University of Virginia Library

Poetical Works (ed. E. H. Coleridge, 1912), 1046, & n.

Most of the sheets bounds up in the Rugby Ms. show two numbers: (i) a discontinuous series in ink at the head of one or other margin, or occasionally at topcentre; and (ii) a continuous series in pencil at top-centre. Most of the inked numbers are lightly cancelled in pencil, which suggests that the pencilled series was added, and the inked series struck out, when the sheets were bound into the volume which Shadworth H. Hodgson presented to his old school. My reference is to the pencilled number.

His emendation of line 11 (supplying "taught" after "example") may of course be accepted.

Letters (ed. E. L. Griggs, 1956), I 155-6; Essays on His Own Time (ed. Mrs. H. N. Coleridge, 3 vols., 1850), I 69-70; Poetical Works 108: 61-2. In his discussion of the pencil abbreviations on the last leaf of the Gutch Notebook, C. R. Goodring conjectures that Thelwell may have figured in the list jotted down probably in July 1795. His comments on the poem cite some of the main ms. readings, but he seems to credit the Oxford text with independent authority. He refers to "two imperfect versions among the Cottle papers at Rugby school", adding that while the poem's "general sense supports the standard Oxford readings of 'slothful ease' and 'Cyprian bough' . . . the manuscript actually reads 'slothful woe' and 'cypress boughs'." But unless some other source turns up to support the Oxford readings, these can only be understood as mistaken transcriptions from the Rugby text. E.H. Coleridge is certainly explicit enough that here was the basis of his version. Politics in the Poetry of Coleridge (1961), 226-227, 116-117.