Part 50

At the age of nine he was taken from school and put to work in the fields. At the age of ten he was employed by an old tin-streamer to throw up the sand from the river, earning threepence a day. At twelve he was working on the surface "nearly three miles from his favourite home. As he travels to and fro from his labour through long lanes bramble covered, and over meadows snowy with daisies, or by hedges blue with hyacinths, or over whispering cairns redolent with the hum of bees--" he means thyme on which the bees hover gathering honey--"the beautiful world around him teems with syllables of song. Even then he pencils his strange ditties, reciting them at intervals of leisure to the dwellers of his own district, and older heads than his tell of his future fame."

One thing is evident, that at this early age he was inordinately conceited. He had a true appreciation of the beauties of Nature. He had a receptive soul, but it was that which might have made of him a painter, not necessarily a poet.

At the age of thirteen, or as he styles it, "When thirteen summers have filled his lap with roses, and fanned his forehead with the breeze of health, we find him sweating in the hot air of the interior of a mine (Dolcoath), working with his father nearly two hundred fathoms below the green fields."

So time passes, and he grows to manhood. Then in his stilted style he says: "Love meets him on his flowery pathway, and he weaves a chaplet of the choicest roses to adorn her head. He worships at the shrine of beauty till they stand before the sacred altar, and the two are made one." In plain English, he fell in love and got married to Jane Rule.

One of his earliest pieces of verse, "The First Primrose," got into a magazine, and attracted some little notice, amongst others that of Dr. George Smith, of Camborne, who gave him encouragement and induced him to publish. His first book appeared in 1853; soon after he was appointed Scripture Reader at Falmouth.

He says in his _Autobiography_: "Soon after my marriage, the Rev. G. B. Bull, of Treslothian, lent me a volume of Shakespere. The first play I read was _Romeo and Juliet_, which I greedily devoured, travelling over a wide down near my father's house. The delight I experienced is beyond words to describe, as the sun sank behind the western waters, and the purple clouds of evening primed the horizon, the bitters of life changed to sweetness in my cup, and the wilderness around me was a region of fairies. Sometimes I cried, sometimes I shouted for joy, and over the genii-peopled heights a new world burst upon my view." Next he read _Childe Harold_, or portions of it. "My younger brother James possessed an eighteenpenny copy of Burns' poems, to which I had access. One day, I was reading Burns in our Troon-Moor home. No one can tell the ecstasy of my spirit, or the deep joy of my heart. Not only was I tired with my mine-work, but also crippled in the quarry raising stone for the garden-wall. I believe I was in my shirtsleeves, when a middle-aged matron entered my home. Seeing a small book before me, she asked what it was. I told her, and her answer surely displayed her prejudice and her narrowness of mind. Looking at me with severity in her features, she exclaimed, 'You ought to be ashamed of yourself! You, a local preacher, and reading Burns!' This strange sin put me quite beyond the reach of her favours, and I do not remember her ever speaking to me afterwards."

It is an infinite pity that John Harris did not inspire his muse from Burns; had he done so, his "poems" might possibly have lived, but _poëta nascitur, non fit_.

"For more than twenty years I was an underground miner, toiling in the depths of Dolcoath. Here I laboured from morning till night, and often from night till morning, frequently in sulphur and dust almost to suffocation. Sometimes I stood in slime and water above my knees, and then in levels so badly ventilated that the very stones were hot, and the rarified air caused the perspiration to stream into my boots in rills, though I doffed my flannel shirt and worked naked to the waist. Sometimes I stood on a stage hung in ropes in the middle of a wide working, when my life depended on a single nail driven into a plank. Had the nail slipped, I should have been pitched headlong on the broken rocks more than twenty feet below. Sometimes I stood on a narrow board high up in some dark working, holding the drill, or smiting it with the mallet, smeared all over with mineral, so that my nearest friends would hardly know me, until my hands ached with the severity of my task, and the blood dropped off my elbows. Sometimes I had to dig through the ground where it was impossible to stand upright, and sometimes to work all day as if standing to the face of a cliff. Sometimes I have been so exhausted as to lie down and sleep on the sharp flints." (There are no flints in Cornish mines.) "And sometimes so thirsty that I have drunk stale water from the keg, closing my teeth to keep back the worms. Sometimes I had wages to receive at the end of the month, and sometimes I had none. But I despaired not, nor turned the nymph of song from my side. She murmured among the tinctured slabs," etc. etc. That the water brought down from the spring for the use of the miners was ever full of worms is not to be believed, nor that he did not receive his regular monthly wages. John Harris was evidently vastly sorry for himself, thinking he was born for better things. I have known many a man who has worked underground as a common miner, without whining and breaking into extravagance such as this.

"We were at supper one evening in Troon-Moor house, our two daughters in a window, I at the end of the kitchen table, and Jane sitting on a chair beside it. We had fried onions, and the flavour was very agreeable. I was hungry, having just returned from a long day's labour in the mine. Suddenly we heard a step in the garden, and then a knock at the door. My wife opened it, and I heard a gruff voice say, 'Does the young Milton live here?' My wife asked the possessor of the gruff voice to walk in; and we soon discovered that it was the Rev. G. Collins. We invited him to partake of our meal, to which he at once assented, eating the onions with a spoon, exclaiming at almost every mouthful, 'I like fried leeks.' He asked for my latest production, and I gave him 'The Child's First Prayer,' in MS. He quietly read it, and before he had finished I could see the tears streaming down his face. Besides the two daughters, Jane and Lucretia, already named, we were afterwards blest with two sons, Howard and Alfred."

I have given this passage from the _Autobiography_ of John Harris with pleasure, as it exhibits the author at his best. Whether the tears may not have been an adjunct of his fancy, I do not pretend to say. When he writes simple English, concerning his own life and experiences, he is always interesting, but when he steps up into his florid car, as a chauffeur at the Battle of Roses at Nice, he is intolerable.

"Throughout my mining life I have had several narrow escapes from sudden death. Once when at the bottom of the mine, the bucket-chains suddenly severed and came roaring down the shaft with rocks and rubbish. I and my comrade had scarcely time to escape; and one of the smaller fragments of stone cut open my forehead, leaving a visible scar to this day. Then the man-engine accidentally broke, hurling twenty men headlong into the pit, and I amongst them. A few scars and bruises were my only injuries. Standing before a tin-stepe on the smallest foothold, a thin piece of flint (?), air-impelled, struck me on the face, cutting my lips and breaking some of my front teeth. Had I fallen backwards among the huge slabs" (the rock does not form slabs) "death must have been instantaneous. Passing over a narrow plank, a hole exploded at my feet, throwing a shower of stones around me, but not a hair of my head was injured."

"A more wonderful interposition of Divine Providence may be traced, perhaps, in the following record. Our party consisted of five men working in a sink. Two of them were my younger brothers. Over our heads the ground was expended, and there was a huge cavern higher and further than the light of the candle would reveal. Here hung huge rocks as if by hairs (!) and we knew it not. We were all teachers in a Sunday-school, and on the tea-and-cake anniversary remained out of our working to attend the festival. Some men who laboured near us, at the time when we were in the green field singing hymns, heard a fearful crash in our working, and on hastening to see what it was found the place full of flinty (?) rocks. They had suddenly fallen from above, exactly in the place where we should have been, and would have crushed us to powder were it not for the Sunday-school treat."

Moving in his little circle, surrounded by the ignorant, it is no wonder that John Harris was puffed up with vanity, and thought himself a poet.

He was very urgent in the promotion of the cause of peace and arbitration between nations, and wrote a series of tracts entitled _Peace Pages_, of which some hundreds of thousands were distributed, and produced as much effect on the policy of nations as waste paper. In the year 1864 a prize was offered for the best poem on the tercentenary of the birth of Shakespeare. It was competed for by over a hundred persons in Great Britain and America. Mr. Harris gained the prize, and was presented with a gold watch. It is not possible to estimate its value, poetically, without a knowledge of the "poems" that failed, and the discrimination of the judges.[41] From first to last John Harris published no less than sixteen volumes of verse. He died in 1884, and was buried in Treslothian Churchyard, near Camborne. He had received a grant of £50 per annum from the Royal Literary Fund, 1872-75, and £200 from the Royal Bounty Fund in 1877.

He had a son, John Alfred Harris, born at Falmouth in 1860, who became a wood engraver, working in a recumbent position owing to a spinal affliction. He illustrated some of his father's works. Another son, James Howard Harris, born in 1857, became master of the Board School, Porthleven, and wrote a memoir of his father.

John Harris had the faculty of receiving impressions from the objects of nature, as does a mirror, but had no power to give forth flashes of genius, for of genius he had none. His verses read smoothly and pleasantly, but will not live, as there is no vital spark in them. He stands, however, on a higher level than Edward Capern, the Devonshire postman "poet," but immeasurably below Burns and Waugh.

He published, moreover, a series of addresses, but all marked with the same paucity of idea, lack of original thought. A good but very self-satisfied man, he reaped far higher applause in his day as he deserved, and in another generation will be clean forgotten. He called himself the miner poet, but he is not even a minor poet. There is something pathetic in the contemplation of a man of this sort. I have come across several instances--men who have a love of nature, an appreciation of the beautiful and the good and the true, but have no genius, no originality, who can imitate but create nothing. It is the same with musicians. There are a thousand who can write songs, but only one in a thousand who can produce a pure melody. The mirror reflects objects, but the burning-glass focusses the sun's rays in a pencil of fire that kindles whatever it falls on. Such is the difference between the versifier and the poet.

Nulla placere diu, nec vivere carmina possunt Quæ scribuntur aquæ portoribus. Hor. _Ep._ I. 19.

FOOTNOTES:

[40] _Od._ I, 1; II, 20.

[41] These were Lord Lyttleton, G. Dawson, and C. Bray.

EDWARD CHAPMAN

Hals tells the following story of Mr. Edward Chapman, of Constantine. But before giving it, it will be well to say a few words of the Chapman family. The name suffices to show that it was not Cornish by origin, and indeed in the _Heralds' Visitation_ it is recorded to have come from the North. Why they came down one cannot say, but they married well. One John Chapman, of Harpford, in Devon, had to wife a daughter of Chichester, of Hall, and his son Edward married a Prideaux, and settled at Resprin in S. Winnow, and as that was a manor that belonged to the Prideaux family it is probable that his wife was an heiress. Edward, the grandson, baptized at S. Winnow May 12th, 1647, was probably the person mentioned by Hals, to whom the adventure is attributed. He was married to a daughter of Bligh, of Botathen.

"This gentleman received from God's holy angels a wonderful preservation in the beginning of the reign of William III when returning from Redruth towards his own house about seven miles distant, with his servant, late at night, and both much intoxicated with liquor (as himself told me); nevertheless having so much sense left as to consider that they were to pass through several tin mines or shafts near the highway, on the south-east side of Redruth town, alighted both from their horses, and led them in their hands after them. The servant went somewhat before his master, the better to keep the right road in those places, which occasioned Mr. Chapman's turning aside somewhat out of the way, whereby in the dark he suddenly fell into a tin mine above twenty fathoms deep, at whose fall into this precipice his horse started back and escaped; in this pit or hole Mr. Chapman fell directly down fifteen fathoms without let or intermission, where meeting with a cross drift (above six fathoms of water under it), he in his campaign coat, sword, and boots, was miraculously stopped, when, coming to himself, he was not much sensible of any hurt or bruises he had received, through the terror and horror of his fall; when, considering in what condition he was, he resolved to make the best expedient he could to prevent his falling further down (where, by the dropping of stones and earth moved by his fall, he understood there was much water under), so he rested his back against one side of the ruin, and his feet against the other, athwart the hole, and in order to fix his hands on some solid thing, drew his sword out of its sheath, and thrust the blade thereof as far as he could into the opposite part of the shaft, and so in great pain and terror rested himself.

"The suddenness of this accident, and the horse's escaping in the dark as aforesaid, was the reason why Mr. Chapman's servant, who went before him, did not so soon find him wanting as otherwise he might, which as soon as he did, he went back the roadway in quest of him, calling him aloud by his name; but receiving no answer, nor being able to find his horse, he concluded his master had rode home some other way, whereupon, giving up all further search after him, he hastened home to Constantine, expecting to have met him there; but contrary to his expectations, found he was not returned. Whereupon his servants, early next morning, went forth to inquire after him, and suspecting (as it happened) he might be fallen into some tin-shafts about Redruth, hastened thither, where, before they arrived, some tinners had taken custody of his horse (with bridle and saddle on), which they found grazing in the Wastsell Downs. Whereupon, consulting together about this tragical mishap, it was resolved forthwith that some of these tinners, for reward, should search the most dangerous shafts in order to find his body, either living or dead; accordingly they employed themselves that day till about four o'clock in the afternoon without any discovery of him. Finally, one person returned to his company, and told them that at a considerable distance he heard a kind of human voice underground; to which place they repaired, and making loud cries to the hole of the shaft, he forthwith answered them that he was there alive, and prayed their assistance in order to deliver him from that tremendous place; whereupon, immediately they set on tackle ropes and windlass on the old shaft, so that a tinner descended to the place where he rested, and having candle-light with him, bound him fast in a rope, and so drew him safely to land, where, to their great admiration and joy, it appeared he had neither broke any bone, or was much bruised by the fall; verifying that old English proverb, that drunkards seldom take hurt; for, as the tinners said, if he had fallen but two or three feet lower, he must inevitably have been drowned in the water. But maugre all these adverse accidents, after about seventeen hours' stay in the pit aforesaid, he miraculously escaped death, and lived many years after, and would recount this story with as much pleasure as men do the ballads of 'Chevy Chase' or 'Rosamond Clifford.'"

JOHN COKE, OF TRERICE

There is no thriving on ill-gotten goods, says the proverb, and this was exemplified in the case of the Cook or Coke family of Trerice, in S. Allen.

According to Hals, John Coke, attorney-at-law, came into these parts of Cornwall in the reign of Queen Elizabeth from Ottery S. Mary, in Devon, "without money or goods, and placed himself a servant or steward under Sir Francis Godolphin, Knight, where he began from, and with, his ink-horn and pen, to turn all things that he touched into gold, and that by indirect art and practices as tradition saith." This Cook or Coke derived from a Henry Cooke, a citizen of Exeter, who married the sister and heiress of Roger Thorne, in Ottery S. Mary; and the eldest branch of the family remained at Thorne till the end of the seventeenth century, when it became extinct.

Sir Francis Godolphin, finding John Coke a clever business man, left in his hands the management of his estate and his tin mines.

Coke took care that all the tin of his master's mines should be run into blocks and stamped with the dolphin, to show whence they came and whose they were. But after a while, as he saw that he was not specially overlooked, and that opportunity was afforded him for peculation, he had a considerable share of the block tin produced at the blowing-houses of Sir Francis for himself, and to distinguish it from that of his master's had it stamped with the figure of a cat, as cats are on the Coke arms; and this he disposed of to his own advantage, and eventually it was found that from the Godolphin mines more tin was produced and sold marked with the cat than was with the dolphin.

Hals says: "Sir Francis's lady being informed of his ill practices, and resolving by the next coinage to be better instructed in this mystery, at such time as Godolphin blowing-house was at work, privately, with one of her maids, in a morning, on foot went to that place, where according, as common fame reported, she found many more blocks or slabs of tin marked with the cat than there were with the dolphin; the one part pertaining to Sir Francis, the other to Mr. Coke. Whereupon, abundantly satisfied, she returned to Godolphin House, but could not be there timely enough against dinner; whereat Sir Francis was greatly distasted, having at that time several strangers to dine with him. At length the lady being arrived, she asked all their pardons for her absence, and told them it did not proceed from any neglect or want of respect, but from an absolute necessity of seeing a strange and unheard-of piece of curiosity, which could not be seen at any other time; viz. to see a cat eat the dolphin. And then gave an account of the premises, to their great wonder and admiration; whereupon, soon after, Sir Francis dismissed him from his service. But by that time he had gotten so much riches that forthwith he purchased the little barton and manor of Trerice, in S. Allen, and made that place his habitation till he purchased the barton and manor of Tregasa, and seated himself there, where, by parsimony and the inferior practice of the law, he accumulated a very considerable estate in those parts. But maugre all his thrift and conduct in providing wealth for himself and posterity, his grandson, Thomas Coke, succeeding to his estate, upon the issueless decease of his elder brother, Christopher Coke, and buying in his widow's jointure at a dear rate, and also undertaking the building of the present new and finely contrived house at Tregasa, though never finished, yet the said fabric was so costly and chargeable to him, together with the vain extravagance of his wife Lance, that he was necessitated to sell divers parcels of lands in order to raise money for his necessary occasions, and finally to mortgage the manor and barton of Tregasa and all his other lands that were before unsold, for about fourteen thousand pounds, to Hugh Boscawen, of Tregothnan, Esq.; and lastly, for that consideration and others, did, by lease and release, fine and proclamation, convey the same to the said Hugh Boscawen, his heirs and assigns, for ever. Soon after this fact Mr. Coke fell into great want and distress, together with his wife and children, and died suddenly by a slip of his foot into a shallow pit, wherein he was searching for tin, out of a conceited opinion he had that he should at last raise his fortune by tin, as his grandfather before him had done."

What Hals has omitted to state is that John Coke married a Godolphin, Prudence, daughter of William Godolphin, of Trewarveneth, by whom he had three sons--John, Edward, and Francis. Thomas Coke, who came to such grief, the sins of the grandfather visited on the grandchild, was Sheriff of Cornwall in the year 1651 under the Commonwealth.

THOMAS PELLOW, OF PENRYN

Thomas Pellow was born at Penryn, in all probability in 1704, and was educated in the Latin school of that place. But loving adventure better than books, and impatient to escape _propria quæ maribus_, he implored his uncle John Pellow to allow him to embark with him in the good ship _Francis_, owned by Valentine Enys, merchant, of Penryn, that was bound with a cargo of pilchards for Genoa. He soon began to regret having left the school bench, for his uncle not only made him work as a common seaman, but when not so employed held him to those hated books, and if he shirked, gave him the cat-o'-nine-tails. "So that by the time we got to Genoa I thought I had enough of the sea, being every day, during our voyage out, obliged (over and above my book learning) to go up to the main-top mast-head, even in all weather." On the return voyage when off Cape Finisterre the vessel was captured by Sallee pirates, and it with the crew conveyed to Morocco as captives. Thomas Pellow was in but his eleventh year, and his Moorish masters thought that they would have little difficulty with him in making of him a Mussulman.

He remained in Morocco for twenty-three years, during which time he kept a diary, and this was published in London in 1739 and 1740, but no date is affixed to the two editions. A third edition was published in 1775, and recently his record of adventure has been included in the "Adventure Series," edited with an introduction by Dr. Robert Brown, and published by Mr. Fisher Unwin, London, 1890. In this edition the narrative extends to 330 pages, and it is not my intention to give even a summary of its contents, the book itself being easily accessible. What must suffice is some account of the beginning of his bondage and an idea of the condition of Morocco whilst he was there.