LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS OF THE ENGLISH LAKES.* REVISION, correction, additions, and
the reproduction of valuable photographs give to this new edition all the interest of a new book. Canon Rawnsley has learned the difficult art of prattling gracefully and without degenerating into mere chatter or senile maundering on subjects which he loves and with which - he is familiar. As his work on Life and
• Literary Associations of the Engitsh Lakes. By the Rev. H. D. Eawnsley, Honorary Canon of Carlisle. 2 vols. Glasgow : James laricLettose and Sons. 1-156.1 Nature at the English Lakes has shown, too, he can write an " inspired guide-book " ; and the subject he here denii with is specially fitted to bring out his faculty for die. charging the duty he has assigned himself of "preserving in their several localities for visitors and residents alike the names, the individualities, the presence of the minds and hearts that have here gathered inspiration and shed lustre upon their homes." The first volume is dominated by Southey, and deals with Cumberland and Keswick; the second is equally dominated by Wordsworth, and treats of Westmoreland and Windermere. But Canon Rawnsley has here and there a word for other than the admirers of the Lake School. Now he brings George Fox and his suit of leather on the scene. Again, he tells the story of the chemist Dalton, and points out the house with its orchard where dwelt Elihu Robinson, the Quaker and earliest of Cumberland meteorologists, who first encouraged Dalton. Or he warns the traveller from Whitehaven to Keswick who happens to be a. *student of mediaeval religious art to "look out at the boulder-strewn shore of Harrington and remember that St. ./Edfrith's wondrously illuminated copy of the Gospels, which was 'wrought for Cuthbert the Saint, was rescued from the sea by the bearer of St. Cuthbert's body at low tide; and if at the British Museum he asks for sight of it he may see, still sticking to its vellum pages, the salt that our Solway gave it on that eventful day so many kindred years ago."
But it is for the sake of the literary associations which cling to the Lakes that Canon Rawnsley has written this book. The men who are dealt with are thus effectively grouped almost at the beginning
Gaunt and awkwardly made, with face so solemn when wrapped in thought, that country folks said, 'It was a feace wi'owt a bit of plesser in it'; in blue-black cape, a Jem Crow cap or • bit of an owd boxer hat,' frilled shirt and cutaway tail coat, umbrella under his arm, comes Wordsworth to the post at Ambleside. Here with shirt loose at the throat, in his white ducks and hatless, stands 'Christopher North ' by the rudder of the Windermere boat, and when he leaps to land the earth seems to shake beneath him. Here brown-eyed De Quincey starts and trembles and talks to himself and hurries on. That little shuf. fling - gaited person, untimely old, irrevere.ndly grey,' who shoulders his stick as if it were a gun, then stops dead, then rune, then pauses again, is Hartley Coleridge—Lill Hartley, as they call him hereabout. There, again, with 'nebbed' cap on head and wooden clogs on feet, the tall, slenderly-built, dark-eyed man, who if you pass him takes little notice, then pauses, looks up with a queer puzzled face, as if he were short-sighted and wanted to look over his spectacles at something or somebody in the sky, and then returns the salutation with abstracted air, is Robert Southey. And here in this old market-cart, with bracken in the bottom for cushions, slowly wending down the vale, are Mrs. Wordsworth and Dorothy Dorothy the wild-eyed, Dorothy with a face as brown and tanned as a gipsy'a, going to meet the walkers of their party at Dungeon Ghyll. A man with grey eyes Dorothy meets there; broadly built and a little above middle height, pallid in com• plexion, and rather heavy of face, but of brow magnificent; he and Dorothy are soon rapt in deepest talk. This is the dear, dear Coleridge' of Dorothy's Journal."
This imaginary meeting—which is, however, not too theatri- cally or guide-bookishly imaginary—supplies as it were the texts which Canon Rawnsley expands in pleasant Scotch fashion into the chapters that constitute these volumes. He is necessarily dependent upon books like De Quincey's EasaY3 or Lamb's 'Letters, which are probably familiar to most of hie readers, for his materials. But occasionally he gives original testimony to the peculiarities or worth of his heroes, as when he revives both Shelley and Southey thus There, with a perpetual fund of anecdote and merriment from a heart that softened but never saddened with years, dwelt Mrs. Stanger, the merry little Mary Calvert who in the old days re' membered how Shelley had been sorely troubled when he opened out a packet one day at Windy Brow to find that the work.box he had designed for Mrs. Calvert's little girl was not there; and remembered, too, the trouble upon her mother's and father's AO when the young firebrand began to let off his fireworks before Miss Mary and Master John had been removed from the dining-
room, and had been sent up to bed one leave Shelley's cottage and Chestnut Hill and road towards Ambleside for one hundred paces ; thence enter the, How many times did
park-like meadow-land, made glorious with the rich backgrogna of Labrigg larch and feel all the good days some ba:dk again of Calvert, Shelley, Coleridge, and Southey as one listen to that genial talk of the lady of Fellside, or saw not infrequentlY the tear gather as she spoke of the dear Greta Bank and Gre!e Hall times, and, pointing to the far-off church of St. Kentigern pass up the the valley, heard her say: 'My time, dear Sir, cannot be long now: I hope to see them all again.' Then the face would brighten sac! she would add: 'If ever good man lived, it was Robert-Bougie'
have known many able men in my life, I have known none more unselfish in his thought and deed, more beautiful in .his home life and his affections than he ; dear Sir, Southey's goodness will surely live for ever.'"
Canon Rawnsley has certainly the act of -costuming and
placing" even his minor characters in the most effective fashion. When Gray visits Keswick his well-tied bob wig, the brass buttons on his drab knee-breeches, and his parrot- shaped nose are not forgotten. When the newly-married
Tennysons are revealed standing in October, 1850, at Miss Robson the milliner's humble little door in Keswick, "just where Greenhow's shop stands out so conspicuously beside the Queen's Hotel," we are reminded that the bride had her blue- grey eyes from the Franklin stock in Lincolnshire, and are advised to look beneath the sombrero hat of the husband at his great shock of rough, dusty, dark hair, bright, laughing, hazel eyes, and massive aquiline face. When Scott is seen at Castle Rock he is "a young fair-faced man with a beautiful girl upon his arm, with a complexion of the clearest and brightest olive; eyes dark, deep-set, and dazzling, of the finest Italian brown, and a profusion of silken tresses black as the raven's wing." All this is both admirable and enjoyable in its way; Canon Rawnsley's book is now a necessary companion to all histories of Lakeland, and its distinguished tenants and visitors. Yet there is perhaps most of the district and of himself in one of his minor sketches such as this :—
"As we talk he is at our side. He iIwell and strongly built. ills face is the face of an elderly man who has found the peace that is bred from adversity. Fine open forehead he has, lined with care, but most with thought; grey vikin,g ' eyes that have a dreamy far away look about them ; a face Solid and reposeful enoogh, but filled with soul and with benevolence ; a mouth that is closely set, except when by a twinkle in the eye, you feel the man has laughter at his heart. He is a true son of Isaac Walton, and has been fishing all the way up the river Bure from his home, Bridge House,. ' That's shaded in green trees There in its shelter'd nook ; '
And he has fallen into a reverie as was not in-
frequent with him there by Thirlmere side; has left his rod, and an eel or a pike has gone off with hook, bait, and tackle and all, as you may read if you will take up a volume of his Cumber/and Ta7k and peep into his Thetas by Thirlmere. Who is he ? He is Richardson,' the waller's' boy, who, born hereabouts in 1817, was reared in Stonehouse, now called Piper House, under Nadole Fell, and got all the schooling he had, at the hands of Priest Wilson, at the little upland school. He grew up to follow his father's trade, built many a house in Keswick, and afterwards reared the walls of the St. John's Vale Parsonage, St. John's Vale School and Chapel. Then, partly by reason of lack of health for such labour, he took to the harder task, as dominie ' of the mountain school, of building up the characters of future men and women of the Vale of St. John, and for twenty-two years was the much-respected village schoolmaster. On the last day of April, 1836, he whose health had been waning for a year was seen suddenly to fall as he walked slowly downhill towards his beautiful little home by the side of the Bare. He was borne by tender bands and true, on the following Tuesday afternoon, up the hill, to be laid at rest almost within hearing of the patter of the children's feet and sound of the children's voices; the last but not least of the Cumberland poets of the present century."
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