MS location unknown. Printed in Coleridge, Life, 123.
My dear Anne,
Have you seen any more of Charles’s owl? The shells got home quite safe. I send you a carrier Trochus and Charles a waved whelk, Duke a fresh-water mussel and Jane a cyprea.1 I went to the theatre whilst I was at Oxford; it is a great large place shaped like a horse shoe; at the flat end sat all the musicians and singers on a stand raised on pillars; in the middle was a great round place called the area, in which all the gentlemen squeezed in if they could; at the tip-top of all the college people all round under them were all the ladies and doctors; there were two great sticking-out boxes like pulpits, at the end of each was an axe tied up in what was meant to look like the Roman lictors’ bundles of rods.2 The Duke of Wellington sat on a most beautiful velvet cushion on a carved chair. The Duke of Cumberland on a velvet and gold chair. His uniform was very funny; first he wore a red coat, then fastened on his shoulder a blue coat trimmed with fur; tied to his sword was a sort of pocket called a sabre-dash. The Duke of Wellington wore robes of black and gold. One day when he came to Exeter C. he kissed Julian and shook hands with me. There were a great many people besides doctors; they all wore red robes. We went to New College and Magdalen; the windows of the first were painted all manner of colours, but the other was brown.
I am your affectionate
Charlotte Mary Yonge