Item 12 - Letter from Benjamin Bailey to Richard Monckton Milnes

5 ff.

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'.

The volume of poetry referred to by Bailey in this letter is now in the Crewe collection, also at Trinity, with an MS dedication from Bailey to Milnes: Poems by the most deservedly admired Mrs Katherine Philips, the matchless Orinda...