Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Page 8

he, "I was chosen by my master as one of those
destined for the university; and about this time my brother Luke, or 'the
Doctor,' so called from his infancy, because being the seventh son, he
had, from his infancy, been dedicated to the medical profession, came
to town to walk the London Hospital, under the care of Sir William
Blizard. Mr. Saumarez, brother of the Admiral Lord Saumarez, was his
intimate friend. Every Saturday I could make or obtain leave, to the
London Hospital trudged I. O the bliss if I was permitted to hold the
plasters, or to attend the dressings. Thirty years afterwards, Mr.
Saumarez retained the liveliest recollections of the extraordinary,
enthusiastic blue-coat boy, and was exceedingly affected in identifying
me with that boy. I became wild to be apprenticed to a surgeon. English,
Latin, yea, Greek books of medicine read I incessantly. Blanchard's
Latin Medical Dictionary I had nearly by heart. Briefly, it was a wild
dream, which gradually blending with, gradually gave way to a rage for
metaphysics, occasioned by the essays on Liberty and Necessity in
Cato's Letters, and more by theology. After I had read Voltaire's
Philosophical Dictionary, I sported infidel! but my infidel vanity never
touched my heart:"
nor ever with his lips did he for a few months only support the new
light given him by Voltaire.

"With my heart," says he, "I never did abandon the name of Christ."
This reached Bowyer's ears, and he sent for him: not to reason with him,
as teachers and parents do too often, and by this means as often
increase the vanity of these tyro-would-be-philosophers; but he took
the surest mode, if not of curing, at least of checking the disease. His
argument was short and forcible.
"So, sirrah, you are an infidel, are you? then I'll flog your infidelity out
of you;"
and gave him the severest flogging he had ever received at his hands.
This, as I have often heard Coleridge say, was the only just flogging he
had ever given him: certainly, from all I ever heard of him, Bowyer was
strictly a flogging master. Trollope, in his History of Christ's Hospital,
page 137, says of him,
"His discipline was exact in the extreme, and tinctured, perhaps, with
more than due severity." [8]
Coleridge, in his 'Biographia Literaria', after paying a just compliment
to Bowyer as a teacher, says,
"The reader will, I trust, excuse this tribute of recollection to a man,
whose severities, even now, not seldom furnish the dreams by which
the blind fancy would fain interpret to the mind the painful sensation of
distempered sleep, but neither lessen nor diminish the deep sense of my
moral and intellectual obligations."
He had his passionate days, which the boys described as the days he
wore his Passy wig (passy abbreviated from passionate). "Sirrah! I'll
flog you," were words so familiar to him, that on one occasion, some
female relation or friend of one of the boys entered his room, when a
class stood before him and inquired for Master--; master was no school
title with Bowyer. The errand of this lady being to ask a short leave of
absence for some boy, on the sudden appearance in town of his country
cousin, still lingering at the door, after having been abruptly told to go,
Bowyer suddenly exclaimed, "Bring that woman here, and I'll flog

her!"
Coleridge's themes in his fifteenth year, [9] in verse as well as prose,
marked him as a boy of great talent, but of talent only according to his
own definition of it (vide "Friend," vol. iii. edit. 1818). His verse was
good, his prose powerful, and language correct, and beyond his years in
depth of thought, but as yet he had not manifested, according to the
same test, anything of genius. I met among some of his notes, written at
the age of fifty-one, the following critique on one of his schoolboy
themes:
"This theme was written at the age of fifteen: it does not contain a line
that any schoolboy might not have written, and like most school-poetry,
there is a putting of thoughts into verse. Yet such verses as a striving of
mind and struggles after the intense and vivid, are a fair promise of
better things."
The same observation might be made in the intense application of his
intellectual powers in search of truth, at the time he called himself an
infidel; in this struggle of mind was the "fair promise of better things."
It was the preparation necessary for such a mind; the breaking up and
tilling of the soil for the successful germination of the seeds of truth.
The sleeping powers of thought were roused and excited into action.
Perhaps this may be considered, as entering too early into the