MY DEAR COLERIDGE,

Being desirous of adding a few more last words to a new edition of my Letters from Scotland, I hope I may be pardoned for the liberty I have assumed in addressing them more immediately to you. To say truth, as the only criticisms on my book to which I have paid any considerable attention, are those contained in your two very interesting letters of last month, I know not to whom I could with so much propriety address the very short explanation which I have judged necessary upon the present occasion. But for what has fallen from yourself, I should never, most certainly, have thought of saying one word more in regard to a book, which I myself had considered so very much in the light of a bagatelle. The Letters were written in great haste, and published originally without much reflection; and if they furnished a little amusement and a little information to the “reading public” of the day, I should have been willing to suppose they had abundantly fulfilled all the purposes for which they were printed. That they have already done so, you are pleased to assure me—and so far I am satisfied. But it is easy for me to see, from the tenor of your remarks, that my ambition has not in general been believed to have been so moderate as it really was;— Under the guise of a simple traveller, apparently desirous only of describing what he had seen and felt in the course of a few months’ tour of idleness and relaxation—it has been suspected or discovered, as you inform me, that I had really gone forth as the champion of a particular set of literary, philosophical, and political opinions—and the nature of these opinions, it seems, has been such as to call down upon my head a measure of graver spleen, and severer criticism, than usually falls to the share of the letter-writer or the tourist. Although I must deny that my intentions were of so serious a kind as has been imagined—and still assure you that my book was written mainly with a view, not to the inculcation of opinions and the defence of dogmas, but the description of men and things—yet, as the opinions which have excited so much reprehension are most truly my opinions, I cannot refuse to stand by the consequences of having expressed them, even in this trivial shape and manner.