DEAR Coleridge,—Your offer about the German poems is exceedingly kind; but I do not think it a wise speculation, because the time it would take you to put them into prose would be nearly as great as if you versified them. Indeed, I am sure you could do the one nearly as soon as the other; so that, instead of a division of labour, it would be only a multiplication. But I will think of your offer in another light. I dare say I could find many things of a light nature to suit that paper, which you would not object to pass upon Stuart as your own, and I should come in for some light profits, and Stuart think the more highly of your assiduity. “Bishop Hall’s Characters” I know nothing about, having never seen them. But I will reconsider your offer, which is very plausible; for as to the drudgery of going every day to an editor with my scraps, like a pedlar, for him to pick out, and tumble about my ribbons and posies, and to wait in his lobby, &c., no money could make up for the degradation. You are in too high request with him to have anything unpleasant of that sort to submit to.
It was quite a slip of my pen, in my Latin letter, when I
told you I had Milton’s Latin
Works. I ought to have said his Prose Works, in two volumes, Birch’s edition, containing all, both
Latin and English, a fuller and better edition than Lloyd’s of Toland.
It is completely at your service, and you must accept it from me; at the same
time, I shall be much obliged to you for your Latin Milton, which you think you
have at Howitt’s; it will leave me nothing to wish
for but the “History of
England,” which I shall soon pick up for a trifle. But you
must write me word whether the Miltons are worth paying carriage for. You have
a Milton; but it is pleasanter to eat one’s own peas
out of one’s own garden, than to buy them by the peck at Covent Garden;
and a book reads the better, which is our own, and has been so long known to
us, that we know the topography of its blots and dog’s-ears, and can
trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins,
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Your “Epigram on the Sun and Moon in Germany” is admirable. Take ’em all together, they are as good as Harrington’s. I will muster up all the conceits I can, and you shall have a packet some day. You and I together can answer all demands surely: you, mounted on a terrible charger (like Homer in the Battle of the Books) at the head of the cavalry: I will lead the light horse. I have just heard from Stoddart. Allen and he intend taking Keswick in their way home. Allen wished particularly to have it a secret that he is in Scotland, and wrote to me accordingly very urgently. As luck was, I had told not above three or four; but Mary had told Mrs. Green of Christ’s Hospital! For the present, farewell: never forgetting love to Pi-pos and his friends.
