Samuel Coleridge - The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“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,