selected by the masters for a classical training in preparation for
the universities, whence they were known as Grecians. Coleridge was
elected a Grecian in 1788. The famous Boyer--famous for his enthusiasm
alike in teaching the classics and in wielding the birch--laid the
foundation of Coleridge's later scholarship. Here, too, Coleridge did a
great amount of reading not laid down in the curriculum,--Latin and
Greek poetry and philosophy, mediaeval science and metaphysics--and won
the approval of his teachers by the excellence of his verses in Greek
and Latin, such as boys at school and students at the universities were
expected to write in those days. In the great city school, as in the
Devonshire vicarage, he lived in the imagination, inert of body and
rapacious of intellect; but he was solitary no longer, having found his
tongue and among his more intellectual schoolfellows an interested
audience. While yet a boy, he would hold an audience spellbound by his
eloquent declamation or the fervor of his argument till, as Lamb, who
was one of his hearers, tells us, "the walls of the old Grey Friars
re-echoed to the accents of the _inspired charity boy_!" That is the way
his conversation,--or monologue, as it often was,--affected not boys
only, but men, and especially young men, to his dying day. He cast a
spell upon men by his speech; upon his schoolfellows, upon young men at
the universities in the Pantisocracy days, upon Lloyd and Poole at
Nether Stowey, upon earnest young thinkers in his last days at Highgate;
so that even if he had never written "The Ancient Mariner" and the
_Biographia, Literaria_ he would still be remembered for the inspiration
of his talk.

Further details of the life at Christ's Hospital must be sought in
Lamb's two essays, especially that on "Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty
Years Ago." In 1791, having secured a Christ's Hospital "exhibition," he
entered Jesus College, Cambridge.

His university life extended over three years, from October, 1791, to
December, 1794. It was an unhappy time for him and an uneasy time for
his respectable relatives, for reasons that were partly in his own
nature and partly in the temper of the times.

Even Boyer's severe training, while it had made him a hard student and
an unusual scholar for his years, had failed to give him what he most
needed as a balance to his intellect and imagination, stability of
character. There is evidence that after the first few months