robbed orchards, and led all dangerous sports, had little in common
with his small, silent, precocious brother. “Frank had a violent love of
beating me,” muses Coleridge, in a tone of mild complaint (and no
wonder, we think, for a more beatable child than Samuel Taylor it
would have been hard to find). “But whenever that was superseded
by any humor or circumstance, he was very fond of me, and used to
regard me with a strange mixture of admiration and contempt.” More
contempt than admiration, probably; yet was all resentment
forgotten, and all unkindness at an end, while one boy read to the
other the story of Hector and Patroclus, and of great Ajax, with
sorrow in his heart, pacing round his dead comrade, as a tawny
lioness paces round her young when she sees the hunters coming
through the woods. As a companion picture to this we have little
Dante Gabriel Rossetti playing Othello in the nursery, and so carried
away by the passionate impulse of these lines,—
“In Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him, thus,”—
that he struck himself fiercely on the breast with an iron chisel, and
fainted under the blow. We can hardly believe that Shakespeare is
beyond the mental grasp of childhood, when Scott, at seven, crept
out of bed on winter nights to read “King Henry IV.,” and Rossetti, at
nine, was overwhelmed by the agony of Othello’s remorse.
On the other hand, there are writers, and very brilliant writers,
too, whose early lives appear to have been undisturbed by such
keenly imaginative pastimes, and for whom there are no well-loved
and familiar figures illumined forever in “that bright, clear, undying
light that borders the edge of the oblivion of infancy.” Count Tolstoi
confesses himself to have been half hurt, half puzzled, by his fellow-
students at the University of Moscow, who seemed to him so coarse
and inelegant, and yet who had read and enjoyed so much. “Pushkin
and Zhukovsky were literature to them,” he says wistfully, “and not,