utrid fever at the same time. But on this occasion Frank displayed
his courageous kindness; for, in contempt of orders to the contrary, and
in contempt of the danger, he stole up to the bedside of little Samuel
and read Pope's 'Homer' to him. This made it evident that Frank's
partiality for thumping S. T. C. did really arise very much out of a
lurking love for him; since George, though a most amiable boy, and ill
of the same fever in another room, was left to get well in the usual
way, by medicine and slops, without any thumping certainly, but also
without any extra consolations from either Iliad or Odyssey. But what
ministered perpetual fuel to the thumping-mania of Francis Coleridge was
a furor of jealousy--strangely enough not felt by him, but felt _for_
him by his old privileged nurse. She could not inspire her own passions
into Francis, but she could point his scorn to the infirmities of his
rival. Francis had once reigned paramount in the vicarage as universal
pet. But he had been dethroned by Samuel, who now reigned in his stead.
Samuel felt no triumph at that revolution; Francis no anger. But the
nurse suffered the pangs of a baffled stepmother, and looked with
novercal eyes of hatred and disgust upon little Sam that had stolen away
the hearts of men and women from one that in _her_ eyes was a thousand
times his superior. In that last point nurse was not so entirely wrong,
but that nine-tenths of the world (and therefore, we fear, of our
dearly-beloved readers) would have gone along with her, on which account
it is that we have forborne to call her 'wicked old nurse.' Francis
Coleridge, her own peculiar darling, was memorable for his beauty. All
the brothers were handsome--'remarkably handsome,' says S. T. C., 'but
_they_,' he adds, 'were as inferior to Francis as _I_ am to _them_.'[11]

Reading this and other descriptions of Frank Coleridge's beauty (in our
Indian army he was known as the _handsome Coleridge_), we are disposed
to cry out with Juliet,

'Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feathered raven!'

when we find how very nearly his thoughtless violence had hurried poor
S. T. C. into an early death. The story is told circumstantially by
Coleridge himself in one of the letters to Mr. Poole; nor is there any
scene more picturesque than this hasty sketch in Brookes's 'Fool of
Quality.' We must premise that S. T. C. had asked his mother for a
particular indulgence requiring some dexterity to acc