Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Page 5

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 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 loaf--our '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-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, (to make it go down the more glibly) or the fragrant cinnamon.
In lieu of our 'half-pickled' Sundays, or 'quite fresh' boiled beef on
Thursdays, (strong as caro equina), with detestable marigolds floating
in the pail to poison the broth--our scanty mutton crags on Fridays--and
rather more savoury, 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.
"I (Coleridge) was a poor friendless boy, my parents, and those who
should have cared for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of
their's, which they could reckon upon 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 holiday 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 towards it in
those unfledged years! How in my dreams would my native town come

back (far in the west) with its churches and trees and faces! To this late
hour of my life, and even to the end of it did Coleridge trace
impressions left by the painful recollection of these friendless holidays.
The long warm days of summer never return but they bring with them a
gloom from the haunting memory 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