My Grandfatherly love and kisses to the Fairy Prattler and the meek boy. I did heave a long-drawn wish this morning, as the sun and the air too were so genial, that the latter had been in the good woman’s house at Highgate well wrapped up. A fortnight would do wonders for the dear little fellow. You and Mrs. Allsop may rely on it that I would see him every day during his stay here, if there were only one hour in which it did not rain vehemently.
God bless you,
And your obliged and most
affectionately attached friend,
S. T. Coleridge.
T. Allsop, Esq.
Coleridge wrote about this time to Wordsworth regarding his translation of part of Virgil (Knight’s Life of Wordsworth, ii, 302), and threw cold water on the project of Wordsworth’s entering into rivalry with Dryden.
Letter 212. To Allsop
April 14th, 1824.