Wordsworth and Coleridge Marginalia in a Copy of Richard Payne Knight's "Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste" [with Note

Abstract

AMONG THE MANY BOOKS fortunately spoiled by Coleridge's abuse of their margins,' there is one in the Huntington Library which seems to have escaped commentators.The work itself, Richard Payne Knight's Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, is a good example of the aesthetic criticism of the eighteenth century, and the marginal annotations are of great interest in that connection as well as in themselves. The volume's provenance and the general appearance of the script had assigned the annotations to Coleridge. To decipher these, to relate the text to the aesthetic controversies in which it played a part, to see the germs of later theory in Coleridge's scornful and speculative comments, was exciting and rewarding enough. But when one had to face the possibility that these apparent Coleridge marginalia are a rare, even a unique, phenomenon-a set of Wordsworth marginalia-then indeed the wonder grew. Careful comparison with manuscript Coleridge and Wordsworth letters of appropriate dates, and scientific tests of the penmanship, established the handwriting as undeniably Wordsworth's. What had begun as an opportunity to decipher some as yet unpublished Coleridge annotations, of special interest because critical, at significant points, of eighteenth-century theory, developed, as an important side issue, the puzzling fact that they are in Wordsworth's handwriting.2 The copy of Knight's Inquiry which contains the marginalia is of