Page:A Sketch of the Characters of Sir John Patteson and Sir John Coleridge.djvu/6

 playmates out of school as a good sculler, a good swimmer, a good cricketer, and a good player at fives and at football. Coleridge, like Patteson, was a favourite of the head-master, and if he inherited a good deal of the family talent, it is no disparagement to them to say that he was indebted to Dr. Goodall for a large portion of his classical taste and elegant scholarship. Coleridge was less robust than Patteson, and he may not have excelled in so many of the rougher sports, but in manliness of spirit he was not inferior. And if his disposition would have naturally led him to "beware of entrance into a quarrel," yet being in it, he was safe to bear it that the opposers should beware of him. Accordingly an anecdote was long preserved at Eton of a memorable battle fought by him and a boy of the name of Mann, which lasted a whole after 12 and the greater part of an after 4, and when the master came and took the combatants away, the two young heroes were neither of them able to see each other.

On leaving Eton both Patteson and Coleridge were sent to the University; and here for the first and last time their paths were parted. Patteson got King's, and went to Cambridge, where he obtained a Davies' University Scholarship. But Coleridge lost King's, for as these were times when a King's Scholarship depended on seniority and on that alone, Coleridge, with Milman and Bishop Sumner, were all superannuated. He obtained, however, a Corpus Scholarship and a Fellowship in Exeter College, in the University of Oxford, and the bracing effect of a mortifying disappointment, probably did him more good than harm. The University. career both of Patteson and Coleridge continued to give the same good earnest of future success. When they quitted the Universities the two young friends met once more on the same road, the road that leads to the Bar and the Bench. They were fellow pupils in the same chambers,—the chambers of an eminent Special Pleader, Mr. Godfrey Sikes. At the bar they were trusted and thoughtful counsel, but without these shining and dashing qualities which sometimes bring more grist to the mill than sound learning and solid judgment. There was so far a difference between them that of Patteson it might be said that he had more of the oak than the willow; of Coleridge it was said that he had more of the willow than the