Beschreibung:

SERIES OF 44 AUTOGRAPH LETTERS SIGNED ('S. Palmer', 'Samuel Palmer', 'S.P.', 'Nogo', 'Mr. Fearing', 'Blind Infancy', 'Vanity of Vanities', 'Nobody', 'A good-for-nothing-little-baby-scamp who is ashamed to sign his name', 'Outis', 'A blind baby feeling for the bosom of T. Howard Wright Esq' and 'A Suckling at the bosom of Truth'; and one unsigned but complete), one with a sketch, with substantial fragments of six other autograph letters (18 pages), to Rev. John Preston Wright (b. c. 1845), his wife Edith (2) and his younger brother Thomas Howard Wright (b. 1849), a barrister; the letters represent Palmer in many moods, from the serious, the good-humoured to the ludicrous, and contain his views or quips on a wide range of subjects including religion, the Law, philosophy, natural history, money, the Blake Exhibition, music, a visit to Coleridge's house in Highgate, prints, papists, Spring cleaning, courage and cowardice, murder, ghosts, snakes, books, biography, knowledge, London, Oxford, health, loneliness, his social conscience, morality, Swedenbourg, human vanity, children, marriage, astronomy, astrology, Progress, schooling, poetry, wisdom, expediency, anecdotes, modern Christianity, martyrdom, vestments, the ancient Persians, despair, drollery, folly, money, flannel waistcoats and much else; he mentions William Blake ('was misled by erroneous spirits'), Milton, Matthew Arnold, Swift, Thackeray, Dr Johnson, Jeremy Taylor, Ann Radcliffe, Goldsmith, Herbert Spencer John Stuart Mill, David Hume, James Boswell Charles Darwin, Bunyan, Burke, Bacon, [Dickens], Gibbon, Spenser, Wordsworth, Campbell, Crabbe Robinson, Ruskin, Carlyle, Sir Thomas Browne, Scott, Sydney Smith, Southey, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare and Coleridge among others, 194 pages in all, mostly octavo, two letters quarto and one folio, two letters lightly crossed through, a few mostly minor tears, Furze Hill, Mead Vale, Red Hill, Bradlaugh Parliament Street, 'Diffidence Villa', 'The Slow coach house', and 'The Cart-rut Red Hill', 1866-1881