Letter from William Hone, London, to William Howitt, 1826 February 5 : autograph manuscript signed

Thanking him for a copy of his "Forest Minstrel" which "...during the few hours it has been in my possession, renders the day of arrival a bright one in my gloomy calendar - because it was addressed to me as a 'respected friend', and one of the authors was pleased to call himself my 'friend' - and because I know the import of the word when it is so expressed by one of the 'Society of Friends;" continuing to discuss the books and the ways in which he identifies with it and the ways in which it speaks to him; commenting, in a postscript, his last meeting with Keats; saying "By the way you mention Keats and Hunt - I had a slight knowledge of Keats whom I saw for the last time, within a week of him quitting England, & sat with him on a bench in a fine grove at Hampstead, where he rested, and talked, and gasped from his laboring lungs, in a sad way. Hunt I was with daily before he left for Italy, and now I meet him sometimes at the friend's house I call at most frequently, Charles Lamb's - I hope you do not exclude Coleridge from your list of 'seers' of things animate & inanimate. In my estimation he is the first of living poets - Remember the little volume of his poems published by "J & A Arch" thirty years ago and I presume they are conjoined with his 'Ancient Mariner' in the 'Sybilline leaves' but I have not that book to refer to."