livelihood which, through his wife's careful economy, sufficed for
rearing his large family. Coleridge tells us that his father "had so
little of parental ambition in him that he had destined his children to
be blacksmiths, etc." (though he had "resolved that I should be a
parson"), "and had accomplished his intention but for my mother's pride
and spirit of aggrandizing her family." Several of the children rewarded
their mother's care by distinguishing themselves in a modest way in the
army or in the church, but the only one about whom the world is curious
now was the youngest of the ten, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was born
at Ottery St. Mary, October 21, 1772.

The essential traits of his later character appeared in his early
childhood. Almost from infancy he lived in his imagination rather than
in the world of reality. "The schoolboys drove me from play, and were
always tormenting me, and hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but
read incessantly.... I became a _dreamer_, and acquired an indisposition
to all bodily activity; and I was fretful, and inordinately
passionate." "Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth," were "prominent
and manifest" in his character before he was eight years old. Such is
his own account of his childhood, written to his friend Poole in 1797;
and it is an accurate description, as far as it goes, of the grown man.
But of the religious temper, too, the love of freedom and of virtue, the
hatred of injustice, cruelty, and falsehood that guided his uneven steps
through all the pitiful struggle of his middle life, of the conscience
that made his weakness hell to him--of these, too, we may be sure that
the beginnings were to be seen in the boy at Ottery St. Mary, as indeed
they were before his eyes in the person of his father, who, if not a
first-rate genius, was, says his son, "a first-rate Christian."

The good vicar died in 1781; and the next year, a "presentation" to