he was reading; the answer was "Virgil." "Are you then," said M.
"studying your lesson?" "No," said C., "I am reading it for pleasure;"
for he had not yet arrived at Virgil in his class studies. This struck
Middleton as something so peculiar, that he mentioned it to the head
master, as Coleridge was then in the grammar school (which is the lower
part of the classical school), and doing the work of the lower boys. The
Rev. James Bowyer, who was at that time head master, a quick discerning
man, but hasty and severe, sent for the master of the grammar school,
and inquired about Coleridge; from him he learnt that he was a dull and
inapt scholar, and that he could not be made to repeat a single rule of
syntax, although he would give a rule in his own way.

This brought Coleridge before Bowyer, and to this circumstance may be
attributed the notice which he afterwards took of him: the school and
his scholars were every thing to him, and Coleridge's neglect and
carelessness never went unpunished. I have often heard him say, he was
so ordinary a looking boy, with his black head, that Bowyer generally
gave him at the end of a flogging an extra cut; "for," said he, "you are
such an ugly fellow!"

When, by the odd accident before mentioned, he was made a subscriber to
the library in King Street,

"I read," says he, "'through' the catalogue, folios and all, whether I
understood them, or did not understand them, running all risks in
skulking out to get the two volumes which I was entitled to have
daily. Conceive what I must have been at fourteen; I was in a
continual low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every
object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner, and
read, read, read; fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's island, finding a