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this grammar, I can only conjecture; but it seems he thought it his duty to explain to the ladies, in justice to their feelings, his learned reasons for the alteration he had made in the name of this case.

I had often pressed him to write some account of his early life, and of the various circumstances connected with it. But the aversion he had to read or write any thing about himself was so great, that I never succeeded, except in obtaining a few notes, rather than a detailed account. There would be little either useful or interesting in any account of Coleridge's life, which a stranger to him could give; therefore, from the best authorities with which I am acquainted, and from an intimacy of nearly twenty years, is this memoir of my late lamented friend compiled. He commences one of the notes above alluded to, with his early childhood. "I was," says he, "the last child, the youngest child of ten by the "same mother, that is to say, John, William

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(who died in infancy), James, William, Ed"ward, George, Luke, Ann, Francis, and my"self, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, beneficially abridged Esteese (Earnon), i. e. S. T. C., and the thirteenth, taking in three sisters by my dear “father's first wife, - Mary, afterwards Mrs. Bradley, Sarah, who married a seaman and "is lately dead, and Elizabeth, afterwards Mrs. Phillips-who alone was bred up with us after

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my birth, and whom alone of the three I was "wont to think of as a sister, though not exactly,

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yet I did not know why, the same sort of sister, as my sister Nancy. Being the youngest child, I possibly inherited the weakly state of "health of my father, who died at the age of 62, "before I had reached my seventh year; and "from certain jealousies of old Molly, my bro"ther Frank's dotingly fond nurse, (and if ever "child by beauty and loveliness deserved to be "doted on, my brother Francis was that child,) "and by the infusions of her jealousy into my "brother's mind, I was in earliest childhood "huffed away from the enjoyments of muscular activity from play, to take refuge at my mo"ther's side, on my little stool, to read my little book, and to listen to the talk of my elders. "I was driven from life in motion, to life in thought and sensation. I never played except

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by myself, and then only acting over what I "had been reading or fancying, or half one, half "the other, with a stick cutting down weeds and

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nettles, as one of the seven champions of Chris"tendom.* Alas! I had all the simplicity, all "the docility of the little child, but none of the "child's habits. I never thought as a child, "never had the language of a child. I forget

*He had, before he was six years old, read three times through the Arabian Nights, or rather one of the volumes.-See "The Friend," vol. i. p. 252, ed. 1818.

"whether it was in my fifth or sixth year, but I

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believe the latter, in consequence of some quarrel between me and my brother, in the first "week in October, I ran away from fear of being

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whipped, and passed the whole night, a night “of rain and storm, on the bleak side of a hill on the Otter, and was there found at daybreak, "without the power of using my limbs, about six yards from the naked bank of the river.

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"In my seventh year, about the same time, if "not the very same time, i. e. Oct. 4th, my most dear, most revered father, died suddenly. O that I might so pass away, if like him I were "an Israelite without guile. The image of my father, my revered, kind, learned, simplehearted father is a religion to me!"

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Judge Buller who had been educated by his father, had always promised to adopt the son, at least to educate him, foreseeing that Samuel, the youngest, was likely to be left an orphan early in life. Soon after the death of the Rev. John Coleridge, the Judge obtained from John Way, Esq., one of the governors of Christ's Hospital, a presentation to that school, and young Coleridge was sent by the Judge and placed there on the 18th July, 1782. "O! what a "change!"* he goes on in the note above quoted.

* I insert a similar observation on his feelings when he first left home. "When I was first plucked up and transplanted from

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Depressed, moping, friendless, poor orphan, "half starved; (at that time the portion of food to "the Bluecoats was cruelly insufficient for those "who had no friends to supply them)." In the late Mr. Charles Lamb's "Works” published in 1818, there is an account of the school, entitled "Recollections of Christ's Hospital." In 1823 there is a second essay on the same subject by Lamb, under the assumed title of " Elia,”—Elia supposed to be intimate with Lamb and Coleridge. This second account, entitled Christ's Hospital five-and-thirty years ago," gave umbrage to some of the "Blues," as they termed themselves, as differing so much from the first in full praise of this valuable foundation, and particularly as a school from which he had benefited so much. In the preface to the second series, Elia says, "What he (Elia) tells of himself is often true only (historically) of another when under the first person he shadows forth the forlorn state of a country boy placed at a London

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my birth place and family, at the death of my dear father, whose "revered image has ever survived in my mind, to make me know "what the emotions and affections of a son are, and how ill a "father's place is likely to be supplied by any other relation, Pro"vidence (it has often occurred to me) gave the first intimation, "that it was my lot, and that it was best for me, to make or find my way of life a detached individual, a Terræ Filius, who was to "ask love or service of no one on any more specific relation than "that of being a man, and as such to take my chance for the free "charities of humanity."

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school far from his friends and connexions," which is in direct opposition to Lamb's own early history. The second account, under the personification of Elia, is drawn from the painful recollections and sufferings of Coleridge while at school, which I have often heard him relate.

Lamb told Coleridge one day that the friendless school boy in his " Elia," (soon after its publication) was intended for him, and taken from his description of the Blue-coat school. After Coleridge's death, Lamb related the same circumstance to me, that he had drawn the account from Coleridge's feelings, sufferings, &c., Lamb having himself been an indulged boy and peculiarly favoured through the instrumentality of a friend :-" I remember," says Elia," Lamb at school, and can well recollect that he had some peculiar advantages, which I and others of his schoolfellows had not. His friends lived in town and were at hand, and he had the privilege of going to see them almost as often as he wished, through some invidious distinction which was denied to us. The present treasurer of the Inner Temple can explain how it happened. He had his tea and hot rolls in the morning, while we were battening upon our quarter of penny loafour crug moistened with attenuated small beer in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was poured from. On Monday's milk porritch, blue and tasteless, and the pease

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