Your sincere friend,
S. T. Coleridge.
P. S. I have enclosed a five-guinea note. The five shillings over please to lay out for me thus. In White’s (of Fleet Street or the Strand, I forget which—O! the Strand I believe, but I don’t know which), well, in White’s catalogue are the following books:—
4674. Iamblichus,[131] Proclus, Porphyrius, etc., one shilling and sixpence, one little volume.
4686. Juliani Opera, three shillings: which two books you will be so kind as to purchase for me, and send down with the twenty-five pamphlets. But if they should unfortunately be sold, in the same catalogue are:—
2109. Juliani Opera, 12s. 6d.
676. Iamblichus de Mysteriis, 10s. 6d.
2681. Sidonius Apollinaris, 6s.
And in the catalogue of Robson, the bookseller in New Bond Street, Plotini Opera, a Ficino, £1.1.0, making altogether £2.10.0.
If you can get the two former little books, costing only four and sixpence, I will rest content with them; if they are gone, be so kind as to purchase for me the others I mentioned to you, amounting to two pounds, ten shillings; and, as in the course of next week I shall send a small parcel of books and manuscripts to my very dear Charles Lamb of the India House, I shall be enabled to convey the money to you in a letter, which he will leave at your house. I make no apology for this commission, because I feel (to use a vulgar phrase) that I would do as much for you. P. P. S. Can you buy them time enough to send down with your pamphlets? If not, make a parcel per se. I hope your hurts from the fall are not serious; you have given a proof now that you are no Ippokrite, but I forgot that you are not a Greekist, and perchance you hate puns; but, in Greek, Krites signifies a judge and hippos a horse. Hippocrite, therefore, may mean a judge of horses. My dear fellow, I laugh more and talk more nonsense in a week than [most] other people do in a year. Farewell.
John Thelwall,
Beaufort Buildings, Strand, London.