leisure for contemplation. Medical men are too often called upon to
witness the effects of acute rheumatism in the young subject: in some,
the attack is on the heart, and its consequences are immediate; in
others, it leaves behind bodily sufferings, which may indeed be
palliated, but terminate only in a lingering dissolution.

I have often heard Coleridge express regret that he had not cultivated
mathematics, which he believed would have been of important use in life,
particularly had he arrived so far as to have mastered the higher
calculus; but he was, by an oversight of the mathematical master,
stopped on the threshold. When he was commencing Euclid, among some of
its first axioms came this:--"A line is length without breadth." "How
can that be?" said the scholar, (Coleridge); "A line must have some
breadth, be it ever so thin." This roused the master's indignation at
the impertinence of the scholar, which was instantly answered by a box
on the ear, and the words, hastily uttered, "Go along, you silly
fellow;" and here ended his first tuition, or lecture. His second
efforts afterwards were not more successful; so that he was destined to
remain ignorant of these exercises of the logic of the understanding.[A]
Indeed his logical powers were so stupendous, from boyhood, as never to
require such drilling. Bowyer, his classical master, was too skilful in
the management of youth, and too much interested in the success of his
scholars to overlook what was best fitted for them. He exercised their
logical powers in acquiring and comparing the different classics. On
him, as a teacher, Coleridge loved to dwell; and, with his grateful
feelings, ever ready to acknowledge the sense of his obligations to him,
particularly those relating to his mental improvement, he has, in his
Biog. Lit. vol. i. p. 7, expressed himself in these words:

"He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero,