MS location unknown. Printed in Coleridge, Life 154-156

My dear Driver¹
I rather doubted about sending you Cyrus², because, as you will see, he does not stand alone, but is a chapter of general history and therefore is not very minute, nor has he been written more than once, so that you must excuse numerous deficiencies and please to let me have him again. To my shame be it spoken I have not read Clarendon; we ought to have read him aloud when we were diligent Dicks³, instead of which I was set to read him to myself when I was too young and could not get on. I think you get a great deal of him well adapted in Lodge, but you see I am not competent to give an opinion. Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers cannot help being interesting in spite of the man that writes it.⁴ I think you would find it a useful string to your bow. He certainly makes out a very good case for Rupert, who, always having been rather a pet of mine, I am glad to see exculpated. It seems that he fought Marston Moor against his own opinion, under positive orders from Charles, which he never showed to any one under all the accusations he suffered, but carried about him to his dying day. I wish I could do more to help you where you are. Don’t be afraid for the Confirmation story⁵, it will be written all the quicker when it once begins for being well cogitated at first, and I do cogitate it. Lucy and Juliet are the names of the sisters still, I could not make the first do with any other. I have been settling how Lord Herbert begins the Confirmation with them – something in this way; they are staying at his parsonage, you now, just after he and Constance are come back from Madeira. He says, ‘Don’t you think, Lucy, that you could be spared to stay with us till after the Confirmation?’ He was little prepared for the manner in which his invitation was received. Lucy rose up and sat down, then said with an effort, while the tears began to flow, ‘ Oh, Herbert, you don’t know how bad I am! When Aubrey died, and I was ill, then I thought how I was really going to be good, and we set to work and made rules, and went to Mr. Fellowes to be prepared for Confirmation. Then I was out of spirits and weak after all that had happened, and mamma thought it was the Confirmation, and took us to London, and Juliet and I came out! And I could not help liking the parties very much, only what with them and with the masters too, all my time was taken up, and I could not mind my rules, and so whenever I got time to think I only found myself growing worse and more unhappy.’

So this is to be the state of mind in which he takes her up. And I have made out why Constance was so superior. I think the three sisters were sent home when Constance was seven, Lucy five, Juliet four, and all put under the protection of an uncle, Mr. Berners, who always lives abroad, and concerns himself no more about them than to send them to a very good clergyman’s widow who takes young Indians, and there they stay until Constance is thirteen or fourteen, when on their father’s death or mother’s second marriage they are suddenly recollected and all moved to the fashionable school where they have been ever since, Constance having brought away with her too much good to be spoilt in the atmosphere there, perhaps confirmed before she goes. At seventeen she goes to stay about with relations preparatory to going to India, stays with some school-fellow for the consecration of a church where Lord Herbert, just ordained, is to be curate. She is a delicate, graceful, winning, white-lily sort of person, not striking, but very lovely, and he forthwith falls over head and ears in love and only waits to get all the different people’s consents. Lucy and Juliet spend one happy little week of summer holidays with them at his curacy, and are promised Christmas, then he grows ill and is ordered abroad, and they have one little meeting with him and Constance in London. All this before the beginning of the story. If Henrietta does not tarry on the road again your mind will be relieved about Fred on Thursday, and I hope the Old Slave’s aunt⁶ will recover it. I am just sending off two chapters more. My idle work now is writing a play for the Moberly’s Christmas sport, about that time when Edward III. and Philippa found their children left all by themselves in the Tower.⁷ As they say great novelists cannot succeed in the drama, I suppose I shall make a fine mess of it, but it will do for them at any rate to make fun of. Do you want to know where to get red cloak stuff two yards wide at four shillings per yard [?]. Mamma saw some at the Consecration in Sussex, and has a famous bale of it which is just going to be made up. I read a piece of the Allegro at school last week, and I never saw a child in a state of greater delight than Marianne Small, Elizabeth’s younger sister.⁸ I have just given Jane Martin a real old Christian Year.⁹ Thanks for the news of Allens; the economical fire amuses us much. Abbey Church No. 3 would begin after the laughing.

Your most dutiful
C. M. Y.