his long and leisurely discontent. For strange as it may seem,
he laboured under a perennial grievance, holding that as he
voted steadily for the \Vhigs, or rather did not vote against
them, for he seldom troubled himself to go up to London, a
fuller share of honours was his just due. I regret to say
I was till quite recently unaware that this maltreated cleric
VII A NOTABLE ABSENTEE 211
was further immortalised by two volumes of biography and
correspondence edited by his family, and that his lordship
is regarded as a contemporary gossip of some interest. I lost
no time, however, in atoning for my shortcomings, not so much
for the sake of his episcopal philanderings, but from a genuine
curiosity to know how he accounted for his continuous absence
of thirty years from the scene of his duties, and whether, in
short, he had aught to say for himself A perusal of these
volumes will make it clear to any one that the bishop remained
to the close of his life in quite delightful unconsciousness that
any justification was required, unless, indeed, a preference he
expresses for the climate of Windermere is worth noticing. On
the contrary, his letters harp rather upon the text of how scant
is the reward of virtue and fidelity to duty as illustrated in
his own person. They constitute, indeed, a most interesting
revelation of the point of view presumably understandable a
century ago, and are well worth reading for that alone.
Dr. Watson was the son of a village schoolmaster in
Westmorland. An aptitude for mathematics secured him an
entry at Cambridge, where in due course he came out a high
wrangler. Quite early in life he was appointed to the chair of
Chemistry, though without any knowledge of that particular
subject. This deficiency he easily made up for, and indeed
as a scientist in early life he was a marked success. There,
however, his intellectual ambition and energy ended. All his
efforts in future were directed to the improvement of his
fortunes and he had certainly a genius for getting everything
for nothing. He secured the professorship of Divinity, for
which he had small qualifications, though this fact was of little
consequence, as he had no intention of burdening himself
with its duties. He succeeded, however, in raising the
stipend to ^{^1,000 a year, ;j^3oo of which he paid to a
.substitute and enjoyed the balance for the greater part of his
life, and he was now only thirty-five. His next triumph was
the bishopric of Llandaff, and this achieved he went to live in
p 2
212 AN EPISCOPAL JOKE chap.
Westmorland by way of being handy to his duties in South Wales,
bought Calgarth, married a county lady, and settled down to the
pursuits of a country gentleman. Here he calmly awaited the
further promotion which he sincerely thought he was earning
by a consistent profession of Whig sentiments and a steady
support of the ^Vhig Government by his vote on those few
occasions when he took his seat in the House. Unfortunately
for Llandaff, that promotion never came, and the South Wales
diocese was saddled with this insatiable Cambridge don for
the rest of his life, which did not close till he was nearly
eighty. It is commonly said he never saw it. But there is
one account at least of a visit there given by himself with a
most unmistakable sense of having performed a thoroughly
meritorious action. The entertaining part of the business is
that the bishop posed before the Glamorganshire squires who
then entertained him as a neglected person whose conspicuous
services were slighted by an ungrateful world, or in other
words an ungrateful Ministry. The Glamorgan folks, he de-
clares, sympathised with him — no doubt the Welshmen wished
as ardently as the bishop himself for his promotion. His
lordship, however, was an unconscious humorist of a high
order, and this, I think, gives much of their value to his letters.
His crowning jest, perhaps, was the issuing of a circular
mandate to his clergy on the evils of absenteeism, and warn-
ing the truants back to their posts. There is no symptom in
his own account of this affair that a single muscle of the
episcopal mouth twitched as he perpetrated this enormous
joke — he was beyond a doubt in dead and solemn earnest.
De Quincey, who was, of course, a neighbour and knew him
well, declares that though he was quite uninteresting as a man,
pompous and heavy-minded, as a character he was a really
interesting study from his extraordinary valuation of his own
deserts, and his inability to regard his career from any other
point of view but that of material advancement. Through his
entire correspondence the note of wailing at ministerial
VII A UNIQUE CAREER 213
neglect sounds loud. In his applications for advancement, even
in letters addressed to ministers, there is never a suggestion of
" enlarged sphere of action," or a call to higher work or anything
of that sort. There was no humbug, at any rate, about Bishop
Watson. His income, his estate, the just expectations of his
family, his position in the county (not Glamorgan !) and his
steady admiration for the Whig party— these were the burden
of his importunities.
He had lectured for a short time on chemistry at Cambridge,
and written a volume of excellent essays on science, and one
or two other books. He had no social claims, for he was a
village schoolmaster's son. Yet he enjoyed an income of
^5000 a year all told, for most of which he gave no value
whatever, and a fine position in his native county where he
spent his time in sociability and tree planting. " All his
public, all his professional duties," says De Quincey, "he
systematically neglected. He was a lord in Parliament and
for many a year he never attended in his place ; he was a
bishop and he scarcely knew any part of his diocese by sight,
living three hundred miles away from it ; he was a professor
of divinity holding the richest professorship in Europe— the
weightiest for its functions in England — drawing by his own
admission one thousand per annum from its endowments, and
for thirty years he never read a lecture or performed a public
exercise ! " And in spite of it all as evidence of what querulous
importunity could do in those days, he actually came within
an ace of being Archbishop of York ! Lady Holland told
Wordsworth that Charles Fox and Grenville had quite decided
to offer him that exalted post, which promised to be soon
vacant. But the failing occupant of the See just outlived the
Administration, which was prematurely dissolved. " Yet what
an Archbishop ! " says De Quincey. " He talked openly at his
own table as a Socinian ; ridiculed the miracles of the New
Testament, which he professed to explain as so many chemical
214
"THIS IS THE OLD COCK"
CHAP,
tricks of legerdemain, and certainly had as little devotional
feeling as any man who ever lived."
The banks of Windermere at least have much to thank the
bishop for, and I should feel constrained to apologise for
having given his lordship such an amount of space if he were
not in his peculiar way a historical character and a notable
example of what was possible of accomplishment for men of
nerve in the brave days of old.
Before, however, dismissing the bishop, who seems to have
l)oen a kindly host and well liked among his neighbours, I
IViniierinere.
cannot forbear the relation of a local incident of which his
lordship was, in effigy, at any rate, the hero. Among other
property that he had bouglit in Ambleside was an old tavern
called " The Cock." The landlord thinking that some extra
distinction might attach to his inn if it were known that the
bishop owned it, pulled the old signboard down and renamed
the house " The Bishop." To complete the business, he had
the new signboard illustrated with a rude portrait of his lord-
ship in all the glory of shovel hit and episcopal wig. In the
meantime, a new inn was started over the way which appro-
VII ROBIN THE DEVIL 215
priated the discarded name of " The Cock," and to such purpose
that it attracted no small share of its older neighbour's custom.
The owner of the latter, growing seriously alarmed at the turn
things were taking, hoisted up another signboard underneath
the portrait of the bishop, beneath which, with more of an eye to
business than to the fitness of things and a proper regard to
church dignitaries, was inscribed, in luminous characters, " This
is the Old Cock."
But Calgarth had a history long before Bishop Watson built
his new mansion there. Every one knows the legend of the
skulls of Calgarth which no mortal power could banish from
their niches in the wall. Wherever they might be thrown,
whether into deep lake or black wood, they always, by some
supernatural means, reappeared, to resume their grim watch over
the fortunes of Calgarth Hall. The Phillipsons reigned in
those days along the banks of Windermere, a wild, dare-devil,
race, if all one hears be true. One of them in particular, an
ardent and reckless cavalier in the Civil War, is well remembered
and was known as " Robin the Devil." One Colonel Briggs of
Kendal, when the Parliamentary party got the upper hand, was
very zealous in enforcing Puritan tenets on a somewhat unwilling
people. Phillipson, who was a malignant of malignants, swore
he would tolerate such insolence no longer, and rode over one
Sunday to Kendal at the head of a troop of horse with the
intention of killing the obnoxious colonel in church. The
Roundhead ofiicer, fortunately for himself, was not there, but
" Robin the Devil " swaggered about the church brandishing
his naked sword and causing immense excitement and con-
fusion. The incident is preserved in a local jingle : —
" The door was wide and in does he ride
In his chxnking gear so gay,
A long keen brand he held in his hand
Our Dickon for to slay."
The casque of this ruffling gallant is still to be seen in Kendal
church, and Scott alludes to it in " Rokeby."
2l6
LOWOOD
CH. VII
At Calgarth, too, we cross the Troutbeck brook on its way to
the lake, from the village and the valley of that name, which is
so familiar in all Lakeland annals. Hitherto we have been
thrust considerably backward from the water, getting occa-
sional glimpses of it only through screening woods ; but now
the road bends downwards to the shore, and at the " Lowood "
hotel, dear to generations of honeymooners, a most lovely scene
—with the upper reach of the lake in the foreground and all
the Coniston and Scafell and Langdale mountains behind —
unfolds itself One might almost as well try to say some-
thing original of the "Star and Garter" at Richmond as
of this famous haunt on Windermere : so without seeking for
inspiration we will pursue the last mile of road, which, running
close to the shore, lands us at the busy scene of Waterhead and
in sight of Ambleside.
^^j,.^-i^
j^^#-c^::-^
Ml
^X r
1/
u m ,
^^'^r'^^^^^'
,iii
- - ~ .^SfiSt^S^S*
^^^i^^^^'^-*^'^ -
J'/io' JMoiintahis at Coniston.
Windermere.
CHAPTER VIII.
Now Waterhead at the top of Windermere is a very cheerful
place, for steamers and coaches here meet each other in
connection with the round trips in which the vast majority of
Lake tourists so industriously engage. But the animation which
on a fine summer's day distinguishes the spot is not, as
may be readily imagined, well attuned to \Vords\vorthian
associations, nor to the fastidious eye in harmony with the
sublime nature of the background.
So let us on to Ambleside, but a short mile away, and
passing between serried ranks of lodging-houses, mount up to
its still tolerably old-fashioned and characteristic market place.
One might, no doubt, write a whole chapter, perhaps many
chapters, on the things that have been done in Ambleside, the
things that are to be seen there and near by, and the celebrities
who in modern times have shed lustre upon the little town by
their presence. But Ambleside does not take my fancy as a place
to linger in with this intent : and I shall turn at once to the left,
along the Grasmere and Keswick road, and enter the lush and
somewhat airless arcadia of the Rothay valley. I know that
these two miles from Ambleside to Rydal should be an object
of admiration, and in a modern sense are classic ground.
I confess, though not without trepidation, that to me even
2i8 AMBLESIDE
CHAP.
walking through the meadows there seems to be something
of the atmosphere of a glorified people's park, gravel paths
and wicket gates and notice boards are so very much in evidence.
There is even a suspicion of orange peel about, and ginger beer
bottles may be occasionally seen navigating the tortuous currents
of the Rothay. Villas of the dark grey stone of the country
and dating from every period of the nineteenth century, though
well embowered in foliage, are almost too numerous. As
you crawl along near the wall of the well kept but none too roomy
road, heavy-laden mammoth conveyances roar by, emblazoned
with the objects of their pilgrimage, which are here largely of a
personal nature. How incredible the good Dr. Arnold would
have thought it that the scene of his Rugby vacations would
ever decorate the panels of stage coaches. But all this is
inevitable and really of no consequence. There are a score of
valleys in the two counties as beautiful in their foreground
details as the Rothay, where there is neither orange-peel nor
ginger beer. And as for the mighty fells above, Red Screes
and Scardale, Fairfield and Dove Crag, they are quiet enough
and silent, this time of year at any rate, while even the
accessible charms of Loughrigg on the west, with its modest
thousand feet of altitude, seem in no way sensible of any
overdue attention.
The literary associations of the Lake Country, one need
hardly say, cluster most thickly about this head of A\'indermere.
Mrs. Hemans, Miss Martineau, Wordsworth, the Coleridges,
De Quincey and Dr. Arnold were all here within a short walk
of Ambleside. But what can I say in brief of these illustrious
folk that is not familiar, and to enlarge further upon their lives
and works is neither within the scope of my work nor to the
purpose. There are books upon the English lakes having a
special view to the interpretation of their beauties by Words-
worth. There are other books whose titles do not immediately
suggest that purpose, but which practically amount to essays on
his poetry. Then again, the patriotic local writer is apt to scatter
VIII RYDAL AND WORDSWORTH 219
Wordsworth indiscriminately over his pages, and I presume it
is a truism that if ever there was a great poet who required to
be used with care it is the bard of Rydal. But some of his
admirers appear to me to do him poor service by the random
way in which they cull from his abundant store. Happily, the
great man was of a self-complacent turn of mind, and according
to his friends, not very keenly alive to the unevenness of his pro-
ductions. Otherwise he would be oftentimes turning in his
grave and vainly calling to be saved, not from his discerning
friends who handle him with skill and consideration, but from
a number of less judicious writers who seem to use him on the
principle of a trump card at whist, and " when in doubt " to
" quote Wordsworth."
I confess with trepidation to having been sometimes seized with
an impious yearning after this country before it had any " literary
associations" — when Grey first saw it, and West first WTOte of
it, and its unknown beauties first provoked the Muse of Richard
Cumberland. This, however, is little short of flat treason under
the very shadow of Rydal Mount, for yonder are the gables of
Wordsworth's modest house of grey stone standing out amid
the trees above the road. We have just passed Rydal Hall too,
beautiful in its stately timber, the ancient seat of the Flemings,
who are there yet. This old manor, set amid what was once a
republic of shepherds, is a pleasant survival among what is now
in great part a land of villa-residents.
Wordsworth lived at Rydal Mount for the last forty years of
his life, and surely no man of note ever reached four-score so
nearly scatheless from all everyday worries and cares. It
would almost seem as if Providence took exceptional measures
to procure immunity from the ordinary troubles of life for the
gentle dreamer. She provided him with two women, very
literally a Martha and a Mary, who worshipped him and made
his happiness the object of their lives. She supplied him with
sources of income ample for his simple needs, and that drew
neither upon his time nor strength, though as a young man
The Mili at Ambleside
CH. vin THE POET'S APPEARANCE 221
Wordsworth's prospects had in fact looked tolerably dismal, for
h(j was unpractical enough, and had no mental wares suitable for
the market. The poetic note he struck so early, and clung to so
tenaciously, not only brought in little money, but for years
scarcely any credit. Admiring friends, however, stepped into the
breach, as they had a way of doing for poets in those days. The
family money too, which had been alienated, was restored and he
got his share. Then came the office of stamp distributer, woith
several hundreds a year, the duties of which were performed by
a clerk, and this made him well off for life. It was so late in
the day when his poems became sufficiently appreciated to
sensibly increase his income as to be scarcely worth mentioning ;
but the point is, that his means were ample for his simple
tastes without the necessity for seriously connecting his art and
his purse.
And yet at thirty-nine Wordsworth looked sixty ! He was
travelling in a public conveyance, says his friend and near
neighbour De Quincey, and conversing with an elderly gentle-
man on the opposite seat, when the latter, alluding to some
possible event in the not very distant future, remarked to
^Vordsworth that at any rate they two were not likely to witness
it. The poet bridled somewhat at this, and asked the stranger
how old he took him to be. The latter after careful scrutiny,
gave it as his opinion that Wordsworth would never see three-
score again, and appealed to the other occupants of the coach,
who all of them practically agreed in this surprisingly erroneous
estimate. Doubtless when the poet was sixty he looked no
more ! He seems to have had a somewhat ill-knit, awkward,
unathletic frame, with rather stooping shoulders, which was
strange for a man who spent his life walking in the open air.
His complexion, which had been olive, turned ruddy and
weatherbeaten with advancing years. A near relative of the
writer's, who as a young man met the poet at Foxhow in his
seventieth year, recalls very vividly the first impression made
by his appearance in the room as that of a farmer.
222 WORDSWORTH'S DAILY LIFE chap.
But what a curious life was Wordsworth's. Surely unique in
his passion for rural life, coupled with such complete indifference
to the occupations and amusements that one regards as almost
inseparable from it, and that the greatest minds with rural tastes
have in some form or other always felt the spell of Wordsworth,
though he lived his whole life among a population who shot and
fished and ran foxhounds with much ardour, cared not a jot for
any of these things. This fact alone is, perhaps, not worthy of
remark ; but what does, I think, seem remarkable is that in all his
poems these luminous phases of country life are studiously ignored.
If the poet had been a Southey, a Coleridge, or a De Quincey
in his personal habits ; if he had hugged his fire and his books
and, like most poets and literary men of that period, at any rate,
taken his constitutional walk as a matter chiefly of relaxation
or of health, the silence on such topics would be conceiv-
able. But we have De Quincey's testimony that books
were a secondary matter with Wordsworth. He had not a
great many, and was careless of those he had. Reading for
him was a matter rather for wet days and evenings. Nature
was his book. He was out of doors, broadly speaking, the
whole of every fine day. Every rural sight and sound — the
crowing of a cock, the bleating of a lamb, the scratching of a
mouse — has, we all know, been dwelt upon by the poet with
a minuteness that is the joy of his detractors. But if I re-
member rightly, the note of hound and horn so familiar then as
now up on the fells finds no mentions in his descriptive poems.
One would have supposed too that even a poet who walked over
sheep pastures and sang of them all his life would have been
drawn into a little amateur farming or sheep-breeding — that he
would have shared in some form or other the pursuits of his neigh-
bours, one would have thought inevitable in the course of so
long a life spent wholly in their midst. Nor was it his
lot either to minister to them, or doctor them, or to buy
and sell with them, or deal out justice, nor was he greatly
given to chaffering or joking or gossiping with them or getting
VIII SOME LOCAL ESTIMATES 223
at llicir hearts and humours after the fashion of men who have
a turn that way. Wordsworth dreamed past them mostly, I take
it, or looked upon them through coloured spectacles. The
peasants of his creation would certainly arouse the suspicions
of a countr\-bred man who had never been north of the Trent,
and he would not, I think, require the aid of Craig Gibson's
banter to confirm them when he got to Westmorland. AVords-
worth's fame, however, does not rest upon such lines as these.
It was from nature pure and simple that he drew the inspira-
tions by which he earned it. And if the Lakeland peasant was
a somewhat glorified personage as seen through the Words-
worthian spectacles, it is amusing to get glimpses now and
then of what his humble neighbours in their turn thought of
the poet. His well-known habit of spouting his poetry as he
walked, with a view to polishing and elaborating it, was a most
natural cause of wonderment. " Well, John, what's the news ? "
said the over sociable Hartley Coleridge one morning to an old
stone-breaker by Rydal Lake. " Why nowte varry particlar, only
aid Wudsworth's brocken lowce ageean." " These mutterings
and mouthings of the poet," says a contemporary, " were taken
by the poor people as an indication of mental aberration."
On another occasion a stranger, resting at a cottage at Rydal,
incjuired of the housewife whether Wordsworth made himself
neighbourly among them. " Well," said she, " he sometimes
goes booin' his pottery about t' rooads an' t' fields an' taks na
nooatish o' neabody ; but at udder times he'll say good morn-
ing, Dolly, as sensible as oyder you or me ! "
De Quincey who had, of course, exceptional opportunities
for observing Wordsworth's character, dwells with great
emphasis on the poet's " extreme, intense, unparalleled one-
sidedncss." Of his range of reading, for example, he .says,
''Thousands of books that have given rapturous delight to
millions of ingenious minds, for Wordsworth were absolutely
a dead letter — closed and sealed up from his sensibilities and
his powers of appreciation, not less than colours from a blind
224 A SORE POINT CH. viii
man's eye." The egotism and self-complacency which in a
higher form was so invaluable to Wordsworth during the years
of neglect which his work suffered at the hands of the public,
took on at times an irritating turn in the small affairs of life.
To quote De Quincey again, who was an enthusiastic admirer
of his friend as a poet, he had traits which seemed almost to
forbid complete and perfect friendship. Southey, as we know,
till late in life, liked his poems much better than their author.
One grievance under which Wordsworth's friends smarted is not
without humour, yet surely should procure them our unbounded
sympathy ; for it seems that the great man would tolerate no
opinion favourable or otherwise of a landscape in his presence
except from members of his immediate household, who, by
some mysterious process, were supposed to have assimilated his
magic power of vision. He treated all such expressions, De
Quincey tells us, with pointed and contemptuous silence, some-
times going even so far as to turn his back on the speaker as
if to emphasise his presumption. One can very well understand
that to the author of the Ancietit Mariner, and to the greatest
stylist of his day, both of whom, though essentially book men,
found for years their whole relaxation in Lakeland scenery,
such an attitude on the part of a friend whom they held in
high regard must have been extremely galling. This same
one-sidedness prevented Wordsworth, no doubt, from doing even