_The White Doe of Rylstone_ has been assigned chronologically to the year 1808; although part of it--probably the larger half--was written during the autumn of the previous year, and it remained unfinished in 1810, while the Dedication was not written till 1815. In the Fenwick note, Wordsworth tells us that the "earlier half" was written at Stockton-on-Tees "at the close" of 1807, and "proceeded with" at Dove Cottage, after his return to Grasmere, which was in April 1808. But on the 28th February, 1810, Dorothy Wordsworth, writing from Allan Bank to Lady Beaumont, says, "Before my brother turns to any other labour, I hope he will have finished three books of _The Recluse_. He seldom writes less than 50 lines every day. After this task is finished he hopes to complete _The White Doe_, and proud should we all be if it should be honoured by a frontispiece from the pencil of Sir George Beaumont. Perhaps this is not impossible, if you come into the north next summer." A frontispiece was drawn by Sir George Beaumont for the quarto edition of 1815. When part of the poem was finished, Wordsworth showed it to Southey; and Southey, writing to Walter Scott, in February 1808, said,-- "Wordsworth has just completed a most masterly poem upon the fate of the Nortons; two or three lines in the old ballad of _The Rising of the North_ gave him the hint. The story affected me more deeply than I wish to be affected; younger readers, however, will not object to the depth of the distress, and nothing was ever more ably treated. He is looking, too, for a narrative subject, pitched in a lower key." One of the most interesting letters of S. T. Coleridge to Wordsworth is an undated one, sent from London in the spring of 1808, containing a characteristic criticism of _The White Doe_. The Wordsworth family had asked Coleridge to discuss the subject of the publication of the poem with the Longmans' firm. It is more than probable that it was Coleridge's criticism of the structural defects in the poem, that led Wordsworth to postpone its publication. The following is part of the letter:--