Let us consider the antecedents of the prophet of Highgate Hill. Was there ever a young man fuller of intellectual promise or of personal charm than the youth of twenty-five, who, in 1797, rambled through the Quantocks discussing and composing poetry with Wordsworth? Circumstances apparently unfavourable had only served to stimulate his intellectual growth. Separated from his family in infancy, to become one of the victims of our public school system—ill-fed, ill-nursed, and ill-taught at Christ's Hospital; urged upon the treadmill of a sound classical education by a rigid schoolmaster, he had assimilated with singular aptitude whatever intellectual food had drifted within his reach. He had caught glimpses of high metaphysical secrets; he had peered into the mysteries of medical practice; he had bolted a miscellaneous library whole; he had been infected with poetical enthusiasm by the study of that minute day-star, W. L. Bowles; and he had completed his training by falling desperately in love with the inevitable sister of a schoolfellow. It is a comfort to reflect that the best regulated systems of education break down somewhere. Coleridge, it would have seemed, ran every risk of being driven sheep-like along the dull high road of Latin grammar. Nature had prompted him to leap the fences, to expatiate in the wide fields of intellectual and imaginative pasture, and to derive a keener zest for his nourishment from the knowledge that the indulgence was illegitimate. Cambridge, the mother of poets, received him with the kindness she had so often shown to her children. We—I speak as a Cambridge man—we flogged (or nearly flogged) Milton into republicanism; we disgusted Dryden into an anomalous and monstrous preference for Oxford; we bored Gray till, half stifled with academic dulness, he sought more cheerful surroundings in a country churchyard; we left Byron to the congenial society of his bear; we did nothing for Wordsworth, except, indeed, that we took him to Milton's rooms, and there for once (it must really have done him some good) induced him to take a glass too much; and we, as nearly as possible, converted Coleridge into a heavy dragoon. We ordered him to bow the knee to Euclid, and to Newton's 'Principia,' the only idols whose merits were altogether beyond his powers of appreciation, and by such kindness in disguise induced him to plunge into a precocious breach with the proprieties. A fellowship might have converted him into a solid Church and State don, an oracle of the Combination Room, and a sound judge of port wine. We sternly withheld the temptation. A reformer has to start in life as a rebel. Coleridge sympathised with the rebellious William Frend, who was being banished from Cambridge for excessive liberalism. He offered his youthful incense to Priestley, the 'patriot and saint and sage'—so the young enthusiast called him—who was soon to be expelled by the exuberant loyalty of Birmingham from an ungrateful country. Though never a Jacobin, he became what, in some form or other, a young man ought to become—an enthusiast for the newest lights, a partisan of the ideas struggling to remould the ancient order and raise the aspirations of mankind. The Master of the College shook his reverend head, kindly enough at times, at the lad's vagaries, and forgave him even for that preposterous attempt to become a trooper which never enabled him, with all his subtlety of distinction, to form any clear conception of the difference between a horse's head and its tail. But he could not run in the regular track. He was thrown into the chaotic world to sink or swim by his unassisted abilities. No man had, in some ways, a better floating apparatus. The poetic vein, soon to manifest itself in his best work, was indeed still turbid with the alloy of didactic twaddle. But already he had the versatility, the inherent vitality of intellect, the power of embodying philosophic thoughts in poetic imagery, which made him unrivalled in monologue. He talked better, I am apt to think, with his chum, Charles Lamb, at the 'Cat and Salutation,' than he ever talked to his worshippers at Highgate Hill. A man is at his best before he is recognised. Coleridge's early letters and essays show the fulness and intellectual vigour, without the too elaborate and slightly sanctimonious circumgyrations, of his later effusions. And his genius was such as implied a double portion of the power of making friends, which, with most of us, wanes so lamentably as the years go by. Lamb, his earliest and latest friend, was already devoted to this brilliant schoolfellow; and if Lamb was an easy conquest, men of less conspicuously tender nature were equally attracted.