Why did Samuel Taylor Coleridge leave Cambridge and enlist as a dragoon?

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Portrait of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge, detail of an oil painting by Washington Allston, 1814; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

During his third year at Jesus College, Cambridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was oppressed by financial difficulties, which led him to leave the university and travel to London. There, he enlisted as a dragoon—a soldier who fights on both horseback and foot—under the assumed name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.1

Coleridge proved to be unfit for military life and remained in the service only until his friends discovered his whereabouts. His brothers subsequently bought him out of the army, allowing him to return to Cambridge.1