His mother managed the
household and brought up the children. Both his parents were of simple
West-country stock; but his father, having a natural turn for study and
having done well in his early manhood as a schoolmaster, went at the age
of thirty-one as a sizar, or poor student, to Sidney-Sussex College,
Cambridge, took orders, and was afterwards given the living of Ottery
St. Mary. Here he continued his beloved work of teaching, in addition to
his pastoral duties, and by means of this combination won the humble
livelihood which, through his wife's careful economy, sufficed for
rearing his large family. Coleridge tells us that his father "had so
little of parental ambition in him that he had destined his children to
be blacksmiths, etc." (though he had "resolved that I should be a
parson"), "and had accomplished his intention but for my mother's pride
and spirit of aggrandizing her family." Several of the children rewarded
their mother's care by distinguishing themselves in a modest way in the
army or in the church, but the only one about whom the world is curious
now was the youngest of the ten, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was born
at Ottery St. Mary, October 21, 1772.
The essential traits of his later character appeared in his early
childhood. Almost from infancy he lived in his imagination rather than
in the world of reality. "The schoolboys drove me from play, and were
always tormenting me, and hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but
read incessantly.
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