Christ's Hospital, and thither in his eighth year the little fellow
was transferred from the home in the Temple.

Should a zealous compiler seek to arrange an autobiography of Charles
Lamb from his writings he would not have a difficult task, and he
would find two delightful essays devoted to the famous school--so long
the distinguishing feature of Newgate Street--where "blue-coat boys"
passed the most importantly formative period of their lives.
Handicapped somewhat by a stuttering speech Charles Lamb did not
perhaps join in all the boyish sports of his fellows, though there are
many testimonies to the regard in which he was held by his
school-mates, and the fact is stressed that though the only one of his
surname at Christ's Hospital, he was never "Lamb" but always "Charles
Lamb," as though there were something of an endearment in the constant
use of his Christian name. "The Christ's Hospital or Blue-coat boy,
has a distinctive character of his own, as far removed from the abject
qualities of a common charity-boy as it is from the disgusting
forwardness of a lad brought up at some other of the public schools."
In the essay from which this is quoted, Charles Lamb, looking back a
quarter of a century after leaving the old foundation, summed up the
characteristics of his school as reflected in the character of its
boys of whom he and the close friend he made there are the two whose
names are the most commonly on the lips of men. It is, indeed, worthy
of remark that from amid the countless boys educated at Christ's
Hospital since it was founded three centuries and a half ago by "the
flower of the Tudor name ... boy patron of boys," the names that stand
out most prominently are those of the two who were at the school
together--Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was at that old
"Hospital," recently, alas, demolished, that these men, so different
in genius, so similar in many of their intellectual tastes, began a