The Argosy — page 132: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ey Hospital, and became a bluecoat scholar. There he remained for several years, his mind unfolding in the direction which was natural to it. He did not distinguish himself especially by his classical pro- ficiency, but he showed he was a lad of mark in ways not so common among boys at public schools. He wrote much original composition, delighting especially in flights into poetry, and he read a vast number of books of all kinds. He is said to have carried on, indeed, quite a book-trade as a school-boy. He was incessantly picking up odd volumes on bookstalls, and going through intricate negotiations with his school comrades with regard to the sale, and purchase, and ex- change of books. From those school days at Christ’s Hospital dates a friendship which was to be one of the brightest flowers in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s life; this was his friendship with Charles Lamb. We can picture to ourselves what sort of a boy’s friendship that must have been. What rare and novel games in the playground; what fireworks of fun flashing from bed to bed after the candles were put out in the dormitory; what evil days for dull, heavy boys when the pair took it into their heads to go forth on a grand campaign of mischief. ‘Then, in more thoughtful moments, what sharing of bright, rainbow dreams of the future; what high aspirations whispered by each to each ; what noble, earnest resolves made and kept the longer because they were made and kept together. At nineteen young Coleridge became an undergraduate at Jesus. College, Cambridge. There was a certain amount of indolence in: his character, and this prevented his gaining any very brilliant honours at the University. His mind was far more occupied with the leading questions of his day, than it was with dead languages and classical literature. His was a vigorous, energetic intellect, which threw itself into the struggles and heart-searchings and difficulties of the times. in which he lived with vivid force and intensity, but possessed scanty ambition in the direction of the learning of the schools: so that, as far as this was concerned, he yielded to the native physical indolence. of which we have spoken above. In his rooms at college, Homer and Thucydides were thrust aside to make way for recent publications which told of the state of men’s minds in Europe, of rising schools of philosophy, of new, wild dreams of liberty and equality. When his friends came to spend the evening with him, he repeated to them no elegant Latin verses, but a pamphlet written by Edmund Burke, which he had learned by heart in the course of a single morning. The mind of young Coleridge at this period was indeed so inces- santly floating away upon a sea of grand, speculative thought that it became far too careless with regard to everyday temporal matters around him ; and of this, when he had been about a year at Cam- bridge, he received a most convincing and uncomfortable proof. | One morning the young undergraduate found lying on his break- fast-table, a bill to the amount of 4100, from one of the leading COnniclooolkks (CO)