It is stated that at this school he laid the foundation of those bodily sufferings, which made his life one of sickness and torture, and occasioned his melancholy resort to opium. He greatly injured his health, it is said, and reduced his strength by his bathing excursions; but is it not quite as likely that the deficiency of food, and those holyday days when he was turned out to starvation, had quite as much to do with it? On one occasion he swam across the New river in his clothes, and dried them on his back. This is supposed to have laid the foundation of his rheumatic pains; but may not that lying out all night in the rain at a former day have been even a still earlier predisposing cause? However that might be, he says, that "full half the time from seventeen to eighteen was passed in the sick-ward of Christ's Hospital, afflicted with jaundice and rheumatic fever." At an earlier day he had undergone a medical treatment, which was oddly enough the cause of his breaking out into verse. He had a remarkably delicate white skin, which was once the cause of great punishment to him. His dame had undertaken to cure him of the itch, with which the boys of his ward had suffered much; but Coleridge was doomed to suffer more than his comrades, from the use of sulphur ointment, through the great sagacity of his dame, who with her extraordinary eyes, aided by the power of glasses, could see the malady in the skin, deep and out of power of common vision; and consequently, as often as she employed this miraculous sight, she found, or thought she found, fresh reason for continuing the friction, to the prolonged suffering and mortification of her patient. This occurred when he was about ten years of age, and gave rise to his first attempt at making a verse, as follows: "O Lord, have mercy on me! For I am very sad! For why, good Lord? I've got the itch, And eke I've got the _tad_!" the school name for ringworm. In classical study Coleridge made wonderful progress, though but little in mathematics. He read on through the catalogue, folios and all, of the library in King-street, and was always in a low fever of excitement. His whole being was, he says, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple himself up in a sunny comer, and read, read, read; fancying himself on Robinson Crusoe's island, finding a mountain of plum-cake and eating a room for himself, and then eating out chairs and tables--hunger and fancy! So little affection had Coleridge for the school, that he greatly wanted, at fifteen, to put himself apprentice to a shoemaker. It was of the same class of odd attempts as his future one at soldiering.