Coleridge, whose simple, unworldly character is as well known as his
genius, seems to have inherited his particular disposition from his
father. His father was the Rev. John Coleridge, the vicar of Ottery
St. Mary, in Devonshire. He was a learned man, the head master of
the free grammar-school at Ottery, as well as vicar. He had been
previously head master of the school at South Molton, and was one of
the persons who assisted Dr. Kennicott in his Hebrew Bible. "He was an
exceedingly studious man," says Gillman, on the authority of Coleridge
himself, "pious, of primitive manners, and the most simple habits:
passing events were little heeded by him, and therefore he was usually
characterized as 'the absent man.'" Coleridge was born October 21st,
1772, the youngest of thirteen children, of which nine were sons, one
of whom died in infancy. Of all these sons Coleridge is said to have
most resembled his father in mind and habit. His mother was, except
for education, in which she was deficient, a most fitting wife for
such a man. She was an active, careful housekeeper and manager, looked
well after worldly affairs, and was ambitious to place her sons well
in the world. She always told them to look after good, substantial,
sensible women, and not after fine harpsichord ladies. Coleridge used
to relate many instances of his father's absence of mind, one or two
of which we may quote. On one occasion, having to breakfast with his
bishop, he went, as was the practice of that day, into a barber's shop
to have his head shaved, wigs being then in common use. Just as the
operation was completed, the clock struck nine, the hour at which the
bishop punctually breakfasted. Roused as from a revery, he instantly
left the barber's shop, and in his haste forgetting his wig, appeared
at the breakfast-table, where the bishop and his party had assembled.
The bishop, well acquainted with his absent manners, courteously and
playfully requested him to walk into an adjoining room, and give his
opinion of a mirror which had arrived from London a few days
previously, and which disclosed to his astonished guest the
consequence of his haste and forgetfulness.
The old gentleman, Coleridge also related, had to take a journey on
some professional business, which would detain him from home for three
or four days: his good wife, in her care and watchfulness, had packed
a few things in a small trunk, and gave them in charge to her husband,
with strong injunctions that he was to put on a clean shirt every day.
On his return home, his wife went to search for his linen, when, to
her dismay, it was not in the trunk. A closer search, however,
discovered that the vicar had strictly obeyed her injunctions, and had
put on daily a clean shirt, but had forgotten to remove the one
underneath. This might have been the pleasantest and most portable
mode of carrying half-a-dozen shirts in winter, but not so in the
dog-days.
The poor idolized him and paid him the greatest reverence; and among
other causes, for the odd one of quoting the original Hebrew liberally
in his sermons. They felt themselves particularly favored by his
giving them "the very words the Spirit spoke in;" the agricultural
population flocked in from the neighborhood with great eagerness to
hear him on this account; and such an opinion did they acquire of his
learning, that they regarded his successor with much contempt, because
he addressed them in simple English. This worthy old man died when
Coleridge was about seven years old only.
He seems to have been a delicate child, of timid disposition. Being so
much younger than his brothers, he never came in to be a playfellow of
theirs, and thus to acquire physical hardihood and activity. "I was,"
he says, "in earliest childhood huffed away from the enjoyment of
muscular activity in play, to take refuge at my mother's side, or on
my little stool to read my 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. Alas! I had all the simplicity, all the docility of a
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 a 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."
This anecdote has been differently related by Cottle, and by the
author of Pen and Pencil Sketches. They state that little Sammy
Coleridge, as they call him, when between three and four years of age,
had got a thread and a crooked pin from his elder sister Ann, and,
unknown to the family, had set out to fish in the Otter. That he had
wandered on and on, till, overtaken by fatigue, he lay down and slept.
That he continued out all night, to the consternation of the family,
and was found by a wagoner the next morning, who, going along the road
at four o'clock, thought he heard a child's voice. He stopped, and
listened. He now heard the voice cry out, "Betty! Betty! I can't pull
up the clothes." The wagoner went to the margin of the river, where he
saw, to his astonishment, a little child with a withy bough in his
hand, which hung over the stream, pulling hard, and on the very point
of dragging himself into the water. The child when awakened, as well
as frightened, could only say his name was Sammy, and the wagoner
carrying him into Ottery, joy indescribable spread through the town
and the parsonage.
Which version of this story is the more correct, who shall decide?
Little Coleridge, at the age of ten, was placed in Christ's Hospital
in London, through the influence of Judge Buller, who had been
educated by his father. This school was then, it seems, conducted in a
very miserable and unkind manner. Coleridge was half starved there,
neglected and wretched. The first bitter experiences of children who
have had tolerable homes, of such as have had a decent house over
their heads, and decent parents or friends, is on going to school.
There has, no doubt, been much improvement in these as in other
respects of late years. Schoolmasters, like other men, have felt the
growing influences of civilization and true feeling. But there is yet
much to be done in schools. Let it be remembered that fagging and
flogging still continue in our great public schools of Westminster,
Eton, and others. Riding the other day on the top of an omnibus
through London, we could, from that popular eminence, see the master
of a naval and military school exercising his vocation with the cane
on one of his unhappy scholars. This I presume is a part of what the
boys are systematically taught there--the preparatory initiation into
the floggings that they are likely to get in the army or navy. That is
bad and brutalizing enough, but that we are not yet advanced beyond
the absurd idea of driving learning into our gentlemen with the cudgel
and the birch, says very little indeed for our advance in true social
philosophy. Southey gives a very lively idea of the school change in a
boy's life, in his Hymn to the Penates.
"When first a little one I left my home,
I can remember the first grief I felt,
And the first painful smile that clothed my front
With feelings not its own. Sadly at night
I sat me down beside a stranger's hearth;
And when the lingering hour of rest was come,
First wet with tears my pillow."