Lot 95
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Rare Books, Maps & Manuscripts
Auction: 4 May 2011 at 12:00 BST
Description
Autograph letter, to his brother George, about Calligraphy, incomplete, lacking most of the second leaf, written in Coleridge's neatest copperplate script, commenting on his cough, ",,,not Cerberus ever bark'd louder: every act of tussitation seems to divorce my bowells and belly...Well - from catarrhs may Heaven preserve / The lungs Of all my Tribe!..."; passing on family news, and commenting enthusiastically on his meeting with the writing master Thomas Tomkins (1743-1816), whose script he emulates in this letter, 2 pages, folio, and fragment of second page (small strip at top), 17 May 1791 "...he declared, that he thought me a very clever young man - and I declared that I thought his Collection of Poems one of the best Collections, I had ever seen...here he shewed me the Title-page of Macklin's famous bible, written by himself. It was, without hyperbole, most astonishingly beautiful. I could not help delicately insinuating that I conceived such writing not more the production of a fine-formed Hand, than the emanation of an elegant Soul; and I ended with lamenting my own most shameful deficiency in this respect. He desired to see my writing - I shewed him some - he might have read it by the light of my Blushes...it contained never the less the seeds of a good hand... I regard them as the causes, and that time as the Æra of my surprizing conversion - a conversion to be parrelleled by none since the conversion of St. Paul..."
Footnote
Note: Published in the Collected Letters, ed. Griggs, I, 9-11 (No.6).
Provenance: The property of a gentleman by direct descent from George Coleridge.