MANUSCRIPT. [A hand-written collection of three long contemporary poems. N.p.: circa 1818.] 90pp., manuscript, 4to (223 x 174mm.) 2 engraved portrait frontispieces, being Princess Charlotte of Wales and her husband, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, 45 unnumbered leaves in a single hand with manuscript title-pages for Lord Byron’s ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, Thomas Campbell’s ‘O’Connor’s Child, or the Flower of Love Lies Bleeding’, and Samuel Roger’s ‘Jacqueline’. (Light browning, damp-staining verso the front-free endpaper, abrasions verso portrait of Princess Charlotte.) Contemporary red full straight-grain morocco (extremities rubbed and scuffed, small loss and sunning to spine panel). Note: Princess Charlotte had defied her father in marrying for love. George IV had wanted Charlotte to marry William, Prince of Orange, but in marrying Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfed Charlotte had become a symbol of hope against her unpopular father and grandfather and was also a literary heroine for the romantic sensibility of the time. She was happily married to Leopold for eighteen months before dying in childbirth at the age of twenty-one. Her fate – similar to that of the tragic protagonists of the three poems- plunged the country into a period of national mourning.