CHAPTER XI 
THE GROVE, HIGHGATE, AND SAMUEL TAYLOR 
COLERIDGE 
F the history of William Hogarth, as we have just seen, was 
I 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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