Derwent Coleridge, second surviving son of Samuel Taylor his wife Sara, née Fricker, has long awaited full-length biographical scrutiny. Appointed Principal of St Mark's national Anglican teacher-training when it was founded in 1841, he played a significant role as an educationalist over the ensuing twenty-three years, striving to put into practice his renowned father's concept of a state-maintained clerisy operating on behalf of a National Church. He became a figure of considerable controversy, finally receiving what was, in effect, the sack in 1863 when, under the notorious Revised Code of regulations of the Committee of Council on Education, Derwent's work of providing higher education for the teachers of the people, to raise their status and enable them to climb the professional ladder, even into the Church—in short, as STC had urged, to create a clerisy to promote "the continued and progressive civilization of the community" (Church & State, 113)—came to an halt. The National Society for Promoting the Education of the Principles of the Poor in the Established Church throughout England and Wales lost its Coleridgean rudder. Derwent was offered the poorly paid living of Hanwell, Middlesex, plus a pension of £200 a year from the National Society. He was 63, with no private means of his own; he was obliged to accept and so to Hanwell he went, there to sink into the deep oblivion accorded those who displeased the Establishment. He struggled along as a poor, but devoted parish priest until he was 80, when he and his few nearest and dearest retired to a small villa in Torquay where he spent his final three years tortured by neuralgia and nursed by his ever devoted wife. Viewed retrospectively, his St Mark's career was remarkable. In his outlook and his direct action Derwent was amazingly in advanced of his day, though undoubtedly this was because he was closely following the precepts of his father, who in all he thought and wrote was light—years in advance of his era—not infrequently, one suspects, in advance of ours too. Therefore it might be justly argued that Derwent was not the innovative radical that he was accused of being; his was not original thinking, since it derived from his father's concept of the role of education as expounded in the great seminal essay, On the Constitution of Church and State. What was outstanding about Derwent was his moral and intellectual courage: in the face of endless hostile he continued, throughout his twenty-three years at St Mark's, to follow his father's vision of a "clerisy" as the primary instrument of a National Church responsible for "preserving and strengthening the national culture." Derwent wanted his pupils at St Mark's, the intended clerisy of the future, to be educated to the utmost of their capabilities whatever their social origins; to have a knowledge of Latin, literature, and music. Inevitably he ran into opposition; in educating intended teachers of the poor to standards rivalling the education of the gentry he was, it was alleged, breeding a class of teachers who, instead of being content with the station of life into which they had been born, would see themselves as a professional group with ideas and aspirations wholly unsuited to their lot: the seeds of social unrest were being sown at St Mark's. As for music as an essential ingredient of a national culture, as Derwent insisted, such a notion provoked particular scorn. Derwent had to maintain a constant running battle to retain the daily choral services in the college chapel (these, in fact, were responsible for the growth of the choral revival which …