e political protesters had been bought off
with snug places in the excise. Pretended knowledge passed for wisdom,
dignity paraded as worth, affectation and hypocrisy patronized virtue. And
Coleridge appears upon the scene, a conservative, with a beautiful
innocence and an indifference to all pretended authority and asks, "How do
you know?"

* * * * *

The number of people who have written their names large in literature, who
were the children of clergymen, is no mere coincidence. Tennyson, Addison,
Goldsmith, Emerson, Lowell, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Coleridge--you
can add to the list to suit. Young people follow example, and the habit of
the father in writing out his thoughts causes others of the family to try
it, too. Then there is an atmosphere of books in a rectory, and leisure to
think, and best of all the income is not so great but that the practise of
economy of time and money is duly enforced by necessity. To be launched
into a library and learn by absorption is a great blessing.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Seventeen Hundred Seventy-two, the son
of the Reverend John Coleridge, of Ottery Saint Mary, a small village of
Devonshire. The rector was also a schoolmaster, just as all clergymen were
before division of labor forced itself upon us. This worthy clergyman was
twice married, his first wife bearing him three children, the second ten.
Samuel was the last of the brood--the thirteenth--but his parents were not
superstitious.

The youngest in a big family, like the first, is apt to have a deal of
love lavished upon him. The question of discipline has proved its own
futility, and when a baby comes to parents approaching fifty, depend upon
it, that child transforms the household into a monarchy, with himself as
tyrant. This may be well and it may not.

Little Samuel Taylor seemed to be aware of his power; he evolved a
wondrous precocity and ruled the rectory with a rod of iron. When he was
five he propounded questions that shook the orthodoxy of the worthy vicar
to its very center.

Yet, remarkable as was the intellect of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the
family would not have remained in obscurity without him. In fact, the very
brightness of his fame caused the excellence of his brothers to be lost in
the shadow. His brother James became the father of Henry Nelson Coleridge,
who married his cousin Sara, the daughter of our poet.

To anticipate a little, it is well eno