Letter from Lord Coleridge, Ambleside, to William Angus Knight, 1881 October 4 : autograph manuscript signed.

Explaining how he came to possess the "manuscript notes & alterations in Wordsworth's poems; and explaining the significance of the acquisition;" saying "I saw them advertised in a catalogue which was sent me, & at my request the book was very courteously forwarded to me for my inspection. It appeared to me of sufficient interest & value to induce me to buy it; & I accordingly became the purchaser. It is a copy of the edition in six volumes the publication of which began in the year 1836; & of the volume containing the collected sonnets which was afterwards printed uniformly with that edition. It appears to have been the copy which Wordsworth himself used for correcting altering & adding to the poems contained in it. As you have seen in some of the poems the alterations are very large, amounting sometimes to a complete rewriting of considerable passages. Many of these alterations have been printed in subsequent editions; some have not; two or three small poems as far as I know have not been hitherto published. Much of the writing is Wordsworth's own; but perhaps the larger portion is the handwriting of others, one or more, not familiar to me as Wordsworth's is - How the volumes came to be sold I do not know; nor why those who withhold from the world a book of 'The Recluse', for the same sort of reason, as I have understood, as that which induces a cotton monopolist to hold back a cargo of cotton, have parted with half dozen or dozen few lines to be found in these manuscripts I am quite unable to say. Such as they are & whatever be then interest or value, you are as far as I am concerned heartily welcome to them, & let me to be glad indeed if they add in the least degree to make your edition more worthy of the great man for whom my admiration grows every day I live, & my deep gratitude to whom will cease only with my life & my reason."