As idle as a painted ship

Again courtesy of the library, we've been enjoying Hornblower videos. I think that a lot of these stories were published in the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines. Anyhow, in the fourth episode, Captain Pellew quotes from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This comes very close to being an anachronism, if it isn't one. The Rime is from 1797 or 1798, it appears; at least one Hornblower chronology places the year in that series as 1797. It's a near thing, anyhow, it seems. How many generations of schoolkids had to learn how many verses of this? Unlike some Shakespeare and other stuff memorized, these lines really stick.