CHAPTER XI 



THE GROVE, HIGHGATE, AND SAMUEL TAYLOR 



COLERIDGE 



IF the history of William Hogarth, as we have just seen, was 

 uneventful, and, except in the episode of his run-away 

 marriage, entirely devoid of romance, the illustrious poet and 

 philosopher, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was born eight years 

 after the death of the great English painter of men and manners, 

 crowded as much of adventure and poignant emotion as was 

 possible into sixty-two years of a life mainly devoted to sedentary 

 pursuits. 



For the benefit of those who may have forgotten, I would recall 

 that the author of " Christabel " and " The Ancient Mariner," 

 was the youngest son of the Vicar and schoolmaster of St. Mary 

 Ottery, a village in Devonshire, that boasted a grammar school 

 at which, under his parent's eye, the future poet received the 

 rudiments of his education. His father dying when he was about 

 nine years old, Samuel was presented to a scholarship at Christ's 

 Hospital, spending some eight years of his life there, and he rarely 

 visited his native place after he had left it. 



" He was transplanted," says he himself, " before his soul had 

 fixed its first domestic loves," and his filial and fraternal feelings 

 do not appear to have been very strong. He seems, however, to 

 have retained an admiring recollection of the rural beauty of his 

 early home, for the sensitive boy spent much of his spare time 

 lying on the leads of the School House of Christ's Hospital, gazing 

 at the sky and dreaming of the scenes of his childhood. 



He tells us that " he never closed his eyes in the sun without 

 seeing afresh the waters of the Otter and its willowy banks, the 



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