Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Page 6

young dace in the streams; getting appetites for
the noon; which those of us that were penny less (our scanty morning
crust long since exhausted) 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, and 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 (where our individual faces would be as
well known to the warden as those of his own charges) to the lions in
the Tower, to whose levee, by courtesy immemorial, we had a
prescriptive right of admission."
In short, nearly the whole of this essay of Elia's is a transcript of
Coleridge's account of the school. 'Never was a friend or schoolfellow
more fondly attached to another than Lamb to Coleridge. The latter
from his own account, as well as from Lamb and others who knew him
when at school, must have been a delicate and suffering boy. His
principal ailments he owed much to the state of his stomach, which was
at that time so delicate, that when compelled to go to a large closet
(shoe-bin, its school name,) containing shoes, to pick out a pair easy to

his feet, which were always tender, and he required shoes so large that
he could walk in them, rather than with them, and the smell, from the
number in this place, used to make him so sick, that I have often seen
him shudder, even in late life, when he gave an account of it. In this
note, continuing an account of himself at school, he says,
"From eight to fourteen I was a playless day-dreamer, 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."
The incident, indeed, was singular: going down the Strand, in one of
his day-dreams, fancying himself swimming across the Hellespont,
thrusting his hands before him as in the act of swimming, his hand
came in contact with a gentleman's pocket; the gentleman seized his
hand, turning round and looking at him with some anger, "What! so
young, and so wicked?" at the same time accused 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.
In his bathing excursions he had greatly injured his health, and reduced
his strength; in one of these bathing exploits he swam across the New
River in his clothes, and dried them in the fields on his back: from
these excursions commenced those bodily sufferings which embittered
the rest of his life, and rendered it truly one of sickness and suffering.
When a boy 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

common vision; and consequently, as often as she employed this
miraculous sight, she found or thought she found fresh reasons for
continuing the friction, to the prolonged suffering and mortification of
her patient. This occurred when he was about eight years of age, and
gave rise to his first attempt at making a verse, as follows:
"O Lord, have mercy on me! For I am very sad! For why, good Lord?
I've got the itch, And eke I've got the 'tad',"
the school name for ringworm. He was to be found during play-hours
often with the knees of his breeches unbuttoned, and his shoes down at
the heel, [7] walking to and fro, or sitting on a step, or in a corner,
deeply