Great Malvern [on embossed notepaper: University, St Andrews, N.B.]. - Inaugural meeting of Wordsworth Soiety at Grasmere last night; lists aims of the Society and some of its members; the Bishop of St. Andrews [Charles Wordsworth] is President. Invites Houghton to join Council, listing other probable members; duties will be light.
The Master [Christopher Wordsworth] wishes WW to preach a sermon the Sunday before he retires from his Vice-Chancellorship. Lodge has returned from Holland. The Master told JCH that Dora Wordsworth is better: 'I wonder whether her long illness has arisen from disappointed love. Do you hear any reasonable motive assigned for Wordsworth refusing his consent?'.
Embossed notepaper, Bishopshall, St. Andrews. - Met Houghton at Shakespeare Tercentenary meeting sixteen years ago; suggested him as Council member for Wordsworth Society at its inaugural meeting. Professor Knight has written twice to Houghton but has had no reply.
(Pasted to a sheet marked ‘With compliments from Prof. L. Campbell’.)
Notes, correspondence and printed material largely relating to W. Aldis Wright's work as Secretary of the Old Testament Revision Company. Includes letters from: Bartholomew Price; the Bishop of St David's [Basil Jones]; the Bishop of Llandaff [Alfred Ollivant], two Bishops of Winchester [Harold Browne and Samuel Wilberforce) and the Bishop of St Andrew's, Dunkeld and Dunblane [Charles Wordsworth]. Draft letters from Wright to R. A. [?] Massie and the editor of the Rock. Printed correspondence, members lists etc of the Old and New Testament Revision Companies. Notes on the Psalms, the Athanasian Creed, 'The Rephaim and other giant races of Scripture' [no 44] etc.
Also present: what purports to be a frontispiece to the Coverdale Bible of 1535, with an engraved portrait of Coverdale 'from a Drawing in the Possession of Dr Gifford' [from Erasmus Middleton's Biographia evangelica of 1816?] and a copy of 'Coverdale's Dedication' and 'Myles Coverdale unto the Christen Reader' [from Bagster's 1838 printing?]. A note in Philip Gaskell's hand judges the frontispiece to be 'slightly fishy: cd be a block printed on old paper'.
Wright, William Aldis (1831-1914), literary and biblical scholar