Item 20 - Letter from William Whewell

4 pp.

WW is sorry to hear that HJR is ill. HJR's old pupil, [Charles J.] Goodhart, is a particular favourite with Thomas Thorp. WW did not mean to suggest he had quarrelled with Miller's Bampton Lectures since he has not read them: 'But I suppose I should have asked you what you mean by your school and my school. I do not know that my views and opinions are those of any class of people and they certainly are not those which have often served as a basis for the jokes of our common acquaintances - your school is I presume the Wordsworthian, and I believe that many of the persons whom, I imagine, you would include in it have exceedingly amiable and deeply seated religious & moral views & feelings - but what these have to do with... Coleridge's rant of etymologico-Platonic speculations is what I have never been able to make out'. They have been fighting in Cambridge over the right of election. Adam Sedgwick 'has just printed a pamphlet on the subject which is quite admirable - I cannot send it you but I beg you to believe on my word that we are exceedingly in the right and that the heads in general & French in particular are greatly in the wrong'.