Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Seventeen Hundred Seventy-two, the son of the Reverend John Coleridge, of Ottery Saint Mary, a small village of Devonshire.  The rector was also a schoolmaster, just as all clergymen were before division of labor forced itself upon us.  This worthy clergyman was twice married, his first wife bearing him three children, the second ten.  Samuel was the last of the brood—­the thirteenth—­but his parents were not superstitious.

The youngest in a big family, like the first, is apt to have a deal of love lavished upon him.  The question of discipline has proved its own futility, and when a baby comes to parents approaching fifty, depend upon it, that child transforms the household into a monarchy, with himself as tyrant.  This may be well and it may not.

Little Samuel Taylor seemed to be aware of his power; he evolved a wondrous precocity and ruled the rectory with a rod of iron.  When he was five he propounded questions that shook the orthodoxy of the worthy vicar to its very center.

Yet, remarkable as was the intellect of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the family would not have remained in obscurity without him.  In fact, the very brightness of his fame caused the excellence of his brothers to be lost in the shadow.  His brother James became the father of Henry Nelson Coleridge, who married his cousin Sara, the daughter of our poet.

To anticipate a little, it is well enough here to say that the daughter of Coleridge was a woman of remarkable excellence, and if you wish to disprove the adage that genius does not transmit itself she is a good example to bring up—­even though there is a difference between fact and truth.  James Coleridge was also the father of Mr. Justice Coleridge, himself the father of Lord Chief Justice Coleridge.

And since iconoclasm is not out of place in an essay on Coleridge, it can also be stated that when Sara Coleridge married her cousin she did a wise thing.  The marriage was a most happy one, and the children of these cousins have shown themselves to be beyond the average.  And once, certainly not with his daughter in mind, Coleridge debated the question of consanguinity with Charles Lamb, and proved to his own satisfaction at least that the marriage of cousins was eminently sane, proper, just and right, and fraught with the best results for humanity.

The only indictment that can be brought against the father of Coleridge is that he was a zealous Latin scholar, and proposed that the term “ablative” be abolished as insufficient, and in its stead should be used that of “quale-quare-quiddative case.”  He was a simple, amiable, excellent man who did his work the best he could, and was beloved by all the parish.  As to the excellence of the established order of things he had no doubts—­government and religion were divine institutions and should be upheld by all honest men.