Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Page 7

engaged in some book. This had attracted the notice of
Middleton, at that time a deputy grecian, and going up to him one day,
asked what he was reading; the answer was "Virgil." "Are you then,"
said M. "studying your lesson?" "No," said C., "I am reading it for
pleasure;" for he had not yet arrived at Virgil in his class studies. This
struck Middleton as something so peculiar, that he mentioned it to the
head master, as Coleridge was then in the grammar school (which is the
lower part of the classical school), and doing the work of the lower
boys. The Rev. James Bowyer, who was at that time head master, a
quick discerning man, but hasty and severe, sent for the master of the
grammar school, and inquired about Coleridge; from him he learnt that
he was a dull and inapt scholar, and that he could not be made to repeat
a single rule of syntax, although he would give a rule in his own way.
This brought Coleridge before Bowyer, and to this circumstance may
be attributed the notice which he afterwards took of him: the school and
his scholars were every thing to him, and Coleridge's neglect and
carelessness never went unpunished. I have often heard him say, he was
so ordinary a looking boy, with his black head, that Bowyer generally
gave him at the end of a flogging an extra cut; "for," said he, "you are
such an ugly fellow!"
When, by the odd accident before mentioned, he was made a subscriber
to the library in King Street,
"I read," says he, "'through' the catalogue, folios and all, whether I

understood them, or did not understand them, running all risks in
skulking out to get the two volumes which I was entitled to have daily.
Conceive what I must have been at fourteen; I was in a continual low
fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present
sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner, and read, read, read;
fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's island, finding a mountain of
plumb-cake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the
shapes of tables and chairs--hunger and fancy!"
In his lad-hood he says,
"My talents and superiority made me for ever at the head in my routine
of study, though utterly without the desire to be so; without a spark of
ambition; and, as to emulation, it had no meaning for me; but the
difference between me and my form-fellows, in our lessons and
exercises, bore no proportion to the measureless difference between me
and them in the wide, wild, wilderness of useless, unarranged
book-knowledge and book-thoughts. Thank Heaven! it was not the age
nor the fashion of getting up prodigies; but at twelve or fourteen I
should have made as pretty a juvenile prodigy as was ever emasculated
and ruined by fond and idle wonderment. Thank Heaven! I was flogged
instead of flattered. However, as I climbed up the school, my lot was
somewhat alleviated."
When Coleridge arrived at the age of fifteen, he was, from the little
comfort he experienced, very desirous of quitting the school, and, as he
truly said, he had not a spark of ambition. Near the school there resided
a worthy, and, in their rank of life, a respectable middle-aged couple.
The husband kept a little shop, and was a shoemaker, with whom
Coleridge had become intimate. The wife, also, had been kind and
attentive to him, and this was sufficient to captivate his affectionate
nature, which had existed from earliest childhood, and strongly
endeared him to all around him. Coleridge became exceedingly
desirous of being apprenticed to this man, to learn the art of
shoemaking; and in due time, when some of the boys were old enough
to leave the school, and be put to trade, Coleridge, being of the number,
tutored his friend Crispin how to apply to the head master, and not to

heed his anger should he become irate. Accordingly, Crispin applied at
the hour proposed to see Bowyer; who, having heard the proposal to
take Coleridge as an apprentice, and Coleridge's answer and assent to
become a shoemaker, broke forth with his favourite adjuration, "'Ods
my life, man, what d'ye mean?" At the sound of his angry voice,
Crispin stood motionless, till the angry pedagogue becoming infuriate,
pushed the intruder out of the room with such force, that Crispin might
have sustained an action at law against him for an assault. Thus, to
Coleridge's mortification and regret, as he afterwards in joke would
say,
"I lost the opportunity of supplying safeguards to the understandings of
those, who perhaps will never thank me for what I am aiming to do in
exercising their reason.
"Against my will," says