Item 12 - Letter from Benjamin Bailey to Richard Monckton Milnes

Colombo, 'Ratnapoora, last address'. - Thanks for Milnes' reply and the books, which must still be on their way up river; will draw up reminiscences when he has read Milnes' Keats; asks whether it was 'poor Jane Reynolds' who reported his death; contrast with unexpected deaths of others. Knows little of the MacCarthys. Will send books, which, 'as the biographer of Keats... [Milnes] ought to have'. Poem quoted by Milnes is one Keats copied in a letter from Oxford from a scare volume of poetry by Katherine Philips; Milnes might rebind it in honour of Keats and the writer. Bailey bought it at Thrale auction in 1816; also has a copy of the first edition of Endymion, which he reviewed in the Oxford Herald; has arranged for this review to be sent to Milnes; his other publications. Sir J. E. Tennant will vouch for the unpromising literary environment of Ceylon. Requests Moxon's edition of Keats.

'I extracted a sentence from one of Keats's letters to myself which sounds very melancholy... but which shows the just confidence he had in himself: "At one time or other I will do you a pleasure, and the poets a little justice; but it ought to be in a poem of greater moment than Endymion, I will do it some day". That day never came; but the fragment of Hyperion shows what he could have done, had his life been spared'.