of the head-master
Bowyer, and made of the elder scholar, Middleton by name, a steady
friend and counselor for years. Yet at this time Coleridge was
considered by the lower-master, under whom he was, "a dull and inept
scholar who could not be made to repeat a single rule of syntax,
although he would give a rule in his own way." The life, however, of
this great school, with all its injudicious liberties and
confinements, must have been anything but a healthy one. Starved and
solitary, careless of play as play, and already full of that consuming
spiritual curiosity which never left him, Coleridge's devotion to the
indiscriminate stores of the circulating library gave the last
aggravation to all the unwholesome particulars of his life. "Conceive
what I must have been at fourteen," he exclaims. "I was in a continual
low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of
present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner and read, read,
read; fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's island finding a mountain of
plum-cake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the
shapes of tables and chairs--hunger, and fancy!" ...

A droll incident occurred about this period of his life, which shows
... his absolute want of ambition. The friendless boy had made
acquaintance with a shoemaker and his wife, who had a shop near the
school, and who were kind to him; and thereupon he conceived the
extraordinary idea of getting himself apprenticed to his friend, whom
he persuaded to go to the head-master to make this wonderful proposal.
"Od's, my life, man, what d'ye mean?" cried the master, with not
unnatural indignation mingling with his amazement; and notwithstanding
Coleridge's support of the application, the shoemaker was turned out
of the place, and the would-be apprentice chosen, "against my will,"
he says, "as one of those destined for the university." The same
irascible yet excellent master flogged the boy severely on hearing
that he boasted of being an infidel....

His next stage in life was not a shoemaker's shop in Newgate Street,
but Jesus College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1791 at the age of
nineteen--the object of many high prophecies and hopes on the part of
his school and schoolfellows, who had unanimously determined that he
was to be great and do them honor. The first thing he did, however,
was alas! too common an incident: he got into debt, though not, it
would appear, for an overwhelming sum, or