Almost from infancy he lived in his imagination rather than in the world of reality.

"The schoolboys drove me from play, and were always tormenting me, and hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly....

I became a _dreamer_, and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity; and I was fretful, and inordinately passionate." "Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth," were "prominent and manifest" in his character before he was eight years old.

Such is his own account of his childhood, written to his friend Poole in 1797; and it is an accurate description, as far as it goes, of the grown man.
But of the religious temper, too, the love of freedom and of virtue, the hatred of injustice, cruelty, and falsehood that guided his uneven steps through all the pitiful struggle of his middle life, of the conscience that made his weakness hell to him--of these, too, we may be sure that the beginnings were to be seen in the boy at Ottery St.Mary, as indeed they were before his eyes in the person of his father, who, if not a first-rate genius, was, says his son, "a first-rate Christian." The good vicar died in 1781; and the next year, a "presentation" to Christ's Hospital having been secured for him, little Samuel, not yet eleven years old, went up to London to enter the famous old city school.
Here, "In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim," where he "Saw nought lovely but the sky and stars," one of some seven hundred Blue-Coat boys, Coleridge lived for nine years.
Most of the boys at Christ's Hospital, then as now, were given a "commercial" education (which none the less included a very thorough training in Latin); but a few of the most promising students were each year selected by the masters for a classical training in preparation for the universities, whence they were known as Grecians.

Coleridge was elected a Grecian in 1788.