MS location unknown. Printed in Coleridge, Life, 334-5

My dear Mary
I send you the Melanesian paper; would you do as the Bishop asks, and send him your address and two stamps, and so get the paper regularly sent to you? Partridge sends me a terrible number, and now they are not to be gratis to subscribers. We have told them to send in their names to Bishop Selwyn; it is getting rid of a good deal of bother.

Moreover the Monthly Packet has turned me out except as a contributor. It has been going down, Newbery and Atalanta supplant it, and the old friends are nearly all gone, and the young ones call it goody-goody. So the old coachman who has driven it for forty years is called on to retire! They are very civil about it, and want me to be called Consulting Editor, but that is nonsense, for they don’t consult me. It is not Christabel’s fault, but A. D. I. wants to be modern, though still good and churchy, and I don’t like to be scolded for what I have not sanctioned, so it is a relief in that way. It is property, and so no wonder Mr. Innes views it as such, and not as a thing pro ecclesia. Don’t withdraw your questions, they want to go on with them, and they do good, and above all, don’t speak of my withdrawal as ill-usage, but only as Anno Domini, which it may be more than is the nature of things I should understand, for I think that I am as much to the fore as ever. Only most of my old friends have passed, and it is not the same. I go on with cameos and perhaps with stories, certainly with some conchology.

I am reading your book, and will mention it.

Your affectionate
C. M. Yonge