Thank you for your new volume

which I received the day before yesterday. There came with it copies (as I suppose) – directed for M^r Wordsworth & M^r Coleridge. That for the latter, must wait till an opportunity occurs of sending it to him at Highgate, which is his place of abode. Wordsworth’s will go tomorrow to his house, but he himself is at present in the Netherlands, or on the way thither.

I have not read thro the volume, – & of what I have read the tribute to your schoolmaster

has pleased me most. You write xx sweetly upon grateful subjects & worthy affections. These are worthier themes for poetry than crimes & horrors can be made; – & as for satire, I am afraid it is more likely to do some injury to him who writes it, than ever to xxx amend the person against whom it is directed. Not that I would proscribe it in the spirit of a Quaker; for it is necessary sometimes to show oneself capable of resentment. Peter Bells ass

patient as he was, used I have no doubt to fling out his heels sometimes upon just provocation.

Xxxx You have given me that sort of praise which is truly gratifying, because I am conscious that it is just.

I wish you had touched upon a part of the Giaours conduct,

which if I have ever occasion to grapple with him again I xxx will certainly bring forward, – his taking half his wifes fortune, by virtue of those marriage laws, in the xxx open breach of which he lives, & which he avowedly holds in contempt!

It is long since I have written any poetry. I shall endeavour to finish those poems which were begun many years ago,

& then leave the field to younger spirits. It has become long since more congenial to my inclinations to be following historical pursuits, In eight or ten weeks my Book of the Church

will appear, under which title a view of our ecclesiastical history is comprized As soon as it is compleated I set out for a two months absence in the south & west of England. I wish any propitious circumstances might lead you into these parts before I depart, or after I return, – for it would give me real pleasure to shake you by the hand.