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 cata

logue, folios and all, whether I understood "them, or did not understand them, running "all risks in skulking out to get the two vo"lumes 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

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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!"

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In his lad-hood he says,

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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;

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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 middleaged 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, "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.

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Against my will," says he, "I was chosen by my master as one of those destined for "the university; and about this time my brother "Luke, or the Doctor,' so called from his infancy, because being the seventh son, he had, "from his infancy, been dedicated to the me

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dical profession, came to town to walk the "London Hospital, under the care of Sir Wil"liam Blizard. Mr. Saumarez, brother of the

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"Admiral Lord Saumarez, was his intimate "friend. Every Saturday I could make or ob"tain leave, to the London Hospital trudged I. "O the bliss if I was permitted to hold the plas"ters, or to attend the dressings. Thirty years afterwards, Mr. Saumarez retained the liveliest "recollections of the extraordinary, enthusiastic "blue-coat boy, and was exceedingly affected in identifying me with that boy. I became wild to be apprenticed to a surgeon. a surgeon. English, "Latin, yea, Greek books of medicine read I incessantly. Blanchard's Latin Medical Dictionary I had nearly by heart. Briefly, it

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was a wild dream, which gradually blending with, gradually gave way to a rage for metaphysics, occasioned by the essays on Liberty "and Necessity in Cato's Letters, and more by "theology. After I had read Voltaire's Philo

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sophical Dictionary, I sported infidel! but my "infidel vanity never touched my heart:"-nor ever with his lips did he for a few months only support the new light given him by Voltaire.

With my heart," says he, "I never did abandon "the name of Christ." This reached Bowyer's ears, and he sent for him: not to reason with him, as teachers and parents do too often, and by this means as often increase the vanity of these tyro-would-be-philosophers; but he took the surest mode, if not of curing, at least of checking the disease. His argument was short

and forcible." So, sirrah, you are an infidel, are you? then I'll flog your infidelity out of you;"-and gave him the severest flogging he had ever received at his hands. This, as I have often heard Coleridge say, was the only just flogging he had ever given him: certainly, from all I ever heard of him, Bowyer was strictly a flogging master. Trollope, in his History of Christ's Hospital, page 137, says of him, "His discipline was exact in the extreme, and tinctured, perhaps, with more than due severity." Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, after paying a just compliment to Bowyer as a teacher, "The reader will, I trust, excuse this tribute "of recollection to a man, whose severities, even now, not seldom furnish the dreams by which "the blind fancy would fain interpret to the mind "the painful sensation of distempered sleep, but "neither lessen nor diminish the deep sense of my moral and intellectual obligations." He had his passionate days, which the boys described as the days he wore his Passy wig (passy abbreviated from passionate). "Sirrah! I'll flog you," were words so familiar to him, that on one occasion, some female relation or friend of one of the boys entered his room, when a class stood before him and inquired for Master ; master

says,

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*

"Jemmy Bowyer," as he was familiarly called by Coleridge and Lamb, might not inaptly be termed the "plagosus Orbilius" of Christ's Hospital.