MS location unknown. Printed in Coleridge, Life p.300
My dear Sir William-
I hope it is not very presumptuous to follow my impulse of not exactly congratulating you, but expressing my great pleasure in the award of this mark of honour1 to you, coming, it seems to me, in an especially gratifying manner, as being so entirely free from all connection with party and at a time when I suppose it cannot be as a matter of course, but as showing how high real merit and desert can stand above politics.
I do not know whether this is all my ignorance, but the feeling that the tidings gave me could not but long to express itself, more especially when I seem to see again the look of intense happy emotion that it would have brought into my father’s eyes.
Forgive me if I have said what I ought not, I really could not help it-
Yours affectionately,
C. M. YONGE.