As to the vicar’s wife we know little, but enough of a glance is given into her character through letters to show that she had in her make-up a trace of noble discontent.  She was not entirely happy in her surroundings, and the amiable ways of her husband were often an exasperation to her, rather than a pleasure—­even amiability can be overdone.  He never saw more than a mile from home, but her eyes swept England from Cornwall to Scotland, and few men, even, saw so far as that a hundred years ago.  The discontent of Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the heritage of mother to son.  When Samuel was nine years of age the father passed away.  The widow would have been in sore financial straits had it not been for the older children, and even as it was, strict economy and untiring industry were in order.  Out of sympathy, Mr. Justice Buller, who had been a pupil of the Reverend John Coleridge, proposed to secure the youngest boy a scholarship in Christ’s Hospital School, and so we find him entered there, July Eighteenth, Seventeen Hundred Eighty-two.  This was a year memorable in the history of America; and the alertness of the charity boy’s intellect is shown in that he was aware of the struggle between England and the Colonies.  He discussed the situation with his schoolfellows, and explained that the mother country had made a mistake in exacting too much.  His sympathies were with the Colonies, but he thought submission on their part was in order when the stamp-tax was removed and that complete independence was absurd—­the Colonies needed some one to protect them.

Such reasoning in a boy of ten years seems strange, especially in view of the fact that a noted professor of pedagogy has recently explained to us that no child under fourteen is capable of independent reasoning.

But it is quite certain that young Coleridge’s opinions were not borrowed, for all the lad’s acquaintances, who thought of the matter at all, considered the Americans simply “rebels” who merited death.

Coleridge remained at Christ’s Hospital for eight years, and before he left had easily taken his place as “Deputy Grecian.”  Charles Lamb has given many delightful glimpses of that schoolboy life in the “Essays of Elia.”

Middleton, afterward Bishop of Calcutta, called the attention of Boyer, the master, to Coleridge by saying, “There is a boy who reads Vergil for amusement!” Boyer was a strict disciplinarian, but he was ever on the lookout for a lad who loved books—­the average youth getting out of all the study he could.

The master began to encourage young Coleridge, and Coleridge responded.  He wrote verses and essays, and was a prodigy in memorizing.  According to Boyer’s idea, and it was the prevailing idea everywhere then, and is yet in some sections, memorization was the one thing desirable.  If the subject were Plato, and the master had forgotten his book, he called on Coleridge to recite.  And the tall, fair-haired boy, with the big dreamy eyes, would rise and give page after page, “verbatim et literatim.”