Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, London, to Robert Southey, 1813 February 9 : autograph manuscript signed.

Apologizing for not having written and describing how busy he has been: "Then the endless Rat a Tat Tat at our black & blue bruised Door -- & my two Master-Fiends, Letters and Proof Sheets, to which indeed I must add a third, their Compeer -- invitations to large Dinners"; promising to send Southey a copy of the second edition of his play "Remorse"; saying that Dr. Andrew Bell came to see him this morning, upset about a review of "Remorse" from a prestigious critic who he would not name and who had asserted that there were "many very unequal Lines in the play"; writing that he then discovered that the critic was William Gifford, "who had said good-naturedly, that I ought to be whipt for leaving so many weak & slovenly Lines in so fine a Poem. -- What the Lines were, he would not say -- & I do not care. Inequalities every Poem, even an Epic, much more a Dramatic Poem, must have & ought to have -- the question is, are they in their own place Dissonances? If so, I am the last man to stickle for them, who am nicknamed in the Green Room the anomalous Author, from my utter indifference or prompt facility in sanctioning every omission that was suggested"; responding to claims by Gifford in the Quarterly Review that Coleridge was one of the authors ridiculed in Rejected Addresses: or the New Theatrum Poetarum and saying that they are "surely unworthy a man of sense like Gifford" and do not affect him; commenting on the reception of Rejected Addresses and what it says about the gossipy and malicious nature of current literary taste; discussing at length the response in various papers to the play and how critics have focused on his previous writing rather than the object at hand; adding "if it had not been for the Preface to W's Lyrical Ballads [they] would themselves have never dreamt of affected Simplicity & Meanness of Thought & Diction --. This Slang has gone on for 14 or 15 years, against us -- & really deserves to be exposed"; describing what he thinks the strengths of the play are; writing about the idea of remorse in general and how it functions in the play; discussing the use of meter in the play; referring to his debts to Schiller: "As to my Thefts from the Wallenstein, they were on my compulsion from the necessity of Haste -- & do not lie heavy on my Conscience, being partly thefts from myself, & because I gave Schiller 20 for one I have taken. I shall, however, weed them out as soon as I can: & in the mean time, I hope, they will lie snug"; mentioning a line in the play that he had inadvertently taken from Wordsworth; promising to write tomorrow on the subject of Martha Fricker; adding in a postscript that the house was crowded again last night and the manager told him they lost £200 by not running it on Saturday night as well, "tho' Jack Bannister came out."