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

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.

Lamb and, later, Leigh Hunt. The
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."
Yet full draughts of knowledge Cole-

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 Hospital, and was placed there on the 18th July, 1782. Christ's Hospital-the Blue-ridge certainly took in at Christ's Hoscoat School-was in 1782 very different translated the eight hymns of Synepital. Before his fifteenth year he "had from what it is in 1865. The hideous sius from the Greek into English anacredress 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, half-petitors. "From eight to eighteen," he starved, objects of reluctant and degrad-writes, "I was a playless day-dreamer, ing charity." There is little doubt that There is little doubt that the treatment he received there induced clumsy, slovenly, heedless of dress, and careless as to personal appearance, treat"a weakness of stomach" that was the ed with severity by an unthinking masparent 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 to such a pitch did he carry this habit, that once when a lady called upon him on "a 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 ready for execution." He states that Coleridge, when he heard of the man's death, said, "it was lucky the cherubim who took him to heaven were nothing but faces and wings, or he would infallibly have flogged them by the way."

Among his schoolfellows were Charles

At the age of eighteen, on the 7th of and misery, he left Christ's Hospital for February, 1790, after much discomfort 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, alhonors, that is to say. His reading was though he obtained honors-poetical too desultory; in mathematics he made chance 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

*In the several memoirs of Coleridge and of Lamb, the Inn is described as being in Smithfield; I believe it was in Newgate Street, No. 17. Peter Cunningham so states. There is still a Salutation Inn (though probably not the old hotel) in Newgate Street. Cunningham adds, that "here Southey found out Coleridge, and sought to move him from the torpor of inaction." Lamb, in his famous letter to Southey, reminds him of their meetings at the old tavern.

Quincey, who writes this, adds, that he enlisted "in a frenzy of unhappy feeling at the rejection he met with from the lady of his choice." In 1836 I published in the New Monthly Magazine" a letter from Wales, by the late S. T. Coleridge.” It was addressed to Mr. Marten, a clergyman in Dorsetshire. Coleridge being at Wrexham, standing at the inn window, there passed by, to his utter astonishment, a young lady, "Mary Evans quam afflictum et perdite amabam-yea, even to anguish." "I sickened," he adds, "and well-nigh fainted, but instantly retired. God bless her. Her image is in the sanctuary of my bosom, and never can it be torn thence but with the strings that grapple my heart to life."

dence at Cambridge occurred that ro-
mantic episode with which all readers are
familiar. Having come up to London
greatly dispirited, on the 3rd of Decem-
ber, 1793, he enlisted in the 15th Light
Dragoons, under the name of Silas Tom-
kin Cumberbatch. The story is told in
various ways. Joseph Cottle, who pro-
fesses to gather the facts from several
"scraps" supplied by Coleridge at va-
rious times, infers that he enlisted be-
cause he was crossed in love. He made,
of course, a bad soldier, and a worse rider.
According to Cottle, he was one day
standing sentry when two officers passed
who were discussing one of the plays of
Euripides; Coleridge, touching his cap,
"corrected their Greek." Another ac-
count is, that one of the officers of the
troop discovered some Latin lines which
Coleridge had pinned up to the door of a
stable. The discovery of his scholarship
was made, however, his discharge was
soon arranged, and he was restored to the
University. Miss Mitford, in her Re-
collections," states that the arrangements
for his discharge took place at her fath-
er's house, at Reading, where the 15th
was then quartered, and adds that it was
much facilitated by one of the servants
who "waited at the table" agreeing to
enlist in his stead.

What motive swayed the judgment, or what stormy "impulse drove the passionate despair of Coleridge into quitting Jesus College, Cambridge, was never clearly or certainly made known to the very nearest of his friends." De

May not this incident, which seems to have been unknown to his biographers, supply a key to the motive of his enlistment, as surmised by both Cottle and De Quincey?

After his return to Cambridge he formed, with Southey, the scheme of emigrating to America. Southey, in a letter to Montgomery, long afterwards, thus briefly explains it: "We planned an Utopia of our own, to be founded in the wilds of America, upon the basis of common property, each laboring for all— a PANTISOCRACY- -a republic of reason and virtue." And Joseph Cottle writes: "In 1794 Robert Lovell, a clever young Quaker, who had married a Miss Fricker, informed me that a few friends of his from Oxford and Cambridge, with himself, were about to sail to America, and on the banks of the Susquehanna to form a social colony,' in which there was to be a community of property, and where all that was selfish was to be proscribed." Two of the patriots were very soon introduced to the more prudent bookseller: one of them was Coleridge, the other Southey. It was speedily ascertained that their combined funds, instead of sufficing to "freight a ship," would not have purchased changes of clothing; and very

*In 1837, after the death of Coleridge, a volume of "early recollections" of the poet was published by Joseph Cottle, the bookseller of Bristol, by whom the poems of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, were originally published in 1794. The book is not "to be entirely depended upon. ' So, at least, Southey says. Yet it is full of curious and most interesting matter, and, beyond doubt, the publisher was the attached, and generous, and sympathizing friend of the three immortal men whom he may be said to have introduced to the world. James Montgomery's view of this work seems to me a just one: "that the reminiscent had not printed a single remark that was either dishonorable to himself or derogatory to the friend-soon the Pantisocratic trio were necessi ship that had existed between him and the highly tated to borrow a little money from the gifted individuals. Cottle's bookshop stood at bookseller to pay their lodgings, which the N. E. corner of High Street; the house was were then at 48, College Street, Bristol burnt down long since, but has been rebuilt. His residence was Firfield House, Knowle, near Bris (the house is still standing, and remains tol, where he died in 1853, in his eighty-fourth in nearly its original condition). The scheme was of course abandoned, and

year.