VIEWS FROM GRETA HALL

'This Greta Hall is a house on a small eminence, a furlong from Keswick, in the county of Cumberland. Yes, my dear Sir, here I am, with Skiddaw at my backâ€”on my right hand the Bassenthwaite Water, with its majesticcaseof mountains, all of simplest outline. Looking slant, direct over the feather of this infamous pen, I see the sun setting. My God! what a scene! Right before me is a greatcampof single mountainsâ€”each in shape resembles a giant's tentâ€”and to the left, but closer to it far than the Bassenthwaite Water to my right, is the Lake of Keswick, with its islands and white sails, and glossy lights of evening,â€”crowned with green meadows; but the three remaining sides are encircled by the most fantastic mountains that ever earthquakes made in sport, as fantastic as if Nature had laughed herself into the convulsion in which they were made. Close behind me flows the Greta; I hear its murmuring distinctly. Then it curves round, almost in a semicircle, and is now catching the purple lights of the scattered clouds above it directly before me.'â€”A letter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's.

J. Ruskin.

SAMUAL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

From a Painting by G. Dage, R.A.

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'This illustrious man, the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive, in my judgment, that has yet existed among men.'â€”De Quincey.

IN him we have another of our intellectual giants, a many-sided man, a poet, a theologian, a politician, or, in Charles Lamb's well-known phrase, a logician, a metaphysician, a bard. He was a fortunate man in so far as he has attained literary immortality. He was a singularly unfortunate man in so far as his natural character was deficient in will-power, and lacking in that subtle but invaluable property known as common-sense. His story, once you begin it, holds you, like the story of his own 'long, lank, brown, and ancient Mariner's,' captive to the end, it is so full of pathetic romance.

Garrulous, kind-hearted old Bookseller Cottle, of Bristol, very minor poet himself, yet devoted to letters, and staunch friend in their utmost need to an afterwards famous band of young men, tells us how Robert Lovell, an inexperienced and sanguine Quaker, was carried away by a Socialistic colonization scheme to be tested on the banks of the Susquehannahâ€”the community to be called a Pantisocracyâ€”fromwhich injustice, wrath, anger, clamour, and evil-speaking, were to be excluded, thereby setting an example of human perfectability. Four young men, Lovell said, had joined the movement, who were to embark at Bristol for the American coloniesâ€”Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Cambridge with whom the idea was supposed to have originated, Robert Southey and George Burnett from Oxford, and himself. In due time he introduced his friendsâ€”Southey, 'tall, dignified, possessing great suavity of manners, an eye piercing, with a countenance full of genius, kindliness, and intelligence'; Burnett, son of a Somersetshire farmer, who soon vanished from sightâ€”never, indeed, comes fairly into it;and Coleridge, with 'an eye, a brow, and a forehead indicative of commanding genius.' The last soon applied on behalf of the fraternity for a loan, not to pay for the emigrants' sea passage, but their lodgings bill! The good man lent Â£5, and afterwards advanced Coleridge Â£30, taking the value back in MSS. as he could secure them. Meanwhile, Coleridge lectured to small audiences on somewhat abstruse subjects for a Bristol population, and managed to fall in love with a sister of his friend Lovell's wife, a third of these Miss Frickers becoming engaged to and marrying Southey, though he had not the remotest prospect of supporting a family. Lecturing and literature had not paid, Pantisocracy had perished in the bud, and Coleridge had not in any other direction shown the least capacity for dealing with every-day affairs. His antecedents both proved, and had intensified, his want of sagacity.

Born in 1772, into the large family of a learned Devonshire clergyman, who was also Head Master of a Grammar Schoolâ€”'a gentle and kindly eccentric'â€”helost his father when only nine years of age, and was sent to the Blue Coat School (Christ's Hospital) in London. Here Charles Lamb was his schoolfellow. He grew, ere he left it, to be a tall lad of striking presence, with long black hair. At nineteen he was sent to Cambridge University. From Cambridgeâ€”owing, it is now generally believed, to some disappointment in a love affair, though others will have it that it was owing to debts recklessly contractedâ€”he went up to London with little money in his pocket, and enlisted as a private in a regiment of light cavalry, under the assumed name of Silas Titus Comberback. In this regiment he remained only four months, proving 'an execrable rider, a negligent groom of his horse, and generally a slack and slovenly trooper.' Here a Latin quotation scribbled on a whitewashed wall discovered him, and led to his discharge, a visit to Oxford and an introduction to Lovell and Southey, then students, made him a more decided Pantisocratist, then a Bristolian, a protÃ©gÃ© of Cottle and Charles Lloyd, and a benedict. In 1795 he was married at St. Mary de Redcliffe Church, and the thriftless pair set up housekeeping forthwith in a rose-covered cottage at Clevedon, then a village on the shores of the Severn Sea, though now a fashionable watering-place. Little furniture, no cash, no income beyond a promise of a guinea and a half for every hundred lines of copy, whether in rhyme or blank verse, offered a poor matrimonial prospect. Two days after the wedding, however, Cottle sent him 'with the aid of the grocer, and the shoemaker, and the brewer, and the tin-man, and the glass-man, and the brazier,' all he requiredâ€”and more. In this retreat Coleridge did some necessary bread-winningwith his pen, but still more planning and projecting of great world-astonishing magazines. Combined with his fancy for projecting big schemes was an unconquerable habit of procrastination. 'His strongest intentions were but feebly supported after his first paroxysm of resolve.' Such a man was unlikely to launch a serial on the world successfully. He issued circulars of a paper to be calledThe Watchman, travelled through the Midlands into Lancashire and Yorkshire to obtain subscribers, and issued a few numbers, and then it collapsed. In his travels he made the acquaintance of Lloyd, afterwards of Ambleside, who found him in books, and made a home for him at Nether Stowey. Wordsworth was then at Alfoxden, a close adjoining village. It was during a walk taken by the two poets over the Quantock Hills that their joint volume 'Lyrical Ballads,' was conceived, and that the 'Ancient Mariner' was partly written. 'Christabel' is another product of this period of Coleridge's life, and what has been aptly called the dream-poem of 'Kubla-Khan.' It was also now that he avowed himself a Unitarian, and commenced to preach in the chapels of that sect. Travelling to Shropshire in this ministry he captivated young William Hazlitt by his extraordinary discourses in public and in private, who records how it seemed to him poetry and philosophy were met together in the preacher, truth and genius had embraced under the eye and sanction of religion. At this time, he adds, Coleridge's personal appearance was of one above the middle height, inclining to be corpulent, with hair still raven-black, forehead broad and high, light as if built of ivory, projecting brows, with rolling, bright eyes beneath them, and a mouth 'gross,voluptuous, open, eloquent.' His preaching, too, brought him into contact with the generous De Quincey, and with the two Wedgwoods, the eminent Staffordshire potters, who defrayed the expenses of himself and William and Dorothy Wordsworth to Germany, and granted Coleridge a pension to enable him to devote his life to literature. On their return, Coleridge went to London on the staff of theMorning Post, in the columns of which he did first-class work.

In 1800 he removed his family to Keswick. He came to that town in many respects a changed man. The torrents of revolutionary talk he indulged in during his undergraduate days had lapsed into ultra-Toryism under the reaction from the disappointed hopes excited by the upheaval in France, but chiefly from his connection with the London Tory organ, although, as his German biographer somewhat grimly remarks, 'a trace of his partiality for the community of goods lingered in his blood; he never ceased to live upon his friends'! The Church of England doctrines he was intended to imbibe at school and college had given way before Unitarianism and the mysticism and pantheism of the Continent. Goethe, Kant, and Lessing had become his masters. He came, too, in broken health. At Keswick dwelt a good man in Greta Hall, or rather in the smaller of the two houses now known by that name. Mr. Jackson, who started as a common carrier, was a well-to-do man, and had accumulated a library. He charged Coleridge half the proper rent for the other cottage, and gave him access to his books. There seemed no reason why our poet-philosopher should not have been happier here than ever before. But the end of his poetical career wasat hand. 'Opium,' says De Quincey, himself a victim to the drug, 'killed Coleridge as a poet.' He began taking the deadly poison to allay the pains of gout, to which he was a martyr. His 'Ode to Dejection' is undoubtedly his dirge over the grave of his muse. In his hours of awakening he gave himself afresh to philosophy to compel mental activity. He found the study an alleviation, but by no means a cure. An artist friend took him a voyage up the Mediterranean. On returning to his care-worn wife he found himself without sufficient means for the support of a growing family, though Sir George Beaumont, of Coleorton, and the ever-faithful Cottle and Sir Humphry Davy, helped him and interested themselves on his behalf, to enable him to earn something by lecturing in London. Returning again to the Lake Country, he started another weekly paper, which he calledThe Friend. It failed to capture the public, and ceased at the twenty-seventh number. He had magazine and review work, and published something. The opium habit still increased till these Kendal Black Drops (he probably so calls them because he first procured them as a quack medicine from this town) were at last taken in doses amounting to two quarts of laudanum in a week. Yet he was visited by the Lambs, the Wordsworths, Hazlitt, Professor Wilson, and many another who admired and loved him for his genius and his unique personality. In four years' time his brother-in-law, Robert Southey, and his family joined him at Greta Hall. On the other hand, the Wedgwood annual allowance was withdrawn, on the ground that his side of the agreement was not being fulfilled. More and more he drifted about from place to place, leaving his wife andchildren to the care of their relatives. One while he stayed with the Wordsworths at Grasmere, and another with a benevolent friend at Calne (he was three years there), till his generous host's means being much reduced he was compelled to withdraw his hospitality. Here he had been partly weaned from opium, but on going up to London in search of a livelihood he fell back under its complete tyranny. In a kind of desperation he carried his case to a Dr. Gillman, of Highgate. This gentleman, an able physician and a man of standing and culture, was happily married, and needed no 'paying guest,' but as Professor Brandle puts it, 'the spell of his talk, and the repute of his name, vanquished the Gillmans at once, and from that time he became the inmate and friend of the family, and remained so till his end.' Here in this beautiful homeâ€”beautiful in its then countrified surroundings, beautiful in its moral atmosphereâ€”he was once again happy, and for no fewer than sixteen years. No opium was permitted within the walls. His wife and children, and friendly visitors like Irving, Hallam, Maurice, Hare, and T. H. Green, were welcomed. He became an undoubted Christian, and a powerful advocate of a form of orthodoxy commoner now than it was thenâ€”an attractive Anglican theology impregnated with the German type of platonic philosophy. His utter simplicity of character was never lost, and, unfortunately, his endeavours after pecuniary recovery were thwarted by a scoundrelly publisher cheating him of large sums he had fairly earned by hard work and genius. It was at this time he issued 'Aids to Reflection,' 'Lay Sermons,' and other memorable books.

Towards the end of his days he suffered much,notably from an affection of the heart, which 'bent his figure, furrowed his face, and hindered his work.' Finding death within sight, he settled what outward affairs he had to settle, ordered mourning rings for his friends, composed an epitaph for his tombstone, and in a marvellous calm, not begotten of narcotics, but of a living faith, he passed away into the fulness of light, in the year of our Lord 1834, and the sixty-second of his age.

What is the true estimate of his character? His was empathically a self-marred life. With a steady, reliable temperament and will he might have achieved one of the very highest positions among England's greatest men. 'Frailty,' cries a modern essayist, 'thy name is Genius.' His conversational powers were unequalled, and attracted eminent people from afar to hear him pour forth his brilliant scientific knowledge, philosophic speculations, and wealth of illustration. It is true that Charles Lamb adjudged him too great a monopolist of the situation. 'Lamb,' was the response, 'did you ever hear me preach?' 'I never heard you do anything else,' retorted Lamb. His talks were really spontaneous orations which electrified his hearers. That ineffectual outward life of his, so full of latent possibilities, has not, happily, been altogether thrown away. Both the pre-opium-drinking days and the post-opium-drinking were long enough for him to influence the thoughts and teaching of his own and future ages, and he still leavens the literature of the pulpit and the desk. His poetry yet delights young and old. It is comforting to know that one whom the 'Circean Chalice' had driven to wish for annihilation, and created in him a desire to place himself in a madhouse, could write from his death-bedto a 'dear god-son' that on the brink of the grave he had proved Christ to be an Almighty Redeemer, who had reconciled God, and given him, under all pains and infirmities, 'the peace that passeth understanding.'

His literary output I will neither expound nor criticise, tempting as it is to do both. His poems are on the shelves of every well-selected library, however small. His more solid works are not for the general public. They are too profound, and go far too deeply into the secret springs of life and thought, too far afield into the Divine and human undercurrents of motive and action; are too theological, too speculative, to lay hold of any but those who themselves are, in their spheres, and to some extent, at least, guides and moulders of other men's emotions and duties. They are essentially books for the patiently reflective, who learn that they may teach. If spiritual things are only spiritually discerned, so also are philosophical theories, methods, and categories appreciated only by those who have a natural leaning towards them, and some degree of training. Nine-tenths of my readers will be 'practical' men and women, to whom his revelations will seem guess-work and his intuitions dreams. But if any want a delicate and subtle analysis of Coleridge's mind, and whatsoever was in it, they may read the late Walter Pater's 'Appreciation' of him.

'I have no particular choice of a churchyard, but I would repose, if possible, where there were no proud monuments, no new-fangled obelisks or mausoleums, heathen in everything but taste, and not Christian in that. Nothing that betokened aristocracy, unless it were the venerable memorial of some old family long extinct. If the village school adjoined the churchyard, so much the better. But all this must be as He will. I am greatly pleased with the fancy of Anaxagoras, whose sole request of the people of Lampsacus was, that the children might have a holiday on the anniversary of his death. But I would have the holiday on the day of my funeral. I would connect the happiness of childhood with the peace of the dead, not with the struggles of the dying.'â€”Written on a book-margin by Hartley Coleridge.

Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside.

Ruskin,J.

NAB COTTAGE, RYDAL.

The Home of De Quincey's Father-in-law (seep.8), and afterwards ofHartley Coleridge.

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'Hartley Coleridge has come much nearer us, and probably you might see as much of him as you liked. Of genius he has not a little, and talent enough for fifty.'â€”Wordsworth.'Dined at Mrs. Fletcher's. H. Coleridge behaved very well. He read some verses on Dr. Arnold which I could not comprehend, he read them so unpleasantly; and he sang a comic song that kept me very grave. He left us quite early.'â€”Crabbe Robinson'sDiary.

'Hartley Coleridge has come much nearer us, and probably you might see as much of him as you liked. Of genius he has not a little, and talent enough for fifty.'â€”Wordsworth.

'Dined at Mrs. Fletcher's. H. Coleridge behaved very well. He read some verses on Dr. Arnold which I could not comprehend, he read them so unpleasantly; and he sang a comic song that kept me very grave. He left us quite early.'â€”Crabbe Robinson'sDiary.

POOR 'Lile Hartley'â€”littleHartley, as the neighbours called himâ€”is one of the most pathetic figures in English literature. Undersized in body, of promising intellect from childhood, of child-like simplicity in character, devoid of self-control, and overmastered by the alcoholic habit, as his father was by the opium habit, he is at once pitiable, excusable, and lovable. As you ride from Ambleside to Grasmere you pass a low cottage on your right, just beneath Nab Scarr, where the young farmer and his wife lived who cared so unselfishly for him and for his comfort and welfare. It is locally known as 'Coleridge's Cottage.' Here he lived in later manhood, followedand brought home tenderly, when he had wandered away, by his kind-hearted caretakers, and writing prose essays and sweet sonnets in hours of freedom from his besetment.

By birth Hartley Coleridge belongs to the West Country, having come into the world while his parents lived on Redcliffe Hill, Bristol, shortly after their return from their little flower-covered, poverty-stricken Clevedon Cottage. The National Dictionary of Biography is in error in giving Rose Cottage as his birthplace. It was beyond all doubt Bristol, and he was born during the autumn of 1796. 'A pretty and engaging child,' his brother Derwent says he was. There must have been something attractive about the babe, for it is given to few to be apostrophized by two poets at so early an age, especially by two such as his own father and his father's friend, William Wordsworth. Great things were anticipated for him in the future by both the seers. He was taken to London for a visit when three years old, and, after being mystified by the street lamps, he suddenly exclaimed: 'Oh! now I know what the stars are: they are lamps that have been good upon earth, and have gone up into heaven!' At six years of age he was removed with the family to Keswick. Here for a season the two households of Coleridge and Southey dwelt at Greta Hall, an occurrence which seems in many ways to have remarkably influenced his career. Those who came in contact with him at this place speak of him as pouring forth, with flashing eyes, strange speculations far beyond his years, and weaving wild inventions. His dreamy boyhood was varied by another stay in London and a visitto Bristol, in both which places further mundane knowledge was acquired, only to be forthwith transmuted into the visions which filled his mental life. His very play related to the history of a kind of Utopia, its populations, its geography, its constitution, its wars, its politics. 'Ejuxria' was the name he gave his island kingdom, and he prolonged the existence of it for himself and his playmates beyond the length of the famous thousand and one nights of the Eastern story-teller. Everything he saw, everything he read, became forthwith 'Ejuxrian.' This habit of introversion and lack of practicality changed its forms as he grew older, but never left him. When at length he went to a boarding-school at Amblesideâ€”or, rather, was placed in a clergyman's house near it with a few other boys for private tuitionâ€”his power of improvization was encouraged by his companions demanding long-drawn-out romances from him, while his morbid tendencies and consciousness of his small stature induced the habit of lonely wanderings and musing.

Desultory reading and frequent intercourse with his father's friendsâ€”Southey, Wordsworth, Professor Wilson, De Quincey, and Charles Lloydâ€”formed the chief part of his early education. He seems to have been as a schoolboy truthful, dutiful, and thoughtful, but with great infirmity of will and subject to paroxysms of passion and heartbroken repentance. From school to Oxford University was a natural and proper advance. Unfortunately, his rare conversational qualities made him much sought after for students' wine parties. The result of this was that, although he passed his exams. creditably, and won an Oriel Fellowship, he wasjudged to have forfeited this Fellowship by his intemperance. The authorities were inexorable. No expostulation or influence could save him. It is probable some freedom of speech offensive to the narrow-minded dons of his day had something to do with their hardness. Sympathy and kindly common-sense might have recovered him just then from his snare. As it was, he tried for literary employment in London with little success, though his tarriance there resulted in a further development of his alcoholic tendency. Thence he drifted back to Ambleside, where he tried school-keeping, but in vain. He had no disciplinary power, and one by one his pupils were removed, till the school collapsed. From there he went to the Grasmere Cottage, already spoken of, facing the lovely little lake of Rydal, a blue island-dotted gem framed in with lofty green mountains. Everybody loved the lonely, affectionate manâ€”a keen observer of Nature, an inspired writer of poetryâ€”and everybody grieved when the end came one winter's day of 1849, and his remains were buried in Grasmere Churchyard. There a little group of us stood but a while ago, reverently uncovered, beneath the yews that overshadow his grave and the graves of the Wordsworth family. That he knew his weakness and lamented it, and at seasons valiantly struggled to overcome it, is certain, and one cannot help wondering whether he would not have triumphed ultimately had he lived in a teetotal age, when he could have been surrounded by abstaining companions, who would have sheltered him and kept him out of perpetually recurrent temptations. Some of his more personal verses are sadly suggestive both of his struggle and his need:

'A woeful thing it is to findNo trust secure in weak mankind,But tenfold woe betide the elfWho knows not how to trust himself.'

And again he writes:

'Oh woeful impotence of weak resolve,Recorded rashly to the writer's shame,Days pass away, and Time's large orbs revolve,And every day behold me still the same,Till oft-neglected purpose loses aim,And hope becomes a flat, unheeded lie,And conscience, weary with the work of blame,In seeming slumber droops her wistful eye,As if she would resign her unregarded ministry.'

Passing lightly over his 'Northern Worthies,' some dozen or so of biographic sketches, good and capable 'pot-boilers'â€”yet 'pot-boilers' essentiallyâ€”one comes to his essays, written forBlackwoodand other magazines and papers, and his marginalia written in his books and published after his death. We cannot but be struck with the immense variety of subjects dealt with in his essays. Many of them are signed by a pseudonym, such as 'Thersites' if on 'Heathen Mythology'â€”or 'Tom Thumb the Great' if 'Brief Observations upon Brevity'â€”or 'Ignoramus' if a series on the 'Fine Arts'â€”and very few were issued in his own name. Some are full of quaint humour, such as 'Thoughts on Horsemanship, by a Pedestrian,' 'A Nursery Lecture delivered by an Old Bachelor.' Others have a fine literary flavour, as, for example, 'Shakespeare, a Tory and a Gentleman,' or 'On the Character of Hamlet.' It is, however, as a sonnetteer he will be longest remembered, and as a writer of miscellaneous verses. When rowing roundGrasmere Lake the other day we recalled his lines, beginning:

'Within the compass of a little valeThere lies a lake unknown in fairy tale,Which not a poet knew in ancient days,When all the world believed in ghosts and fays;Yet on that lake I have beheld a boatThat seemed a fairy pinnace all afloat,On some blest mission to a distant isleTo do meet worship in some ruined pile,Where long of yore the Fairies used to meetAnd haply hallow with their last retreat.'

Sometimes, too, when religious controversies grow warm around the good old revelation those verses of his come to remembrance, called 'The Word of God':

'In holy books we read how God hath spokenTo holy men in many different ways;But hath the present work'd no sign or token?Is God quite silent in these latter days?'And hath our Heavenly Sire departed quite,And left His poor babes in this world alone,And only left for blind beliefâ€”not sightâ€”Some quaint old riddles in a tongue unknown?'

Hartley Coleridge's longer and more ambitious pieces do not commend themselves to the public as do his shorter ones. Hisfortewas inâ€”

'Singing of the little rillsThat trickle down the yellow hillsTo drive the Fairies' water-mills;'

of children whom he doted upon,â€”of 'the merry lark that bids a blithe good-morrow,'â€”of 'summerrain'â€”of 'rose, and violet, and pansy, each with its tale of love'â€”of poor Mary Magdalene. From his own soul, as from Mary's, it may be the Lord has 'wiped off the soiling of despair.' May we find it has been so when we ourselves reach the great hereafter.

'Summer is not the season for this country. Coleridge says, and says well, that then it is like a theatre at noon. There areno goings onunder a clear sky.... The very snow, which you would perhaps think must monotonize the mountains, gives new varieties; it brings out their recesses and designates all their inequalities, it impresses a better feeling of their height, and it reflects such tints of saffron, or fawn, or rose-colour to the evening sun.O Maria Santissima!Mount Horeb with the glory upon its summit might have been more glorious, but not more beautiful than Skiddaw in his pelisse of ermine. I will not quarrel with frost, though the fellow has the impudence to take me by the nose. The lakeside has such ten thousand charms; a fleece of snow or of the hoar-frost lies on the fallen trees or large stones; the grass-points, that just peer above the water, are powdered with diamonds; the ice on the margin with chains of crystal, and such veins and wavy lines of beauty as mock all art; and, to crown all, Coleridge and I have found out that stones thrown upon the lake, when frozen, made a noise like singing birds, and when you whirl on it a large flake of ice, away the shivers slide, chirping and warbling like a flight of finches.'â€”A letter of Robert Southey's.

Wine Street.

WINE STREET, BRISTOL.

The Birthplace of Robert Southey.

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'I could say much of Mr. Southey, at this time; of his constitutional cheerfulness, of the polish of his manners, of his dignity, and at the same time of his unassuming deportment, as well as of the general respect which his talent, conduct, and conversation excited.'â€”Joseph Cottle,Southey's first publisher.

HE was the most bookish and the most learned Laureate of them all. As a poet, he was inferior to Wordsworth and Tennyson, yet superior to Pye or Austin. He was a native of Bristol, where his father was an unsuccessful linen-draper in Wine Street. Heredity had little or nothing to do with the evolution of Robert's genius, except so far as from his mother's alertness of intellect and happy temperament he received a foundation upon which he was enabled to build his literary future. Industry, and a great practical capacity, animated by a sanguine spirit, carried him through a life of unremitting toil, and conquered difficulties that would have crushed or disheartened most men.

He first saw the light on August 12, 1774. 'Is it a boy?' asked the mother. 'Ay,' replied the nurse, 'a great ugly boy'; and the mother, whenshe saw the 'great red creature,' feared she should never be able to love him! However, he soon grew to be a handsome, curly-headed lad, sensitive, and very much alive. The Southeys being 'under water' most of their time, their first-born was adopted by a half-sister of the wife. Aunt Tylor lived in Bath. To Bath, then, he was removed, and the fashionable, theatre-going spinster, even over-nice and fastidious in her love of spotless cleanliness, and very imperious in her manner, did her duty conscientiously by her charge, letting him, however, attend dramatic entertainments, and read all he could lay hands on, till he was old enough to be sent to school. The 'Academy' selected was fully as low as the average of the 'Do-the-boys' Halls of the day. The master was a broken-down tradesman who had married his drunken servant-maid, and the school broke up shortly with a free fight between the proprietor and his son. Two years here had added little to the pupil's knowledge. He gained most by his private reading. The next four years were spent in attending as a day-boarder in the classes of a bewigged, irascible little Welshman, with whom he learned Latin and the Church Catechism. 'Who taught you to read, boy?' inquired schoolmaster Williams. 'My aunt, sir.' 'Then tell your aunt that my old horse, dead these twenty years, could have done it better!' This naturally terminated his attendance at that school. The aunt left Bath shortly thereafter, and finally settled at Bristol, Southey going with her, and still poring over Spenser, Sidney, Pope's Homer and translations of Tasso, Ariosto, and Josephus. By-and-by he was promoted to Westminster School to continue his Latin, which he remembered for readingthough not for writing, and to learn Greek, which he afterwards forgot. A bias for history developed itself here, and he found a good library in the house of a friend in Dean's Yard, scarcely out of bounds. Here he studied Gibbon, Rousseau, and Epictetus. Authorship in a school journal was tried, and so successfully that his criticism on the ways of a stupid, 'flogging' preceptor, whose name may well pass into oblivion, led to his expulsion, and the expelled lad, whose name will never be obliterated, returned to his aunt in Bristol.

Robert Southey had a maternal uncle, a clergyman, and English chaplain at Lisbon, who became more to him than a father, the real father having failed in business and died of a broken heart. Mr. Hill sent his nephew to Oxford, designing to make a clergyman of him. The Dean of Christ Church, however, hearing that the tall, handsome, enthusiastic young poet and Radical had been turned out of Westminster for daring to attack that fine old English institution, flogging in the great public schools, rejected his application. Balliol received him. Here he made some lifelong and most valuable friendships, one bringing him a future pension of Â£160 a year to aid him in his devotion to literature, an allowance continued, with unusual generosity, till he had made his mark, and Government had remunerated him for his eminent services. He owed as little to Oxford as to lower schools. All he learned, he tells us, was some swimming and boating. He wrote his epic poem, 'Joan of Arc,' in his nineteenth year; refused to enter into orders, 'joyfully bade adieu to Oxford,' tried to learn medicine, but hated the dissecting-room too much to follow it; had an interview with Coleridge, imbibed'Pantisocracy,' returned to Bristol once more, fell in love with Edith Fricker, sister of Lovell's and Coleridge's wives, and was refused his Aunt Tylor's house in consequence of his erratic opinions and misdoings. His Portuguese uncle now stepped in to wean him from those ultra-democratic views, as they were then considered, though nowadays almost commonplaces of Toryism, and to relieve his pecuniary necessities. Pantisocracy, supplemented by a little lecturing and a little publishing, had not proved profitable, and poor Southey frequently knew the want of a dinner. Mr. Hill was over in England, and took his relative back with him. To make all fast, however, Robert and his beloved Edith, his faithful, loving, and every way admirable wife for many years, got themselves married in St. Mary de Redcliffe Church on the morning of the day the former started from Bristol on his travels. They could not raise the price of the wife's wedding-ring between them, and kind-hearted Bookseller Cottle lent the requisite guinea. They parted at the church-door, Southey going first to Madrid, and then to Lisbon and its environs. In the Spanish peninsula were many valuable libraries hidden away in monasteries. These he ransacked, learning the tongues in which they were written, or printed, posting himself up in Portuguese history, translating the romance of the Cid, and bringing back with him a number of valuable books and documents. It was one of the pleasantest and most profitable periods of his life, was this trip to the old medieval, Catholic world of modern Portugal, though he came home with an intense dislike of Romanism. But he returned to England and commenced studying law in London, forgetting all helearned the moment his law books were closed, and writing his second great poem, 'Madoc,' in the intervals of reading Blackstone and Littleton and Coke. A holiday near Christchurch followed during the bright summer weather of 1797 with wife and mother, brother Tom just released from a French prison, brother-in-law Coleridge, Bookseller Cottle, Friend Lloyd, Charles Lamb, and John Rickman; and then a homeless time, sometimes in London, sometimes in Bristol, and once among the literati of Norwich. Then ensued a residence at Westbury-on-Trym in a pretty cottage, and an acquaintance with Davy, afterwards the celebrated Sir Humphrey. Another trip to Portugal, this time accompanied by his Edith, involved more study, and produced another poemâ€”'Thalaba.' Coleridge, it will be remembered, had removed to Keswick, to Greta Hall. He now wrote for the Southeys to join him there, which they did, and it was their home as long as their lives lasted. Here Robert toiled at literature for his daily bread, living a strenuous life not for his own and his growing family's sake alone, but for the Coleridges during Samuel's sad lapses into the opium habit, and for the widowed Mrs. Lovell and her child also. There was a time when I could not like Robert Southey as man or author. His longer poems seemed prosy, and most of his shorter ones trivial, and his prose lacking in sympathy with humanity, and his books narrow in their outlook on life. He seemed to be commonplace and cold, and every way humdrum. Fuller acquaintance with the author and his works has not greatly changed one's views, about some of his verses, but it has brought acquaintance with some books of extraordinary merit wherein prejudice fades intoquaintness of thought and expression not altogether unpleasant, and since one's youthful days the commonplace virtues of domestic life and home cheerfulness and the heroism that toils and struggles unseen, and bears its life's burdens uncomplainingly, have received a spiritual glorification far beyond that which is due to the showy, romantic, good-for-nothing selfishness of the plunger who neglects his responsibilities while captivating the onlookers.

Life at Keswick was apparently a monotonous one. To-day was as yesterday, and to-morrow as to-day, with the exception of short journeys away, always leavened by longings to be at home. Each forty-eight hours was mapped out with as much regularity as social claims would permit. Reading, writing, walking among the beautiful landscapes of Keswick, and the hearty enjoyment of relaxation in the midst of his numerous family circle, had all their allotted times, with the hours of rest and sleep, for Southey needed sleep and exercise to keep in good order the bodily functions his very existence as an author depended upon. Yet did he never refuse to be interviewed by legitimate callersâ€”that is, those who brought their own literary credentials with them, or introductions from those he knew. Among the men who sought him for his works' sake was Shelley during the time of his compulsory retirement at Keswick. He carried on also a very large private correspondence. His 'selected' letters alone fill four volumes. He befriended Kirke White, the poet, with wise counsel and friendly sympathies, and Charlotte BrontÃ«, and not a few now quite unknown poets, struggling to make names for themselves among the stars of English poesie.The correspondents to whom he unbent, and showed the real man behind the books he wrote, included such geniuses as Bishop Lightfoot, Sir Walter Scott, Walter Savage Landor (who was an inspiration to him), Sir Henry Taylor, and, of course, the Lake Poets so well known to us all by now.

Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside

Southey's Monument.

SOUTHEY'S_MONUMENT, IN CROSSTHWAITE CHURCH, KESWICK.

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The losses, occurring in every extensive family, came from time to time to tear the fibres of Southey's loving and sensitive heart. Children died, or married and left him, and at length his brave, and dearly-beloved wife's mental faculties decayed, and after some time of gradual and hopeless failure, she died in 1837. Two years later he married another excellent woman, though of quite different type from his deeply-mourned Edith. This was Caroline Bowles, who was a literary lady and poetess, and had been a correspondent for some time. He never fully recovered the shock of his first wife's loss, and his own later years were beclouded with brain disease resulting in something not quite imbecility, and yet bordering upon it, in which he seemed to live in a perpetual dream. A fever hastened his end, which came in the month of March, 1843. His successor in the Laureateship and his son-in-law were the only strangers present in Crosthwaite Churchyard at the funeral. It was a cloudy day on which he was buried, but as the service was ending a ray of sunshine touched the grave, and reminded the mourners of the better light in the world beyond into which his soul had entered. Southey was all his life a sincerely religious man. His refusal to enter the Anglican priesthood in youth, and his championship of liberal views, and even the narrowness of his later opinions on affairs of State and Churchâ€”inother words, his bigoted Toryismâ€”were all due to the sincerity of his convictions, and his loyalty to what he thought at the time to be the truth. The best short life you can have of Southey is Edward Dowden's in 'English Men of Letters.'

Of his longer poems the world takes small account, though there is undoubted poetry in them. It preserves chiefly his ballads, things like the 'Battle of Blenheim,' 'How the Water Comes Down at Lodore,' 'The Old Woman of Berkley,' and so forth, which can be found in most anthologies. His prose writings were principally taskwork, bread-winners, painstaking, and mostly reliable. His 'Life of Nelson' has still a circulation, and is probably the most popular of his books. His 'Life of John Wesley' is pre-eminently a Churchman's appreciation of one to whom he tried to be just, but had no kind of sympathy with. The works which best show us Southey himself are his 'Uneducated Poets,' a readable group of short biographies of his humbler brethren, to some of whom he had been personally a benefactor; his 'Book of the Church,' a volume of biographical sketches of builders and martyrs of the Church of England; his 'Commonplace Book,' which shows the marvellous industry of the man in collecting materials for his life-work; and, above all, that curious assortment of odds and ends of erudition connected by the thinnest thread of a story, around which the quaint old-world learning winds and winds endlessly with something of Rabelaisian humour without its grossness. This, of course, is 'The Doctor,' a book once captured from an acquaintance of mine by hospital surgeons on the ground that 'medical' works werenot permitted to patients! This book, written for his own delectation and for the justification of his friends, is particularly suitable for long, wet winter evenings by a cosy fireside, and one that can be opened anywhere to disclose 'a feast of reason and a flow of soul' to the reader.

JOSEPH COTTLE.

JOSEPH COTTON, OF BRISTOL.

B.1770. D.1853.

Friend and Patron of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, and their first Publisher (see pp.85, 87, 106).

Portrait (Ã¦t. 50) by Branwhite, also of Bristol.

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'The Age grew sated with her frail wit,Herself waxed weary on her loveless throne.Men felt life's tide, the sweep and surge of it,And craved a living voice, a natural tone.'FromWordsworth's Grave, byWilliam Watson.

WORDSWORTH is, of course, the greatest poet of the English Lake school. He is also the only one born in the lake counties, educated and, with slight exception, resident all his life within them. His birthplace was Cockermouth, his school the Grammar School of Hawkshead; his residencesâ€”except what time he briefly dwelt among the southern Quantock Hillsâ€”were at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, and Rydal Mount; his burial-place was among his kinsfolk in a quiet corner of Grasmere Churchyard, beneath the sycamores and yews. Most of his compeers and friendsâ€”Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey, Charles Lloyd, John Wilson, and even Hartley Coleridgeâ€”were born elsewhere, and came to live among these northern mountains in youth or manhood.

He wrote, also, more about our district, and wrote it better, than any other. This was partlydue to patriotic devotion to his native corner of our common fatherland, partly because the love of rambling was ingrained in his being, chiefly because he was intuitively a Nature-poet, looking below the grand and the lovely into the mystical heart and core of sights and sounds that conceal and yet reveal their Creator, Fashioner, and Upholder. He was the inspired interpreter of things which ordinary men have not spiritual knowledge to understandâ€”which, indeed, the majority do not so much as behold dimly until one of God's seers lifts the enshrouding veil.

Born in 1770, he died at noon on April 23, 1850. No one now living was contemporary with his birth. Middle-aged admirers of his poems, middle-aged controverters of his claim to pre-eminence, well remember the shadow of death that fell across the nation's heart when they heard the laureate had passed away. 'Surely,' writes F. W. H. Myers, 'of him, if of anyone, we may think as a man who was so in accord with Nature, so at one with the very soul of things, that there can be no mansion of the universe which shall not be to him a home, no governor that will not accept him among his servants, and satisfy him with love and peace.' There are few events to record between his earthly birth and his birth into the upper kingdomâ€”or shall we say his return to that kingdom?â€”if there is anything in his own suggestion thatâ€”

'Not in entire forgetfulness,And not in utter nakedness,But trailing clouds of glory do we comeFrom God who is our home.'

His was a domestic life after he left Cambridge, and had done some Continental travel and some inScotland. It was spent in cottage homes with his beloved sister Dorothy, for a short while in Dorsetshire, another short while at Alfoxden, in Somerset, and then till his marriage at Grasmere. He was married to Mary Hutchinson at Penrith in 1802. As his family grew he removed successively into two larger houses, and eventually settled at Rydal Mount. Here his life was one of attention to his small Government appointment of stamp distributor, wandering 'lonely as a cloud,' and muttering to himself so much that the peasants deemed him half crazy; meditating upon and composing his immortal poems; and, after he had become famous, receiving literary guests from all the English-speaking peoples. His biography is a biography of the mind, a history of mental processes and tendencies, a record of the gradual creation of his own anthology. There are innumerable lives of him, of less or greater length, from the old one of Paxton Hood, and the most full and capable by his own nephew, and by Professor Knight, to the latest in the 'English Men of Letters Series.' Professor Knight, too, has given the world excellent editions of his poems, excellent selections therefrom, and a charming review of his connection with the lakes. All these are accessible to ordinary readers and hero-worshippers. It will answer my purpose best in this place to note only his local Nature-verses. Yet I may, perhaps, remind this generation that Wordsworth had to win his spursâ€”the recognition of his right to be ranked in any degree as a poetâ€”and still more to be considered a teacher of his race. His earlier effusions passed through a veritable fire of scornful criticism. 'Primroses,' 'Daffodils,' 'Pet Lambs,' 'Idle Shepherd Boys,''Alice Fells' and 'Lucy Grays,' and 'Lines to a Friend's Spade,' were altogether too trivial themes for the responsible and serious muse, while 'Peter Bell' was a special subject of scorn. 'Poems of Sentiment' were merely 'sentimental.' The sonnets and larger pieces, particularly 'The Excursion,' were too heavy, and too laboured to be readable. Pantheism was charged upon him as an objectionable creed. Time justified him largely, and Wordsworth Societies helped to do so still further, though in some respects the slashing critics may have had fair ground. No other poet of his calibre is so unequal in the quality of his output. Wordsworth's poems are by no means, it cannot be too much insisted upon, all on the same high plane of merit, and many will never pass into the world's best thought, as nearly all Tennyson's have, to say nothing of Shakespeare's or Milton's.

He was pre-eminently a revealer of the kingdom of Nature, as seen in the mountains and lakes, the birds, the flowers, the peasantry of the counties of Westmorland and Cumberland, and the over-sea portion of Lancashire. Not only did he write an admirable guide for travellers and tourists in these regions, but there is scarcely a section of this land that he has not rendered classic ground by connecting with it some incident, some allusion, some poetical idealizing. Where shall I begin? With Windermere, of course. You remember this in the Prelude?

'When summer came,Our pastime was, on bright half-holidays,To sweep along the plain of WindermereWith rival oar; and the selected bourneWas now an island musical with birdsThat sang and ceased not; now a sister isleBeneath the oak's umbrageous covertâ€”sownWith lilies of the valley like a field;And now a third small island, where survivedIn solitude the ruins of a shrineOnce to Our Lady dedicate, and servedDaily with chanted rites.'

Better still than this is another passage from the same poem:

'There was a boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffsAnd islands of Winander! Many a timeAt evening, when the earliest stars beganTo move along the edges of the hills,Rising or setting, would he stand aloneBeneath the trees or by the glimmering lake,And there with fingers interwoven, both handsPressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouthUplifted, he, as through an instrument,Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,That they might answer him, and they would shoutAcross the watery vale, and shout again,Responsive to his call, with quivering peals,And long halloos and screams and echoes, longRedoubled, and redoubledâ€”concourse wildOf jocund din; and when a lengthened pauseOf silence came, and baffled his best skill,Then sometimes in that silence, while he hungListening, a gentle shock of mild surpriseHas carried far into his heart the voiceOf mountain torrents; or the visible sceneWould enter unawares into his mind,With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, receivedInto the bosom of the steady lake.'

Perhaps it is merely from old associationsâ€”the love one had for skating on the flooded and frozen Severn-side meadows, when in one's 'teens'â€”yet I confess I like even better than either of the foregoing extracts those lines describing the scene when our poet and his schoolmates, 'all shod with steel,''hissed along the polished ice in games confederate,' over the wintry floor of Windermere Lake, lines which lead up to

'Ye Presences of Nature in the skyAnd on the earth. Ye visions of the hills!And souls of lonely places! Can I thinkA vulgar hope was yours when ye employedSuch ministry. When ye through many a yearHaunting me thus among my boyish sports,On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills,Impressed upon all forms the charactersOf danger or desire; and thus did makeThe surface of the universal earthWith triumph and delight, with hope and fear,Work like a sea?'

Wordsworth did not write much referring to Derwentwater. It was not size so much as beauty that captivated his imagination. What little there is may well be passed over for the poems connected with Ullswaterâ€”that English Lake Lucerneâ€”and Helvellyn. Three years after his marriage he visited these regions in a stormy November. Of this short tour he has left a journal, and to its credit we place several of his descriptive verses, notably 'The Pass of Kirkstone,' omitted in some editions of his works. Therein he tells us how the mists, though they obscured the distant views, magnified even the smaller objects close at hand, so that a stone wall might be taken for a monument of ancient grandeur, and the grassy tracts in the semi-light for tarns. The rocks appeared like ruins left by the Deluge, or to altars fit for Druid service, but never carrying the sacred fire unless the glow-worm lit the nightly sacrifice. On another tour it was that his sister Dorothy, always his good genius, called his attention to the gorgeous bed ofdaffodils, in the woods below Gowbarrow Parkâ€”afterwards made famous by his sonnet. 'I never saw daffodils,' he records in his journal, 'so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about them. Some rested their heads on these stones like a pillow, the others tossed, and reeled, and danced, and seemed as if they half laughed in the wind, they looked so gay and glancing.' There is also in the journal a paragraph about a singular and magnified reflection about Lyulph's Tower in this lake, though the tower itself was hidden from him behind an eminence. It was on this second tour he wrote, near Brothers Water, verses, somewhat too like a catalogue of articles on view, that close with this happy lilt:

'There's joy in the mountains,There's life in the fountains,Small clouds are sailing,Blue sky prevailingâ€”The rain is over and gone.'

It is among these lines the fancy occurs of which the critics made such surpassing funâ€”for themselves, certainly:

'The cattle are grazing,Their heads never raising,There are forty feeding like one.'

Not a bad illustration, after all, is this of the facile descent from the sublime into bathos. To the Ullswater period we owe, of course, 'The Somnambulist,' a legend of Aira Force, and a sonnet to Clarkson, the abolitionist, who lived at the foot of the lake. Helvellyn appears in many poems. Grasmere and Rydal, as is only natural, still more often, with their ancient mountains imparting tohim 'dream and visionary impulses,' their 'thick umbrage' of beech-trees, their fir-trees beyond the Wishing Gate, and their 'massy ways carried across these heights by human perseverance.' Of the River Duddon he has given us a series of sonnets, some three dozen in number, of which we may hold 'The Stepping-Stones' to be the best, and 'The After-Thought' the best for me to close with, for it is representative of his subtler feelings:

'I thought of thee, my partner and my guide[A]As being past away.â€”Vain sympathies!For, backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes,I see what was, and is, and will abide;Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide;The form remains, the function never dies;While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise,We men, who in the morn of youth, defiedThe elements, must vanish;â€”be it so!Enough, if something from our hands have powerTo live, and act, and serve the future hour;And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower,We feel that we are greater than we know.'

[A] The river.

'Celestial Spirit which erewhile didst deignOur elder Milton's hallowed prayer to hear,Do thou inspire my tributary strain,Breathe thou through every word that sense severeOfTruth; and if ought eloquent appear,Let it to everyone be manifest,That it flows from that empyrian clear,Where thou beside God's throne, a heavenly guest,With vision beatific evermore art blessed!'Charles Lloyd:Stanzas.

JOSEPH COTTLE.

Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside.

OLD BRATHAY.

The Home of Charles Lloyd.

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'Long, long, within my aching heart,The grateful sense shall cherished be;I'll think less meanly of myself,That Lloyd will sometimes think on me.'Charles Lamb.

MANY will, no doubt, ask who this man was, and where he lived? Such a question shows small acquaintance with either the biographies or writings of the great poets of the Lake School, or of Charles Lamb or Thomas De Quincey. He was the personal and highly-valued friend of them all, and his name and residence are too frequently mentioned in their letters and publications to escape the notice of even casual readers. He was the collaborateur of S. T. Coleridge and Charles Lamb in their first joint volume of poems, published by Joseph Cottle, bookseller, of Bristol, their kind patron in early days of struggle. He became a 'celebrity' of this district when he went to reside at Low Brathay, near Ambleside, fixing his home by the rushing rivulet of the Langdales, and beneath the lofty summit of Loughrigg, the mountain beloved of Fosters, and Arnolds, and their compeers and neighbours. He was born in1775 at Birmingham, his father being a member of the Society of Friends, one of the wealthy banking firm, and a philanthropist and man of culture. He, the elder Lloyd, was a lover and translator of Homer and Horace, and specially a student of Greek literature, thereby helping to disprove the random assertion of a recent novelist that the Quakerism of the past generation was utterly antagonistic to the culture and spirit of old Greece.

When Charles was about of age, and had declined entering his father's bank, that he might give himself up to poesy, Coleridge visited Birmingham on the profitless errand of obtaining subscriptions to his magazine. He took a great liking to the new and rising author, and followed him to Bristol. Coleridge was very poor (Wedgewood's pension had not yet been granted), and was very shiftless to boot. Lloyd provided him with a free home and with access to sorely-needed books. When Coleridge removed to Nether Stowey, on the Quantock Hills, Lloyd went too, and again kept house. Here they were near Wordsworth, then residing at Alfoxden. One result of this acquaintance was the marriage of Lloyd's sister to a younger brother of the future Laureate. A strange, unpractical company these poets and philosophers were, and their ways were erratic. The story of their inability to put a collar on their pony till shown by a servant-girl, is well known. The landlord of Alfoxden refused to renew the letting of the house to Wordsworth because of his rumoured odd manners and habits. Here, at Nether Stowey, poor Lloyd appears first to have developed the epilepsy that, increasing in intensity, at last ended in madness. He was, no doubt in consequence ofthese fits, liable to extreme depression, and his morbidness, a source of anxiety and irritation to his friends, may have lain at the root of a quarrel between them, which the indispensable Cottle helped to settle, relating to their joint authorship, to which Lloyd had contributed the larger quantity of MSS. and the larger share of funds, if not the more excellent material.

As a poet and novelist he is now virtually forgotten. I can find no copies of his works in any public or subscription library in this locality, nor is there one of them in the invaluable London Library among all its hundreds of thousands of volumes. Yet those that exist are worth much money. In a second-hand dealer's catalogue I see there is a copy of the poems priced at no less than fifty shillings, at least ten times its original price. His novels I have failed altogether to find. 'Edmund Oliver' embodies the account, transferred to a fictitious hero, of Coleridge's disappointment in love while at Cambridge, an event which led to his enlisting in a cavalry regiment. It tells nothing but the truth when it humorously narrates the rough-riding experiences and the torture of the unhorsemanlike student-soldier, and pictures the astonishment of a cultured officer on discovering a Latin inscription on a stable wall, and on inquiry a trooper able to converse in Greek and ready to discuss at egregious length the most abstruse questions in philosophy. This episode alone makes the book interesting to collectors.

But though neither 'Edmund Oliver,' a novel in two volumes; nor 'The Duc d'Ormond,' a tragedy; nor 'Beritola,' a tale; nor even 'Desultory Thoughts in London,' are easy to find outside theBritish Museum Library, yet Lloyd clearly deserves a nearer approach to immortality than he has attained. De Quincey writes of him in his 'Literary Reminiscences': 'At Brathay lived Charles Lloyd. Far as he might be below the others I have mentioned, he could not be called a common man. Common! He was a man never to be forgotten! He was somewhat too Rousseauish, but he had in conversation the most extraordinary powers for analysis of a certain kind, applied to the philosophy of manners and the most delicate nuances of social life.' He could not be a mere hanger-on to greater men to whom several poets addressed sonnets of affection and admiration. Charles Lamb, whose contributions to the early joint volume were few, while he speaks of Lloyd's as over a hundred, 'though only his choice fish,' is quite enthusiastic, exclaiming:

'Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,Why were't thou not born in my father's dwelling,So we might talk of the old familiar faces?'

One, and the chief, labour undertaken by Lloyd at Brathay, after his marriage and permanent settlement there, was a voluminous translation of Alfieri's poetical works from the Italian. It is spoken of as faithful to the original and full of the truest poetic insight. In the judgment of competent critics his translations were better than his own compositions, even of those of his later years, such as his 'NugÃ¦ CanorÃ¦,' published about the same time as Professor Wilson's 'Isle of Palms,' of which, by-the-by he received a presentation copy as a token of regard from the author, with whom he was on intimate terms. Lamb in writing toLloyd, gives him rather a back-handed testimonial when he says, 'Your verses are as good and wholesome as prose,' while in another letter he says, 'Your lines are not to be understood on one leg! They are sinuous and to be won with wrestling.' Probably the key to this remark is contained in Talfourd's statement that Lloyd wrote 'with a facility fatal to excellence.' On the other hand, the spitefully sarcastic and foolish sentences of Byron, uttered against Wordsworth and his 'school,' inclusive of the subject of this paper, seem almost beneath contempt:

'Vulgar Wordsworth,' quoth he, 'the meanest object of the holy group,Whose verse of all but childish prattle void,Seems blessed harmony to Lambe and Lloyd.'

Lambe (whose name should have no 'e' at the end) and Lloyd, he adds in a footnote, are 'the most ignoble followers of Southey and Co.' Fancy a Byron sneering at Southey, Wordsworth, and Lamb! These, at least, are equal, if not superior, to himself, even if Lloyd is confessedly beneath him in merit. However, I can, fortunately, give my readers a specimen of one of Lloyd's sonnets, admired and preserved by Bernard Barton. It is addressed to God on behalf of his own father, the Birmingham philanthropist:

'Oh Thou who, when Thou mad'st the heart of man,Implanted'st there, as paramount to all,Immortal conscience; do Thou deign to scanWith favouring eye these lays which would recallMan to his due allegiance. Nothing canThrive without Thee; hence at Thy throne I fallAnd Thee implore to go forth in the vanOf these my numbers, Lord of great and small!Bless Thou these lays, and, with a reverent voice,Next to Thyself would I my father placeClose at Thy threshold; true to his youth's choiceHis deeds with conscience ever have kept pace;Great Father, bid my "earthly sire" rejoice,A white-robed Christian in Thy safe embrace.'

Bernard Barton calls it a 'noble sonnet.'

But the end was nearing. The fits and morbid impressions were followed by illusory voices and cries, and at last Wilson writes his wife: 'Poor Lloyd is in a madhouse.' He seems to have been for awhile in the well-known 'Retreat' at York, from whence he escaped, and was ultimately removed to an asylum in France, where, after some years, he died. In happier days he had married a Miss Pemberton, who is said to have been carried off by Southey on his friend's behalf. She was a capable and appreciated housewife, but her sanity did not prevent the transmission of her husband's disease to his son, the Rev. Owen Lloyd, a highly respected clergyman, with his father's poetic tastes and genius, and a close friend of 'lile' Hartley Coleridge.

Such, in brief, is the story, interesting yet melancholy, of one whose high character and culture and rare social qualities endeared him to a wide circle of men in the first literary ranks, and who was cordially esteemed by another and outer circle, in which was Leigh Hunt, who writes of him as 'a Latinistâ€”much shaken by illness, but of an acute mind, and metaphysical.'

Joseph Cottle.

CHARLES LLOYD AND HIS WIFE.

From a rare Painting. By permission of J. M. Dent, Esq.

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'Bowness Bayis the rendezvous for the Fleet. And lo! from all the airts, coming in the sunshine, flights of felicitous wide-winged creatures, whose snow-white lustre, in bright confusion hurrying to and fro, adorns, disturbs, and dazzles the broad blue bosom of the Queen of Lakes. Southwards from forest Fell-Foot beneath the Beacon Hill, gathering glory from the sylvan bays of green Graithwaite, and the templed promontory of stately Storrs, before the sea-borne wind, the wild swans, all, float up the watery vale of beauty and of peace. Out from that still haven, overshadowed by the Elm-grove, where the old parsonage sleeps, comes theEmmamurmuring from the water-lilies, and as her mainsail rises to salute the sunshine, in proud impatience lets go her anchor the fairGazelle. As if to breathe themselves before the start, cutter and schooner in amity stand across the ripple, till their gaffs seem to cut the sweet woods of Furness Fells, and they put about, each on less than her own length, ere that breezeless bay may show, among the inverted umbrage, the drooping shadows of their canvass. Lo! Swinburne the Skilful sallies from his pebbly pier, in his tiny skiff that seems all sail; and theNorway Nautilus, as the wind slackens, leads the van of the Fairy squadron which heaven might now cover with one of her small clouds, did she choose to drop it from the sky.'â€”John Wilson:Christopher at the Lakes.

Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside

Jodeph Cottle

ELLERAY, WINDERMERE.

The Home of Professor John Wilson, as it then was.

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