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, says, "The reader will, I trust, excuse this tribute 66 66 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 * "Jemmy Bowyer," as he was familiarly called by Coleridge and Lamb, might not inaptly be termed the "plagosus orbilius" of Christ's Hospital. was no school title with Bowyer. The errand of this lady being to ask a short leave of absence for some boy, on the sudden appearance in town of his country cousin, still lingering at the door, after having been abruptly told to go, Bowyer suddenly exclaimed, "Bring that woman here, and I'll flog her!" Coleridge's themes in his fifteenth year,* in verse as well as prose, marked him as a boy of great talent, but of talent only according to his own definition of it (vide “Friend," vol. iii. edit. 1818). His verse was good, his prose powerful, and language correct, and beyond his years in depth of thought, but as yet he had not manifested, according to the same test, anything of genius. I met among some of his notes, written at the age of fifty-one, the following critique on one of his schoolboy themes: "This theme was "written at the age of fifteen: it does not con"tain a line that any schoolboy might not have "written, and like most school-poetry, there is a "putting of thoughts into verse. Yet such verses "as a striving of mind and struggles after the "intense and vivid, are a fair promise of better 66 things." The same observation might be made in the intense application of his intellectual powers in search of truth, at the time he called himself * In his biographical sketch of his literary life, he informs us that he had translated the eight Hymns of Synesius from the Greek, into English Anacreontics, before his fifteenth year. an infidel; in this struggle of mind was the "fair promise of better things." It was the preparation necessary for such a mind; the breaking up and tilling of the soil for the successful germination of the seeds of truth. The sleeping powers of thought were roused and excited into action. Perhaps this may be considered, as entering too early into the history of his mind in boyhood: to this I reply, that the entire man so to speak, is to be seen even in the cradle of the child.* The serious may be startled at the thought of a young man passing through such an ordeal; but with him it was the exercise of his strength, in order that he might "fight the good fight," and conquer for that truth which is permanent, and is the light and the life of every one who comes into the world, and who is in earnest search of it. In his sixteenth year he composed the allegory of "Real and Imaginary Time," first published in the Sibylline Leaves, having been accidentally omitted in the Juvenile Poems, "On the wide level of a mountain's head, (I knew not where, but 'twas some fairy place) the childhood shews the man, As morning shews the day. Paradise Regained, book iv. v. 220. A sister and a brother! That far outstripped the other; And looks and listens for the boy behind; O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed, in which may be traced the first dawnings of his genius. He pictures to himself a boy returning to school after the holidays; in his day-dreams making plans for the future, and anticipating the pleasure he is to enjoy on his return home; his vivid thoughts, and sanguine expectations "far outstripping" the reality of time as marked by the watch or almanack. Real time is personified as a blind boy steadily pursuing his path; whilst imaginary time is represented as a fleeting girl, looking back and listening for her brother whom she has outrun. Perhaps to Mr. Bowyer's excellent method of instruction may be attributed this early developement of his genius. Coleridge remarks of him, "He was 66 66 66 an admirable educer, no less than educator of intellect; he taught me to leave out as many epithets as would make eight syllable lines, and "then ask if the exercise would not be greatly improved." Although in this year he began to indulge in metaphysical speculations, he was wedded to verse, and many of his early poems 66 * Aldine Edition, Vol. i. p. 6.—Pickering, London, 1834. 66 were planned; some of which he finished, and they were published in the "Juvenile Poems," on his entry into life; but as many more were scattered among his friends, who had greatly increased in number. About this time he became acquainted with a widow lady, "whose son," says he," I, as upper boy, had protected, "and who therefore looked up to me, and taught 66 me what it was to have a mother. I loved her "as such. She had three daughters, and of "course I fell in love with the eldest. From this "time to my nineteenth year, when I quitted school for Jesus, Cambridge, was the era of 66 poetry and love." It has been observed, that about this sixteenth year, he first developed genius, and that during this early period of his life, his mind was incessantly toiling in the pursuit of knowledge. His love of reading seemed to have increased in proportion to his acquirements, which were equally great: his representing himself as an infidel was better perhaps understood by his master, who believed it to be only puerile vanity; and therefore Coleridge considered the flogging he received on this occasion, a just and appropriate punishment; and it was so, for as a boy he had not thought deep enough on an equally important point, viz., what is Fidelity, and how easily, he particularly might mistake the genuineness of sincere fidelity for mere outward forms, and the simple observ |