Letter from Rev. George Coleridge, Ottery St. Mary, to Robert Southey, 1814 November 10 : autograph manuscript signed.

This collection, MA 1857, includes seventeen autograph letters signed from various correspondents to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, three autograph letters signed to Robert Southey, one each from Edward Coleridge, John Taylor Coleridge and Sara Fricker Coleridge and two autograph letters signed from William Wordsworth, one to Robert Southey and one to Joseph Henry Green. This collection of letters dates from 1794-1834.
This letter is from the Joanna Langlais Collection, a large collection of letters written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to various recipients. The collection has been divided into subsets, based primarily on Coleridge's addressees, and these sub-collections have been cataloged individually as MA 1848- MA 1857.
Address panel with seal and postmark to "Robert Southey Esq / Keswick / Cumberland."
Place of writing from a published letter of reply to this letter from Southey to the Rev. George Coleridge, dated November 14, 1814 and addressed to Rev. Coleridge at "Warden House / Ottery St. Mary / near Honiton / Devonshire."
This letter begins with a copy of a letter from the Rev. William Hart Coleridge to his uncle, the Rev. George Coleridge, dated "Oxford, Christ Church, Nov. 7th, 1814", informing him that he has obtained a Postmastership at Merton College for Hartley Coleridge and laying out the specific financial benefits to Hartley and adding that this Postmastership, added to Lady Beaumont's £30, Mr. Poole's £10, and with the Ottery contribution of £40 "...will make up the sum of 130 or 140 a year, which with the strictest Economy may certainly do;" outlining the drawbacks that come with the Postmastership but concluding "...I cannot but think that we are very fortunate and I sincerely hope that a door may now be opened, a proper soil found in which Hartley's talents, if they are of a superior class, may vegetate and bring forth their due fruits. Better Colleges might have been found : but the object was not altogether the best College, but a College, where with respectability he might hold a lucrative situation. It now only remains to say, when he can become a Postmaster. This I am sorry to say cannot be, unless a vacancy unexpectedly occurs till Easter or [illegible] Term : but the College will allow him to enter now, and miss the intervening terms."
William Hart Coleridge (1789-1849) was a nephew of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, educated by his uncle the Rev. George Coleridge (the author of this letter and the person to whom the copy of the letter with which his letter begins is addressed) who used his position at Oxford University to secure a Postmastership (scholarship) for Hartley Coleridge to attend Merton College, Oxford. William Hart Coleridge would later serve as the Bishop of Barbados and the Leeward Islands from 1824-1842.