was a tall, dark, saturnine youth, sparing of speech, with raven locks.—­Thomas Fanshaw Middleton followed him (now Bishop of Calcutta) a scholar and a gentleman in his teens.  He has the reputation of an excellent critic; and is author (besides the Country Spectator) of a Treatise on the Greek Article, against Sharpe.—­M. is said to bear his mitre high in India, where the regni novitas (I dare say) sufficiently justifies the bearing.  A humility quite as primitive as that of Jewel or Hooker might not be exactly fitted to impress the minds of those Anglo-Asiatic diocesans with a reverence for home institutions, and the church which those fathers watered.  The manners of M. at school, though firm, were mild, and unassuming.—­Next to M. (if not senior to him) was Richards, author of the Aboriginal Britons, the most spirited of the Oxford Prize Poems; a pale, studious Grecian.—­Then followed poor S——­, ill-fated M——! of these the Muse is silent.

  Finding some of Edward’s race
  Unhappy, pass their annals by.

Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee—­the dark pillar not yet turned—­Samuel Taylor Coleridge—­Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!—­How have I seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, intranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar—­while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy!—­Many were the “wit-combats,” (to dally awhile with the words of old Fuller,) between him and C.V.  Le G——­, “which two I behold like a Spanish great gallion, and an English man of war; Master Coleridge, like the former, was built far higher in learning, solid, but slow in his performances.  C.V.L., with the English man of war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention.”

Nor shall thou, their compeer, be quickly forgotten, Allen, with the cordial smile, and still more cordial laugh, with which thou wert wont to make the old Cloisters shake, in thy cognition of some poignant jest of theirs; or the anticipation of some more material, and, peradventure, practical one, of thine own.  Extinct are those smiles, with that beautiful countenance, with which (for thou wert the Nircus formosus of the school), in the days of thy maturer waggery, thou didst disarm the wrath of infuriated town-damsel, who, incensed by provoking pinch, turning tigress-like round, suddenly converted by thy angel-look, exchanged the half-formed terrible “bl——­,” for a gentler greeting—­“bless thy handsome face!”