CHAPTER X. THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM (1800-1850)holds his poetry, he had and still has a cheering message, full
of beauty and hope and inspiration. Such is Coleridge, a man
of grief who makes the world glad.
LIFE.In 1772 there lived in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, a
queer little man, the Rev. John Coleridge, vicar of the parish
church and master of the local grammar school. In the former
capacity he preached profound sermons, quoting to open-
mouthed rustics long passages from the Hebrew, which he
told them was the very tongue of the Holy Ghost. In the
latter capacity he wrote for his boys a new Latin grammar,
to mitigate some of the difficulties of traversing that terrible
jungle by means of ingenious bypaths and short cuts. For in-
stance, when his boys found the ablative a somewhat difficult
case to understand, he told them to think of it as thequale-
quare-quidditivecase, which of course makes its meaning per-
fectly clear. In both these capacities the elder Coleridge was
a sincere man, gentle and kindly, whose memory was "like
a religion" to his sons and daughters. In that same year was
born Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the youngest of thirteen chil-
dren. He was an extraordinarily precocious child, who could
read at three years of age, and who, before he was five, had
read the Bible and the Arabian Nights, and could remember
an astonishing amount from both books. From three to six
he attended a "dame" school; and from six till nine (when
his father died and left the family destitute) he was in his
father’s school, learning the classics, reading an enormous
quantity of English books, avoiding novels, and delighting in
cumbrous theological and metaphysical treatises. At ten he
was sent to the Charity School of Christ’s Hospital, London,
where he met Charles Lamb, who records his impression of
the place and of Coleridge in one of his famous essays.^191
Coleridge seems to have remained in this school for seven or
eight years without visiting his home,–a poor, neglected boy,
whose comforts and entertainments were all within himself.
(^191) See "Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," inEssays of Elia.