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2 THE BLUE-COAT BOY [1772family
name. There is a Hundred of Coleridge, with a
manor-house of the same name, in the extreme south, from
which the poet himself believed his grandfather to have
come. There is a northern Coleridge in the Hundred of
Roborough. And between the two, in the Hundred of
North Tawton, comes a Coldridge. l It is a little soifth of this
that Coleridge families have been traced in a group of
villages, Drewsteignton, Dunsford, Doddiscombsleigh, and
Ashton, which lie along the Teign valley, to the south-west
of Exeter and Crediton. A John Coleridge, who married a
Sarah Ealeb at Dunsford in 1694, may have been the poet's
great-grandfather, and another John, who married Mary
Wills at Drewsteignton, may fairly be taken as his grandfather.
This John became a weaver or woollen draper
(textor) at Crediton, not, as the poet thought, South Molton,
and here his son, a third John, was born early in 1719.
A daughter Susannah still kept an 'everything shop' at
Crediton about 1777. 2 Coleridge's accent struck a girl from
the midlands disagreeably. Joseph Farington, in 1804, describes
his dialect, particularly in reading, as 'what I should
call broad Devonshire, for a gentleman'. He prolonged 'cow'
into 'kee-ow', and sounded the l in 'talk', 'would', and
'should'. Carlyle also dwells on the 'tawlk' in 1824. 3 When
Coleridge came to Stowey in 1794 the inhabitants caught his
name as Coldridge. At Keswick, too, his wife became 'auld
Mrs Cauldridge'. Variants from other sources are Coltridge,
Coledridge, Colrige, Colredge, Coloridge. Leigh Hunt says
that his schoolmaster called him Coleridge, 'pronouncing
the word like a dactyl'. Coleridge himself found 'a peculiar
indescribable Beauty of the lofty kind in Coleridge'.
For it is one of the vilest Beelzebubberies of Detraction to pronounce
it Col-ridge, or Colleridge, or even Cole-ridge. It is and must be to
all honest and honorable men, a Trisyllabic Amphimacron — w —!
In humorous verse he rhymed it with both 'Polar ridge' and
'scholarage'. 4
1 Devon Place-Names (P.N. Soc), 50, 227, 313, 332, 365.
2 C. i, y,D.H. 11 ; Studies, 5.
3 Litchfield, 139; Farington, ii. 210; Leslie, i. 44; 2 Gent. Mag. x. 27; Froude,
Carlyle, i. 222, 292; cf. pp. 167, 183, 321.
4 G. 251; P. i. 95, 124, 139, 146, 244; P.W. 972, 981; Studies, 82; Sara Coleridge,
Memoir, ii. 233; Leigh Hunt, ch. iii; Lowes, 354, 583, 604 s .