Among them, unseen of them, seem to move the forms of those other boys, Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Leigh Hunt--all students here about this time. _Our_ boy was then a little past seven, a gentle, affectionate lad, “terribly shy,” as he said of himself later, and made all the more sensitive by his slight stammer, which lapsed to a stutter when his nerves were wrought upon and startled. Yet he was no more left alone and isolated now than he was in after life; his schoolfellows indulged him, the masters were fond of him, and he was given special privileges not known to the others. His little complaints were listened to; he had tea and a hot roll o’ mornings; his ancient aunt used to toddle there to bring him good things, when he, schoolboy-like, only despised her for it, and, as he confessed when older, used to be ashamed to see her come and sit herself down on the old coal-hole steps near where they went into the grammar-school, and open her apron, and bring out her basin, with some nice thing she had caused to be saved for him. And he was allowed to go home to the Temple for short visits, from time to time, so passing his young days between “cloister and cloister.” As he walks down the Old Bailey, or through Fleet Market--then in the full foul odour of [Illustration: A CORNER IN THE BLUE-COAT SCHOOL.] its wickedness and nastiness--and so up Fleet Street on his way home, we may be sure that his eager eye alights on all that is worth its while, and that the young alchemist is already putting into practice that process by which he transmuted the mud of street and pavement into pure gold, and so found all that was always precious to him in their stones. After treading them for many years, as boy and as man, he asks: “Is any night-walk comparable to a walk from St. Paul’s to Charing Cross for lighting and paving, for crowds going and coming without respite, the rattle of coaches, and the cheerfulness of shops?” Among his schoolfellows, Charles formed special friendships with a few select spirits; and in Coleridge--“the inspired charity-boy,” who entered the school at the same time, though three years older--he found a life-long companion. He looked up to the elder lad--dreamy, dejected, lonely--with an affection and a reverence which never failed all through life, though in after years subject to the strain of Coleridge’s alienation, absence, and silence. “Bless you, old sophist,” he wrote once to Coleridge, “who, next to human nature taught me all the corruption I was capable of knowing.”