ption of them that entitled Samuel to
reward. That reward was one penny, so that in degree of merit, after
all, the service may not have ranked high. But what perplexes us is the
_kind_ of merit. Did it bear some mystical or symbolic sense? Was it
held to argue a spirit of general rebellion against Philosophy, that S.
T. C. should so early in life, by one and the same act, proclaim
mutinous disposition towards two of the most memorable amongst earth's
philosophers--Moses and Pythagoras; of whom the latter had set his face
against beans, laying it down for his opinion that to eat beans and to
cut one's father's throat were acts of about equal atrocity; whilst the
other, who tolerated the beans, had expressly forbidden the bacon? We
are really embarrassed; finding the mere fact recorded with no further
declaration of the rev. governor's reasons, than that such an
'attachment' (an _attachment_ to beans and bacon!) 'ought to be
encouraged'; but upon what principle we no more understand than we do
the principle of the _Quale-quare-quidditive_ case.

The letters in which these early memorabilia of Coleridge's life are
reported did not proceed beyond the fifth. We regret this greatly, for
they would have become instructively interesting as they came more and
more upon the higher ground of his London experience in a mighty world
of seven hundred boys--insulated in a sort of monastic but troubled
seclusion amongst the billowy world of London; a seclusion that in
itself was a wilderness to a home-sick child, but yet looking verdant as
an oasis amongst that other wilderness of the illimitable metropolis.

It is good to be mamma's darling; but not, reader, if you are to leave
mamma's arms for a vast public school in childhood. It is good to be the
darling of a kind, pious, and learned father--but not if that father is
to be torn away from you for ever by a death without a moment's warning,
whilst as yet you yourself are but nine years old, and he has not
bestowed a thought on your future establishment in life. Upon poor S. T.
C. the Benjamin of his family, descended first a golden dawn within the
Paradise of his father's and his mother's smiles--descended secondly and
suddenly an overcasting hurricane of separation from both father and
mother for ever. How dreadful, if audibly declared, this sentence to a
poor nerve-shattered child: Behold! thou art commanded, before thy first
decennium is completed, to see father and mother no mor