Page 22, footnote.  I have not discovered a copy of Matthew Feilde’s play.

Page 23, line 17 from foot. Squinting W——­.  Not identifiable.

Page 23, line 7 from foot. Coleridge, in his literary life.  Coleridge speaks in the Biographia Literaria of having had the “inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time a very severe master, the Reverend James Bowyer [Boyer],” and goes on to attribute to that master’s discrimination and thoroughness much of his own classical knowledge and early interest in poetry and criticism.  Coleridge gives this example of Boyer’s impatient humour:—­

In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years of our school education), he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words. Lute, harp and lyre, Muse, Muses and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus and Hippocrene, were all an abomination to him.  In fancy I can almost hear him now exclaiming, “Harp?  Harp?  Lyre?  Pen and ink, boy, you mean!  Muse, boy, muse?  Your nurse’s daughter, you mean!  Pierian spring?  Oh, aye! the cloister pump, I suppose!”

Touching Boyer’s cruelty, Coleridge adds that his “severities, even now, not seldom furnish the dreams by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the mind the painful sensations of distempered sleep.”

In Table Talk Coleridge tells another story of Boyer.  “The discipline at Christ’s Hospital in my time,” he says, “was ultra-Spartan; all domestic ties were to be put aside.  ‘Boy!’ I remember Bowyer saying to me once when I was crying the first day of my return after the holidays, ’Boy! the school is your father!  Boy! the school is your mother!  Boy! the school is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is your first cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations!  Let’s have no more crying!’”

Leigh Hunt in his autobiography also has reminiscences of Boyer and Feilde.

James Boyer or Bowyer was born in 1736, was admitted to the school in 1744, and passed to Balliol.  He resigned his Upper Grammar Mastership in 1799, and probably retired to the rectory of Gainscolne to which he had been appointed by the school committee six years earlier.  They also gave him L500 and a staff.

Page 23, line 6 from foot. Author of the Country Spectator.  Thomas Fanshaw Middleton (1769-1822), afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, who was at school with Lamb and Coleridge.  In the little statuette group which is called the Coleridge Memorial, subscribed for in 1872, on the centenary of Coleridge’s birth, and held in rotation by the ward in which most prizes have been gained in the year, Middleton is the tallest figure.  It is reproduced in my large edition.  The story which it celebrates is to the effect that Middleton found Coleridge reading Virgil in the playground and asked him if he were learning a lesson.  Coleridge replied that he was “reading for pleasure,” an answer which Middleton reported to Boyer, and which led to Boyer taking special notice of him.  The Country Spectator was a magazine conducted by Middleton in 1792-1793.