference to the circumstance the poet afterwards said, "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," Curiously

enough, his mind reverted to this idea years afterwards, when, thanking God for His dispensations, and believing them to be the best possible, he ventured the conjecture that he might have been yet more thankful if it had pleased Providence to make him a journeyman shoemaker instead of an author by trade. During the closing years of his life at school the craving for domestic love was no less strong. He made the acquaintance of a widow lady whose son he, as an upper boy, had protected, and he speaks of her with affection as one who taught him what it was to have a mother. He loved her as a son. She had three daughters, and perhaps it would be a little rash to say that the same desire to escape from his solitariness prompted him to fall in love with the eldest. The calf-love was not without ardour and the qualities that last. "Oh, from sixteen to nineteen," he says, "what hours of Paradise had Allen and I in escorting the Miss Evanses home on a Saturday, who were then at a milliner's, whom we used to think, and who I believe really was, such a nice lady;--and we used to carry thither, of a summer morning, the pillage of the flower gardens within six miles from town, with sonnet or love rhymes wrapped round the nosegay." He met his young milliner some years afterwards in Wrexham. "She gave a short, sharp cry," he says, "almost a shriek ; ... sickened and well-nigh fainted. . . God bless her!" Thus Coleridge's friendlessness in London was not entirely unbroken by strange attachments, and it is sufficiently obvious that his timidity and sensitiveness were not so acute that they forbade on occasion even the pillage of the flower gardens,

...

His brother Luke came up to London to walk the hospitals, and it would appear that the young surgeon did not neglect him. Every Saturday that the boy could obtain leave from school he trudged away with his brother to the London Hospital. The result was that he became wild to be apprenticed to a surgeon. "Oh the bliss," he says, "if I was permitted to hold the plasters or attend the dressings. . . . English, Latin, yea, Greek books of medicine read I incessantly. chard's 'Latin Medical Dictionary' I had nearly by heart." "It was a wild dream," he says later, but the friend who knew him best in his early manhood took a more serious view of the possibilities. "Nature, who seems to have meant you for half-a-dozen different things when she made you," says Southey in a letter to Coleridge, "meant you for a physician among the rest." Coleridge formed ardent friendships at Christ's Hospital. Middleton, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, was his first "patron and protector," being some years his senior; and a lifelong friendship, riveted by many ties of sympathy, was there begun with another boy who was three years his junior. This was Charles Lamb, a weakly but pretty boy, with curling black hair, and a Jewish cast of features, thoughtful, timid, sensitive, the son of a barrister's clerk who lived in Crown Office Row. Lamb had a sister ten years older than himself, and she became an important agent not only in his own life, but in that of his friend also.

No schemes, however, for material comfort such as prompted Coleridge to offer himself as apprentice to the shoemaker, no casual dreams of a profession such as suggested surgery as an outlet for his energy, no ardour of

comradeship such as Lamb and Middleton appear to have excited, could cure a nature like Coleridge's of its tendency to solitariness. If he had been more favourably conditioned as to immediate surroundings, this tendency might have been fostered with less danger to the sweetness, the amiability and joyousness of his natural. temperament. But in the lap of home he must have been a solitary lad still. The most illustrious of his friends describes it in The Prelude as a constant habit of his life, to lie on the leaded roof of the school and look up at the sky and dream of the trees, the meadows and the rivers of his native place. The "shaping spirit of imagination" was strong upon him in the years of his long exile as a boy in the streets of the city. It had taken hold of him while he was even yet at home, where, according to his own account, he never played except by himself, and then only at acting over what he had been reading or fancying. He was a poet born. At Ottery St. Mary, while still a child, with the docility of a child, but few of a child's habits, he would prance along the roads, swinging a stick in his hands, and imagining himself to be one of the seven champions of Christendom as he cut down the weeds and nettles that lay in his path. When he came up to London, the poetic impulse was not less strong upon him because the scene was less romantic. He read Shakespeare and Homer and much poetry besides. As often from poetic prompting as from the physical impulses natural to a boy, he swam in the New River. It must have been at the demand of some conception of romance, in imitation perhaps of a feat recorded in poetry, that one day he