The famous Boyer--famous for his enthusiasm alike in teaching the classics and in wielding the birch--laid the foundation of Coleridge's later scholarship.

Here, too, Coleridge did a great amount of reading not laid down in the curriculum,--Latin and Greek poetry and philosophy, mediaeval science and metaphysics--and won the approval of his teachers by the excellence of his verses in Greek and Latin, such as boys at school and students at the universities were expected to write in those days.

In the great city school, as in the Devonshire vicarage, he lived in the imagination, inert of body and rapacious of intellect; but he was solitary no longer, having found his tongue and among his more intellectual schoolfellows an interested audience.

While yet a boy, he would hold an audience spellbound by his eloquent declamation or the fervor of his argument till, as Lamb, who was one of his hearers, tells us, "the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the _inspired charity boy_!" That is the way his conversation,--or monologue, as it often was,--affected not boys only, but men, and especially young men, to his dying day.

He cast a spell upon men by his speech; upon his schoolfellows, upon young men at the universities in the Pantisocracy days, upon Lloyd and Poole at Nether Stowey, upon earnest young thinkers in his last days at Highgate; so that even if he had never written "The Ancient Mariner" and the _Biographia, Literaria_ he would still be remembered for the inspiration of his talk.
Further details of the life at Christ's Hospital must be sought in Lamb's two essays, especially that on "Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago." In 1791, having secured a Christ's Hospital "exhibition," he entered Jesus College, Cambridge.
His university life extended over three years, from October, 1791, to December, 1794.