London: William Pickering 1847. Second edition, expanded, of Coleridge's intellectual autobiography, which was originally published in 1817. With Moxon's 8-page advertising supplement, dated October 1855, at the front. NCBEL 218. The second edition includes a 187-page introduction by Henry Nelson Coleridge, and a dedicatory letter from Sara Coleridge to the Poet Laureate William Wordsworth expressing her "dearest and profoundest wish" that "not only as a Poet, but as a Lover and a Teacher of Wisdom, my Father may continue to be spoken of in connection with you." In explaining his motives for writing this "exculpation", Coleridge emphasized the importance of resolving the long-standing debate over the question of correct poetic diction, which Wordsworth had assayed in his introduction to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800): "It will be found, that the least of what I have written concerns myself personally. I have used the narration chiefly for the purpose of giving a continuity to the work, in part for the sake of the miscellaneous reflections suggested to me by particular events, but still more as introductory to the statement of my principles in Politics, Religion, and Philosophy, and the application of the rules, deduced from philosophical principles, to poetry and criticism. But of the objects, which I proposed to myself, it was not the least important to effect, as far as possible, a settlement of the long continued controversy concerning the true nature of poetic diction: and at the same time to define with the utmost impartiality the real poetic character of the poet, by whose writings this controversy was first kindled, and has been since fuelled and fanned. 2 volumes, short thick 8vo, original green cloth. Rear inner hinges strained, otherwise a fine set of this important edition of one of the primary documents of English Romanticism.