mothers of remarkable men. "She was," says Mr. Gillman, "an uneducated
woman, industriously attentive to her household duties, and devoted to
the care of her husband and family. Possessing none even of the most
common accomplishments of her day, she had neither love nor sympathy
for the display of them in others. She disliked, as she would say, your
'harpsichord ladies,' and strongly tried to impress upon her sons their
little value" (that is, of the accomplishments) "in their choice of
wives." And the final judgment upon her is that she was "a very good
woman, though, like Martha, over careful in many things; very ambitious
for the advancement of her sons in life, but wanting, perhaps, that
flow of heart which her husband possessed so largely." Of Coleridge's
boyhood and school-days we are fortunate in being able to construct an
unusually clear and complete idea. Both from his own autobiographic
notes, from the traditionary testimony of his family, and from the no
less valuable evidence of his most distinguished schoolfellow, we know
that his youthful character and habits assign him very conspicuously to
that perhaps somewhat small class of eminent men whose boyhood has
given distinct indications of great things to come. Coleridge is as
pronounced a specimen of this class as Scott is of its opposite. Scott
has shown the world how commonplace a boyhood may precede a maturity of
extraordinary powers. In Coleridge's case a boy of truly extraordinary
qualities was father to one of the most remarkable of men. As the
youngest of ten children (or of thirteen, reckoning the vicar's family
of three by his first wife), Coleridge attributes the early bent of his
disposition to causes the potency of which one may be permitted to
think that he has somewhat exaggerated. It is not quite easy to believe
that it was only through "certain jealousies of old Molly," his brother
Frank's "dotingly fond nurse," and the infusions of these jealousies
into his brother's mind, that he was drawn "from life in motion to life
in thought and sensation." The physical impulses of boyhood, where they