Gents Mag 1834 part 2 p.544

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	Gentleman's Magazine 1834 part 2 p.544
obituary   Samuel Taylor Coleridge
	Obituary, Samuel Taylor Coleridge SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, ESQ. July 25. At Highgate, aged 62, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Esq. Mr. Coleridge was born in 1773 at the market town of Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire. His father, the Rev. John Coleridge, was for many years Vicar of that parish, after having been an eminent schoolmaster at South Moulton, on the northern side of that county. He was also the author of some Scriptural Dissertations, and of a critical Latin Grammar, which was by no means an ordinary production. He died in 1782, having had a numerous family, of whom the male survivors were: 1. Colonel Coleridge; 2. the Rev. Edward Coleridge, of Ottery; 3. the Rev. George Coleridge, of the same place; and 4. the distinguished Poet and Philosopher now deceased. It may well be supposed that with so large a family, and having had only a small living, Mr. Coleridge could not leave much behind him; and accordingly, some friends procured admission for the youngest son in Christ's Hospital, where he soon distinguished himself as a boy of acute parts and eccentric habits. To his master, The Rev. James Bowyer, he expressed the deepest obligations; he was a severe disciplinarian, but produced excellent scholars. Mr. Coleridge says - "He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, Terence, and above all, the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman poets, of the, so called, Silver and Brazen ages, but with even those of the Augustan era; and on grounds of plain sense and universal logic to see and assert the superiority of the former, in the truth and nativeness, both of their thoughts and diction. At the same time that we were studying Greek Tragic Poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons; and they were the lessons too which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learned from him that poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science, and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. In our English compositions (at least for the last three years of our school education) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words. Lute, harp, and lyre, muse, muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene, were all an abomination to him. In fancy, I can almost hear him now exclaiming - "Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, muse? Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh, aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!" Another friend, to whom Mr. Coleridge acknowledges his obligations, while on that noble foundation, was Dr. Middleton, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, who was then in the first form, or, in the language of the school, a Grecian. From him, among other favours, he received a present of Mr. Bowles's Sonnets, with which our student was so enthusiastically delighted, that in less than eighteen months he had made more than forty transcriptions of them, for the purpose of giving them to persons who had in any way won his regard. The possession of these peoms wrought a great, and indeed radical, change in the mind of our author, who hitherto, and even before his fifteenth year, had bewildered himself in metaphysical speculation and theological controversy. "Nothing else," says Mr. Coleridge, "pleased me. History, and particular facts, lost all interest in my mind. Poetry (though for a school-boy of that age, I was above par in English versification, and had already produced two or three compositions, which, I may venture to say, without reference to my age, were somewhat above mediocrity, and which had gained me more credit than the sound good sense of my old master was at all pleased with,) poetry itself, yea, novels and romances, became insipid to me. in my friendless wanderings, on our leave days, (for I was an orphan, and had scarce any connections in London) highly was I delighted, if any passenger, especially if he was dressed in black, would enter into a conversation with me. For I soon found the means of directing it to my favourite subjects. "Of Providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate, Fix'd fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost." At the age of nineteen our author removed to Jesus College, Cambridge; but of his academical history we know but little; nor does it appear, indeed, that he either graduated or stood a candidate for the literary honours of the university. While there, however, he assisted one of his friends in the composition of an
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