my fifth or sixth year, but I believe the latter, in consequence of
some quarrel between me and my brother, in the first week in October,
I ran away from fear of being whipped, and passed the whole night, a
night of rain and storm, on the bleak side of a hill on the Otter, and
was there found at daybreak, without the power of using my limbs,
about six yards from the naked bank of the river."

"In my seventh year, about the same time, if not the very same time,
i.e. Oct. 4th, my most dear, most revered father, died suddenly. O
that I might so pass away, if like him I were an Israelite without
guile. The image of my father, my revered, kind, learned,
simple-hearted father is a religion to me!"

Judge Buller who had been educated by his father, had always promised to
adopt the son, at least to educate him, foreseeing that Samuel, the
youngest, was likely to be left an orphan early in life. Soon after the
death of the Rev. John Coleridge, the Judge obtained from John Way,
Esq., one of the governors of Christ's Hospital, a presentation to that
school, and young Coleridge was sent by the Judge and placed there on
the 18th July, 1782. "O! what a change!" [6] he goes on in the note
above quoted.

"Depressed, moping, friendless, poor orphan, half starved; (at that
time the portion of food to the Bluecoats was cruelly insufficient for
those who had no friends to supply them)."

In the late Mr. Charles Lamb's "Works" published in 1818, there is an
account of the school, entitled "Recollections of Christ's Hospital." In
1823 there is a second essay on the same subject by Lamb, under the
assumed title of "Elia,"--Elia supposed to be intimate with Lamb and