of her sons. On the death of his father, a
presentation to Christ's Hospital was procured for Coleridge by the
judge, Sir Francis Buller, an old pupil of his father's. He had already
begun to give evidence of a powerful imagination, and he has described
in a letter to his valued friend, Tom Poole, the pernicious effect which
the admiration of an uncle and his circle of friends had upon him at
this period. For eight years he continued at Christ's Hospital. Of these
school-days Charles Lamb has given delightful glimpses in the _Essays of
Elia_. The headmaster, Bowyer (as he was called, though his name was
Boyer), was a severe disciplinarian, but respected by his pupils.
Middleton, afterwards known as a Greek scholar, and bishop of Calcutta,
reported Coleridge to Bowyer as a boy who read Virgil for amusement, and
from that time Bowyer began to notice him and encouraged his reading.
Some compositions in English poetry, written at sixteen, and not without
a touch of genius, give evidence of the influence which Bowles, whose
poems were then in vogue, had over his mind at this time. Before he left
school his constitutional delicacy of frame, increased by swimming the
New River in his clothes, began to give him serious discomfort.

In February 1791 he was entered at Jesus College, Cambridge. A
school-fellow who followed him to the university has described in
glowing terms evenings in his rooms, "when Aeschylus, and Plato, and
Thucydides were pushed aside, with a pile of lexicons and the like, to
discuss the pamphlets of the day. Ever and anon a pamphlet issued from
the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book before
us;--Coleridge had read it in the morning, and in the evening he would
repeat whole pages verbatim." William Frend, a fellow of Jesus, accused
of sedition and Unitarianism, was at this time tried and expelled from
Cambridge. Coleridge had imbibed his sentiments, and joined the ranks of
his partisans. He grew discontented with university life, and in 1793,
pressed by debt, went to London. Perhaps he was also influenced by his
passion for Mary Evans, the sister of one of his school-fellows. A poem
in the _Morning Chronicle_ brought him a guinea, and when that was spent
he enlisted in the 15th Dragoons under the name of Silas Tomkyn
Comberbache. One of the officers of the dragoon regiment, finding a
Latin sentence inscribed on a wall, discovered the condition of the very
awkward recruit. Shortly afterwards an