similar features.  Yet I receive as much pleasure in reading the account of the battle, in Herodotus, as anyone can.  Charles Lamb wrote an essay on a man who lived in past time:  I thought of adding another to it on one who lived not in time at all, past, present, or future—­but beside or collaterally.

Some of Coleridge’s other memories are of a more trifling and amusing sort.  He recalls, for instance, the occasion of his only flogging at school.  He had gone to a shoemaker and asked to be taken on as an apprentice.  The shoemaker, “being an honest man,” had at once told the boy’s master: 

Bowyer asked me why I had made myself such a fool? to which I answered, that I had a great desire to be a shoemaker, and that I hated the thought of being a clergyman.  “Why so?” said he.  “Because, to tell you the truth, sir,” said I, “I am an infidel!” For this, without more ado, Bowyer flogged me—­wisely, as I think—­soundly, as I know.  Any whining or sermonizing would have gratified my vanity, and confirmed me in my absurdity; as it was, I laughed at, and got heartily ashamed of my folly.

Among the reminiscences of Coleridge no passage is more famous than that in which he relates how, as he was walking in a lane near Highgate one day, a “loose, slack, not well-dressed youth” was introduced to him: 

It was Keats.  He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so.  After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said:  “Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!” “There is death in that hand,” I said to ——­, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.

Another famous anecdote relates to the time at which Coleridge, like Wordsworth, carried the fires of the French Revolution about him into the peace of the West Country.  Speaking of a fellow-disciple of the liberty of those days, Coleridge afterwards said: 

John Thelwall had something very good about him.  We were once sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks, when I said to him:  “Citizen John, this is a fine place to talk treason in!” “Nay!  Citizen Samuel,” replied he, “it is rather a place to make a man forget that there is any necessity for treason!”

Is there any prettier anecdote in literary history?

Besides the impersonal wisdom and the personal anecdotes of the Table Talk, however, there are a great number of opinions which show us Coleridge not as a seer, but as a “character”—­a crusty gentleman, every whit as ready to express an antipathy as a principle.  He shared Dr. Johnson’s quarrel with the Scots, and said of them: