However excellent for the many, the system adopted by our universities was ill suited for a mind like Coleridge's, and there were some who felt that a College routine was not the kind of education which would best evolve, cultivate, and bring into training powers so 'unique'. It has been repeated, 'ad nauseam', that great minds will not descend to the industrious accumulation of those acquirements best suited to fit them for independence. To say that Coleridge would not 'condescend' would be a calumny,--nay, when his health permitted, he would drudge and work more laboriously at some of the mechanical parts of literature, than any man I ever knew. To speak detractingly of great and good men is frequently the result of malice combined with egotism. Though it would be injustice not to admit that he has had warm admirers and deeply affectionate friends, it is much to be regretted that there have been persons who have strangely maligned Coleridge, and who have attributed to him vices of which he was innocent. Had these vices existed, they would not have found any unfair extenuation in this memoir, nor would they have been passed over without notice. In answer to calumnies at that time in circulation, (and with sorrow and just indignation it is added that these reports originated with some who called themselves his friends; but, alas! most false and hypocritical!) the following minute from his notes is quoted: "My academic adventures and indiscretions must have seemed unpardonable sins," that is, as they were related by the tale-bearers and gossips of the day. "I mention these," adds he, "because the only immoralities that can without the grossest slander be laid to my charge, were all comprised within the space of the last two years of my College life. As I went to Cambridge innocent, so I dare affirm, from the first week of my acquaintance with Robert Southey to this hour, Southey himself cannot stand more clear of all intention at violations of the moral law: but, in fact, even during my career at Jesus, the heaviest of my offences consisted in the folly of assuming the show of vices, from which I was all but free, and which in the comparatively few exceptions left loathing and self-disgust on my mind. Were I, indeed, to fix on that week of my existence, in which my moral being would have presented to a pitying guardian angel the most interesting spectacle, it would be that very week [13] in London, in which I was believed by my family to have abandoned myself to debauchery of all kinds, and 'thus' to have involved myself in disreputable pecuniary embarrassments. God knows, so intense was my mental anguish, that during the whole time I was physically incapable even of a 'desire'. My whole body seemed stunned and insensate, from excess of inward suffering--my debts were the 'cause', not the effect; but that I know there can be no substitute for a father, I should