eloquent declamation or the fervor of his argument till, as Lamb, who
was one of his hearers, tells us, "the walls of the old Grey Friars
re-echoed to the accents of the _inspired charity boy_!" That is the way
his conversation,--or monologue, as it often was,--affected not boys
only, but men, and especially young men, to his dying day. He cast a
spell upon men by his speech; upon his schoolfellows, upon young men at
the universities in the Pantisocracy days, upon Lloyd and Poole at
Nether Stowey, upon earnest young thinkers in his last days at Highgate;
so that even if he had never written "The Ancient Mariner" and the
_Biographia, Literaria_ he would still be remembered for the inspiration
of his talk.

Further details of the life at Christ's Hospital must be sought in
Lamb's two essays, especially that on "Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty
Years Ago." In 1791, having secured a Christ's Hospital "exhibition," he
entered Jesus College, Cambridge.

His university life extended over three years, from October, 1791, to
December, 1794. It was an unhappy time for him and an uneasy time for
his respectable relatives, for reasons that were partly in his own
nature and partly in the temper of the times.

Even Boyer's severe training, while it had made him a hard student and
an unusual scholar for his years, had failed to give him what he most
needed as a balance to his intellect and imagination, stability of
character. There is evidence that after the first few months, during
which the habits of his hard school life had not yet broken, the new
liberty of university life led him into extravagance, if not
dissipation. Work he doubtless did (he won the Browne medal for a Greek
ode on the slave-trade in 1792), but fitfully, giving less and less