Much of my future happiness they said, Bravo! Southey! In these lines how many feelings of how many oppressed little hearts you have given vent to! Improvement, I do believe, has found its way, in a great degree, since then into private schools; but in many of them still, how much remains to be done! How much more may the spirits of masters and mistresses be humanized! How much more the law of love be substituted for the law of severity! It can not be too deeply impressed on the hearts of those who take the charge of children often at a great distance, that there is no tyranny so cowardly and mean as that which is exercised, not over grown men, but over tender children. Coleridge calls this change, being "first plucked up and transplanted;" and adds—“Oh, what a change! I was a 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." For those who had friends to supply them, the distinction set up was of the most detestable kind. They had luxuries brought in and served up before these poor half-starved little wretches. Charles Lamb, under the title of Elia, describes his own case as one of these favored ones. member Lamb at school, and can well remember 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 us. The present treasurer of the Inner Temple can explain how it happened. He had his "I re tea and hot rolls in the morning, while we were battening upon our quarter of a penny loaf; our crug moistened with attenuated small beer in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was poured from. On Mondays, milk porritch, blue and tasteless, and the pease soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched for him with a slice of 'extraordinary bread and butter' from the hot loaf of the Temple. The Wednesday's mess of millet, somewhat less repugnant (we had three banyan to four meat days in the week)—was endeared to his palate with a lump of double-refined, and a smack of ginger, or the fragrant cinnamon, to make it go down the more glibly. In lieu of our half-pickled Sundays, or quite fresh boiled beef on Thursdays, strong as caro equina, with destestable marigolds floating in the pail to poison the broth; our scanty mutton crags on Fridays; and rather more savory, but grudging portions of the same flesh, rotten-roasted, or rare, on the Tuesdays-the only dish which excited our appetites, and disappointed our stomachs in almost equal proportion; he had his hot plate of roast veal, or the more tempting griskin, exotics unknown to our palates, cooked in the paternal kitchen." 66 "I," says Coleridge, giving us the other side of the case, was a poor friendless boy; my parents, and those who should have cared for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, which they could reckon on being kind to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, which they had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew tired of my holyday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I thought them few enough; one after another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among six hundred playmates. O, the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The yearnings which I used to have toward it in those unfledged years! How in my dreams would my native town, far in the west, come back, with its churches, and trees, and faces! To this late hour of my life do I trace the impressions left by the painful recollections of those friendless holydays. The long, warm days of summer never return but they bring with them a gloom from the haunting memories of those whole day's leave, when, by some strange arrangement, we were turned out for the live-long day, upon our own hands, whether we had friends to go to or none. I remember those bathing excursions to the New river, which Lamb recalls with such relish, better, I think, than he can, for he was a home-seeking lad, and did not care for such water parties. How we would sally forth into the fields, and strip under the first warmth of the sun, and wanton like young dace in the streams, getting appetites for the noon which those of us that were penniless had not the means of allaying; while the cattle, and the birds, and the fishes were at feed about us, and we had nothing to satisfy our cravings: the very beauty of the day, the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of liberty, setting a keener edge upon them! How, faint and languid, finally, we would return, toward nightfall, to our desired morsel, half-rejoicing, half-reluctant, that the hours of uneasy liberty had expired! "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 to the lions in the Tower, to whose levee, by courtesy immemorial, we had a prescriptive right of admission, and where our individual faces would be as well known to the warden as those of his own charges." What an amount of cruelty may be perpetrated even under the show of favor! what hard days for the stomach, under the guise of holydays! Coleridge was, from all accounts, at this time," a delicate and suffering boy." His stomach was weak, his feet tender, so that he was obliged to wear very large, easy shoes. This might be one cause why he more readily fell into sedentary reading habits. 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. The future author of the Ancient Mariner, and translator of Wallenstein, sitting on door-steps and at corners, with his book on his knee, was a very interesting object, if the Ancient Mariner and Wallenstein could have been seen seated in that head of black, cropped hair; as it was, it did excite attention; and Bowyer, one of those clever brutes who, on the strength of a good store of Latin and Greek, think themselves authorized to rain a good store of blows on the poor children in their power, testified his hopes of Coleridge's progress by continually and severely punishing him. He was often heard to say that "the lad was so ordinary a looking lad, with his black head, that he generally gave him, at the end of a flogging, an extra cut; for, said he, you are such an ugly fellow." Books were the poor fellow's solace for the flagellations of the masters and the neglect of the boys, among whom Lamb was not to be reckoned, for he was very fond of him and kind to him. "From eight to fourteen I was a playless day-dreamer," he observes; "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." This incident, says Gillman, was indeed 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, one hand came in contact with a gentleman's pocket. The gentleman seized his hand; turned round, and looked at him with some anger, exclaiming-" What! so young and so wicked!" at the same time accusing 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. It is stated that at this school he laid the foundation of those bodily sufferings, which made his life one of sickness and torture, and occasioned his melancholy resort to opium. He greatly injured his health, it is said, and reduced his strength by his bathing excursions; but is it not quite as likely that the deficiency of food, and those holyday days when he was turned out to starvation, had quite as much to do with it? On one occasion he swam across the New river in his clothes, and dried them on his back. This is supposed to have laid the foundation of his rheumatic pains; but may not that lying out all night in the rain at a former day have been even a still earlier predisposing cause? However that might be, he says, that "full half the time from seventeen to eighteen was passed in the sick-ward of Christ's Hospital, afflicted with jaundice and rheumatic fever." At an earlier day he had undergone a medical treatment, which was oddly enough the cause of his breaking out into verse. 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 power of common vision; and consequently, as often as she employed this miraculous sight, she found, or thought she found, fresh reason for continuing the friction, to the prolonged suffering and mortification of her patient. This occurred |