Sickness overtook the army during its stay, and they removed to Tiverton. Local opinion at the Restoration swung round to the Monarchy, the Stuarts, and the Church of England. Violent strife, political and ecclesiastical, embittered social life. The Rev. Robert Collins, of the Chanter’s House, a descendant of the host of Fairfax, was the leader of the Nonconformists, and Mr. Haydon, of Cadhay, a fine quadrangular Tudor House in the neighbourhood, upheld the dominant party. Robert Collins insisted on disobeying the Act of Uniformity, 1662, and the Conventicle Act, 1664. Haydon resolved to see the law obeyed. There was a constant besetting of the Chanter’s House to discover the holding of an unlawful prayer-meeting, and finally persistent persecution drove Robert Collins and his family to Holland in 1685, where he died, brave and unflinching to the last, bequeathing money to the building of the Independent Chapel at Ottery St. Mary. This chapel, built of old-time furze-burnt bricks in the manner known as “the Flemish bond,” is one of the oldest in the kingdom, has an air of Quaker-like seclusion, and is surrounded by a small graveyard occupying the site of an ancient bowling green. There existed a trap-door in the floor at the back of the pulpit, through which the minister could fly in case of danger, into the vaults which still exist below the schoolroom. The parish workhouse, now converted into cottages, stands near St. Saviour’s Bridge. Here, on the ground floor, were ranged the chained lunatics, to whom passers-by would throw scraps of bone and odds and ends to appease their raving hunger. At the Vicar’s House was born, in 1772, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His father, the Rev. John Coleridge, vicar and schoolmaster, was an erudite Hebrew scholar, and assisted Dr. Kennicott in his literary labours. He was a pious, simple soul, beloved by his family, whose amusing absence of mind is described in a diverting anecdote by De Quincey, not quite fit to be repeated here. One of his scholars was Francis Buller, who sat for twenty-two years as a puisne judge, through whose influence Samuel Taylor Coleridge obtained a nomination at Christ’s Hospital. [Illustration _From the Portrait_] [_By Peter Vandyck._ SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. ] This is not the place to describe at length the career of Ottery St. Mary’s most gifted son. But we can read in his poems of the profound influence of early scenes in the home of his boyhood upon the poet’s imagination. In his sonnet to the river Otter, his “native brook, wild streamlet of the West,” in after years he calls up the vision of the crossing plank, the marge with willows grey, the bedded sand, the flung stone leaping along its breast.