So (I hear) Allen[27] will be most precipitately emancipated. Good luck have thou of thy emancipation, Bob-bee! Tell him from me that if he does not kick Richards’[28] fame out of doors by the superiority of his own, I will never forgive him.
If you will send me a box of Mr. Stringer’s tooth powder, mamma! we will accept of it.
And now, Right Reverend Mother in God, let me claim your permission to subscribe myself with all observance and gratitude, your most obedient humble servant, and lowly slave,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Reverend in the future tense, and scholar of Jesus College in the present time.
XIV. TO MARY EVANS.
Jesus College, Cambridge, February 22 [1792].
Dear Mary,—Writing long letters is not the fault into which I am most apt to fall, but whenever I do, by some inexplicable ill luck, my prolixity is always directed to those whom I would yet least of all wish to torment. You think, and think rightly, that I had no occasion to increase the preceding accumulations of wearisomeness, but I wished to inform you that I have sent the poem of Bowles, which I mentioned in a former sheet; though I dare say you would have discovered this without my information. If the pleasure which you receive from the perusal of it prove equal to that which I have received, it will make you some small return for the exertions of friendship, which you must have found necessary in order to travel through my long, long, long letter.
Though it may be a little effrontery to point out beauties, which would be obvious to a far less sensible heart than yours, yet I cannot forbear the self-indulgence of remarking to you the exquisite description of Hope in the third page and of Fortitude in the sixth; but the poem “On leaving a place of residence” appears to me to be almost superior to any of Bowles’s compositions.
I hope that the Jermyn Street ledgers are well. How can they be otherwise in such lovely keeping?