I dare say Coleridge altered this, because an idea arose, which I actually heard to have been reported as Coleridge’s real intention by a member of contemporary circles (P. G. Patmore, father of Coventry P. who conveyed the report to me)--viz., that Géraldine was to turn out to be a man!! I believe myself that the conclusion as given by Gillman from Coleridge’s account to him is correct enough, only not picturesquely worded. It does not seem a bad conclusion by any means, though it would require fine treatment to make it seem a really good one. Of course the first part is so immeasurably beyond the second, that one feels Chas. Lamb’s view was right, and it should have been abandoned at that point. The passage on sundered friendship is one of the masterpieces of the language, but no doubt was written quite separately and then fitted into _Christabel_. The two lines about Roland and Sir Leoline are simply an intrusion and an outrage. I cannot say that I like the conclusion nearly so well as this. It hints at infinite beauty, but somehow remains a sort of cobweb. The conception, and partly the execution, of the passage in which Christabel repeats by fascination the serpent-glance of Géraldine, is magnificent; but that is the only good narrative passage in part two. The rest seems to have reached a fatal facility of jingling, at the heels whereof followed Scott. There are, I believe, many continuations of _Christabel_. Tupper did one! I myself saw a continuation in childhood, long before I saw the original, and was all agog to see it for years. Our household was all of Italian, not English environment, and it was only when I went to school later that I began to ransack bookstalls. The continuation in question was by one Eliza Stewart, and appeared in a shortlived monthly thing called _Smallwood’s Magazine_, to which my father contributed some Italian poetry, and so it came into the house. I thought the continuation spirited then, and perhaps it may have been so. This must have been before 1840 I think. The other day I saw in a bookseller’s catalogue--_Christabess_, by S. T. Colebritche, translated from the Doggrel by Sir Vinegar Sponge (1816). This seems a parody, not a continuation, in the very year of the poem’s first appearance! I did not think it worth two shillings,--which was the price.... Have you seen the continuation of _Christabel_ in _European Magazine?_ of course it _might_ have been Coleridge’s, so far as the date of the composition of the original was concerned; but of course it was not his.