The next essay, "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," should
be read along with an earlier one, which does not belong actually to
the Elia series, "Recollections of Christ's Hospital." In the later
essay Lamb affected to look at the school as it might have been to a
scholar less fortunately circumstanced than himself, a boy far from
his family and friends, and the boy whom he selected was that one of
his school companions whom he knew best and with whom in manhood he
had sustained the closest friendship--S. T. Coleridge. That friend he
thus apostrophizes in a passage which has frequently been quoted:

Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring
of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before
thee--the dark pillar not yet turned--Samuel Taylor
Coleridge--Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! How have I seen
the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still,
entranced with admiration (while he weighed the
disproportion between the _speech_ and the _garb_ of the
young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet
intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus or Plotinus (for
even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such
philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or
Pindar, while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to
the accents of the inspired charity-boy!

"The Two Races of Men," divides men into those who borrow and those
who lend, the theme being followed out with great humour, and going on
to those "whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers than
closed in iron coffers," and then giving pleasant bits about
Coleridge--under his _nomme de guerre_ of Comberbatch--and his theory