We read in classes on Sundays to our Markers,
and were catechised by them, and under their sole authority during
prayers, etc. All other authority was in the Monitors; but, as I said,
the same boys were ordinarily both the one and the other. Our diet was
very scanty. Every morning a bit of dry bread and some bad small beer.
Every evening a larger piece of bread, and cheese or butter, whichever
we liked. For dinner,--on Sunday, boiled beef and broth; Monday, bread
and butter, and milk and water; Tuesday, roast mutton; Wednesday, bread
and butter, and rice milk; Thursday, boiled beef and broth; Friday,
boiled mutton and broth; Saturday, bread and butter, and pease-porridge.
Our food was portioned; and, excepting on Wednesdays, I never had a
belly full. Our appetites were damped, never satisfied; and we had no
vegetables. [1]
[Footnote 1: The above five letters are I-V of Mr. E. H. Coleridge's
"Letters of S. T. C". Letter VI is dated 1785; Letter VII of "Letters"
is dated "before 1790."]
S. T. COLERIDGE.
"O! what a change!" he writes in another note; "depressed, moping,
friendless, poor orphan, half starved; at that time the portion of food
to the Blue-coats was cruelly insufficient for those who had no friends
to supply them." And he afterwards says:--"When I was first plucked up
and transplanted from my birth-place and family, at the death of my dear
Father, whose revered image has ever survived in my mind to make me know
what the emotions and affections of a son are, and how ill a father's
place is likely to be supplied by any other relation, Providence, (it
has often occurred to me,) gave me the first intimation that it was my
lot, and that it was best for me, to make or find my way of life a
detached individual, a "terrae filius", who was to ask love or service
of no one on any more specific relation than that of being a man, and as
such to take my chance for the free charities of humanity.
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