The Works.

A finely bound association set, with the ownership signatures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's nephew, John Taylor Coleridge, and inscribed by him with an extract from his close friend John Keble's The Christian Year (1827). Keble's popular collection adapted Romantic sensibilities to Anglican devotional poetry. The set remained in the Coleridge family, passing to John's grandson, Bernard, who has added his bookplates. John Taylor Coleridge (1790-1876) met Keble (1792-1866) as an undergraduate at Oxford and later published a memoir of his old friend (1869). He edited the Quarterly Review in 1824, and in the present set has annotated verses 85-87 of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, recording Thomas Hardy's opinion that the stanzas on Lake Geneva were "unsurpassed in descriptive poetry". The inscribed quotation is dated 1852, while Coleridge's ownership inscriptions are dated 1830. 6 vols, octavo (144 x 94 mm). Engraved frontispieces. Late 19th-century blue calf, red and yellow morocco labels, compartments elaborately gilt, double gilt fillet to boards, gilt inner dentelles, marbled endpapers, top edges gilt, fore and bottom edges uncut, purple bookmarkers. Bindings a touch rubbed, a couple of patches of stripping, the odd spots of foxing. A near-fine set. …