"The reader will, I trust, excuse this tribute of recollection to a
man, whose severities, even now, not seldom furnish the dreams by
which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the mind the painful
sensation of distempered sleep, but neither lessen nor diminish the
deep sense of my moral and intellectual obligations."

He had his passionate days, which the boys described as the days he wore
his Passy wig (passy abbreviated from passionate). "Sirrah! I'll flog
you," were words so familiar to him, that on one occasion, some female
relation or friend of one of the boys entered his room, when a class
stood before him and inquired for Master--; master was no school title
with Bowyer. The errand of this lady being to ask a short leave of
absence for some boy, on the sudden appearance in town of his country
cousin, still lingering at the door, after having been abruptly told to
go, Bowyer suddenly exclaimed, "Bring that woman here, and I'll flog
her!"

Coleridge's themes in his fifteenth year, [9] in verse as well as prose,
marked him as a boy of great talent, but of talent only according to his
own definition of it (vide "Friend," vol. iii. edit. 1818). His verse
was good, his prose powerful, and language correct, and beyond his years
in depth of thought, but as yet he had not manifested, according to the
same test, anything of genius. I met among some of his notes, written at
the age of fifty-one, the following critique on one of his schoolboy
themes:

"This theme was written at the age of fifteen: it does not contain a
line that any schoolboy might not have written, and like most
school-poetry, there is a putting of thoughts into verse. Yet such