Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Page 4

a schoolmaster his singularities were of the same character,
manifesting the same simplicity and honesty of purpose. I have before
stated that he wrote a Latin Grammar for the use of his school, and
instead of the word ablative, in general use, he compounded three or
four Latin words [4] as explanatory of this case. Whether the mothers
were startled at the repetition of these words, and thought of the
hardships their sons would have to endure in the acquirement of 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 (who died in infancy), James,
William, Edward, George, Luke, Ann, Francis, and myself, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, beneficially abridged Esteese [Greek: estaesae], 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 my birth, and whom alone of the three I was
wont to think of as a sister, though not exactly, 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 brother
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 mother'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 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 nettles,
as one of the seven champions of Christendom. [5] 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 whether it was in my fifth or sixth year, but I 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 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."
"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, simple-hearted father is
a religion to me!"
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!" [6] he
goes on in the note above quoted.
"Depressed, moping, friendless, poor orphan, half starved; (at that time
the portion of food to the Bluecoats was cruelly