Christ's Hospital having been secured for him, little Samuel, not yet
eleven years old, went up to London to enter the famous old city school.
Here,

"In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,"

where he

"Saw nought lovely but the sky and stars,"

one of some seven hundred Blue-Coat boys, Coleridge lived for nine
years.

Most of the boys at Christ's Hospital, then as now, were given a
"commercial" education (which none the less included a very thorough
training in Latin); but a few of the most promising students were each
year selected by the masters for a classical training in preparation for
the universities, whence they were known as Grecians. Coleridge was
elected a Grecian in 1788. The famous Boyer--famous for his enthusiasm
alike in teaching the classics and in wielding the birch--laid the
foundation of Coleridge's later scholarship. Here, too, Coleridge did a
great amount of reading not laid down in the curriculum,--Latin and
Greek poetry and philosophy, mediaeval science and metaphysics--and won
the approval of his teachers by the excellence of his verses in Greek
and Latin, such as boys at school and students at the universities were
expected to write in those days. In the great city school, as in the
Devonshire vicarage, he lived in the imagination, inert of body and
rapacious of intellect; but he was solitary no longer, having found his
tongue and among his more intellectual schoolfellows an interested
audience. While yet a boy, he would hold an audience spellbound by his