Which version of this story is the more correct, who shall decide? Little Coleridge, at the age of ten, was placed in Christ's Hospital in London, through the influence of Judge Buller, who had been educated by his father. This school was then, it seems, conducted in a very miserable and unkind manner. Coleridge was half starved there, neglected and wretched. The first bitter experiences of children who have had tolerable homes, of such as have had a decent house over their heads, and decent parents or friends, is on going to school. There has, no doubt, been much improvement in these as in other respects of late years. Schoolmasters, like other men, have felt the growing influences of civilization and true feeling. But there is yet much to be done in schools. Let it be remembered that fagging and flogging still continue in our great public schools of Westminster, Eton, and others. Riding the other day on the top of an omnibus through London, we could, from that popular eminence, see the master of a naval and military school exercising his vocation with the cane on one of his unhappy scholars. This I presume is a part of what the boys are systematically taught there--the preparatory initiation into the floggings that they are likely to get in the army or navy. That is bad and brutalizing enough, but that we are not yet advanced beyond the absurd idea of driving learning into our gentlemen with the cudgel and the birch, says very little indeed for our advance in true social philosophy. Southey gives a very lively idea of the school change in a boy's life, in his Hymn to the Penates. "When first a little one I left my home, I can remember the first grief I felt, And the first painful smile that clothed my front With feelings not its own. Sadly at night I sat me down beside a stranger's hearth; And when the lingering hour of rest was come, First wet with tears my pillow." In The Retrospect he has still more clearly depicted it:-- "Corston, twelve years in various fortunes fled Have passed in restless progress o'er my head. Since in thy vale, beneath the master's rule, I roamed an inmate of the village school." The place, he tells us, had been the ample dwelling of the lord of the manor, but-- "Here now in petty empire o'er the school, The mighty master held despotic rule; Trembling in silence, all his deeds we saw, His look a mandate, and his word a law; Severe his voice, severe and stern his mien, And wondrous strict he was, and wondrous wise, I ween. "Even now, through many a long, long year I trace The hour when first with awe I viewed his face; Even now, recall my entrance at the dome,-- 'Twas the first day I ever left my home. Years, intervening, have not worn away _The deep remembrance of that wretched day_.