Part 1

Transcriber's Notes: (1) Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal signs=. (2) Obvious punctuation, spelling and typographical errors have been corrected.

LITERARY CELEBRITIES OF THE ENGLISH LAKE-DISTRICT

BY FREDERICK SESSIONS, F.R.G.S. AUTHOR OF 'ISAIAH, POET-PROPHET AND REFORMER'

_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_

'There is scarcely anything so interesting to man as his brother man; because there is nothing else which so acts on his sympathies; and sympathy is perhaps the most powerful of forces. We may feel much interest in a Thing, more in a Truth, but most of all only in a Man.' MYERS' 'LECTURES ON GREAT MEN'

LONDON ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C. 1905

PREFACE

This is neither a handbook nor a guide to the haunts of our Lake Celebrities. Yet it may, perhaps, serve in some sort the purposes of both.

It is not the result of any fresh or original research. I claim only to have condensed many biographies, and to have provided an index to the literary status of the men and women of whom I treat, some of whose works are scarce, and some too voluminous for ordinary readers.

These essays were written during leisure hours towards the close of a busy life. They were published first in two different newspapers. This will account for their form, and for the absence of either alphabetical or chronological sequence. The earlier ones were written for friends in my old home in the South; the later ones for my new friends in the North. In bringing them together into book form I have remembered the increasing number of tourists who require food for the mind as well as for the body, and I have remembered my own want, in years past, of some concise account of those whose names were perpetually before me while moving from place to place in these attractive regions.

To such tourists especially I respectfully dedicate my biographic sketches, though not without a hope that they may reach, and be of use to, a still wider circle of readers.

FREDERICK SESSIONS.

THE BRANT, KENDAL.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Author's Preface iii

I. THE ENGLISH OPIUM EATER: THOMAS DE QUINCEY: 1.--THE MAN 3 2.--HIS BOOKS 11

II. A PIONEER OF POLITICAL REFORM: HARRIET MARTINEAU 21

III. A LOVER OF BEAUTY: GERALD MASSEY 29

IV. A POET ENGRAVER: WILLIAM JAMES LINTON: 1.--THE MAN 37 2.--HIS BOOKS AND HIS ART 43

V. A SUCCESSFUL NOVELIST: ELIZA LYNN LINTON: 1.--THE WOMAN 51 2.--HER BOOKS 57

VI. THE PHILOSOPHER OF BRANTWOOD: JOHN RUSKIN: 1.--THE MAN 65 2.--HIS ART-TEACHING AND HIS BOOKS 75

VII. A GREAT LIFE MARRED: SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 85

VIII. A LIFE TO PITY: HARTLEY COLERIDGE 95

IX. GEORGE THE FOURTH'S LAUREATE: ROBERT SOUTHEY 103

X. VICTORIA'S FIRST LAUREATE: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 113

XI. A FRIEND OF GREAT POETS: CHARLES LLOYD 123

XII.'CHRISTOPHER NORTH': JOHN WILSON 131

XIII. THE CHAMPION OF LORD BACON: JAMES SPEDDING 141

XIV. TWO BEAUTIFUL LIVES: WILLIAM AND LUCY SMITH 149

XV. TWO BROAD THINKERS: FREDERIC AND F. W. H. MEYER (FATHER AND SON) 157

XVI. A RELIGIOUS MEDIEVALIST: FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER: 1.--THE MAN 167 2.--HIS BOOKS 177

XVII. JOHN RUSKIN'S FRIENDS: THE SISTERS OF THE THWAITE, AND THEIR BROTHER 187

XVIII. A LEARNED YOUNG LADY: ELIZABETH SMITH 195

XIX. A COUNTRY DOCTOR AND HIS STORIES (FOLK-SPEECH): DR. ALEXANDER CRAIG GIBSON 203

XX. TWO PIONEER EDUCATIONISTS: THOMAS AND MATTHEW ARNOLD 213

XXI. 'DRUNKEN BARNABY': RICHARD BRAITHWAITE 223

XXII. LAST WORDS ABOUT OUR CELEBRITIES 233

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

DOVE COTTAGE, GRASMERE _Frontispiece_

THOMAS DE QUINCEY _facing page_ 3

THE KNOLL, AMBLESIDE " 21

BRANTWOOD, CONISTON LAKE " 29

JOHN RUSKIN IN OLD AGE " 65

THE HOUSE AT HERNE HILL IN WHICH RUSKIN WAS BORN IN 1819 " 75

MEDALLION ON THE RUSKIN MEMORIAL, DERWENTWATER " 82

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE " 85

NAB COTTAGE, RYDAL " 95

WINE STREET, BRISTOL " 103

SOUTHEY'S MONUMENT IN CROSTHWAITE CHURCH, KESWICK " 109

JOSEPH COTTLE, OF BRISTOL " 113

OLD BRATHAY " 123

CHARLES LLOYD AND HIS WIFE " 128

ELLERAY, WINDERMERE " 131

VIEW OF WINDERMERE " 167

YEWDALE " 187

HAWKESHEAD, FROM ESTHWAITE WATER " 203

FOX HOW, AMBLESIDE " 213

BURNESIDE HALL, NEAR KENDAL " 223

SWARTHMORE HALL, ULVERSTONE " 233

GRASMERE AND DOVE COTTAGE

'Once I absolutely went forwards from Coniston to the very verge of Hammerscar, from which the whole Vale of Grasmere suddenly breaks upon the view in a style of almost theatrical surprise, with its lovely valley stretching before the eye in the distance, the lake lying immediately below, with its solemn ark-like island of four and a half acres in size seemingly floating on its surface, and its exquisite outline on the opposite shore, revealing all its little bays and wild sylvan margins, feathered to the edge with wild flowers and ferns. In one quarter, a little wood, stretching for about half a mile towards the outlet of the lake; more directly in opposition to the spectator, a few green fields; and beyond them, just two bowshots from the water, a little white cottage gleaming from the midst of trees, with a vast and seemingly never-ending series of ascents, rising above it to the height of more than three thousand feet. That little cottage was Wordsworth's from the time of his marriage, and earlier; in fact, from the beginning of the century to the year 1808. Afterwards, for many a year it was mine.'--THOMAS DE QUINCEY: _Autobiographic Sketches_.

THE ENGLISH OPIUM EATER

THOMAS DE QUINCEY

I.--THE MAN

'Oh! Mr. de Quinshy--sir, but you're a pleasant cretur--and were I ask't to gie a notion o' your mainners to them that had never seen you, I should just use twa words, Urbanity and Amenity.'--The ETTRICK SHEPHERD in _Noctes Ambrosianæ_.

Had you been in Edinburgh on a certain day of the early spring in the year 1850, you might have met a little, undersized, slight-framed man, with a somewhat stealthy tread, and shy, furtive glances--like one who dreads being watched and overtaken--stepping quickly along the streets. He is dressed in an overcoat, buttoned close to the chin, beneath which is no other coat. At first sight you think him a youth. On a nearer approach you notice his hair is turning gray, and that his fair-complexioned face and massive brow are mapped all over with the finest of fine wrinkles, denoting his age, which is actually almost sixty-five. Let us see where he goes. Presently he reaches the publishing office of _Hogg's Instructor_, and the weird little man is shown into the editor's office, and as he seems tired out with the ten miles' walk he says he has taken from his village home, he is kindly told to seat himself. No sooner has he done so, than he produces from one of his pockets a packet of manuscript sheets and a small handbrush from another. He tells the astonished editor that he is Thomas De Quincey, whose name by that time was known all over the English-speaking world, and that he wishes to contribute to the new periodical. As he talks, he unfolds each separate sheet, and, carefully wiping it with his brush, lays it on the desk. Editor Hogg goes to his safe and places a sufficient sum in the hands of the shy stranger, and thus begins a fast friendship and a literary connection which results in the publication of some fourteen volumes of scattered essays--essays the like of which are not to be found elsewhere in our mother tongue either for learning or for inimitable force and elegance of style. The friendship only ended with the death of De Quincey nine years later.

Now let us follow him to his home. His wife has been dead some years. On her death the eldest daughter, still a mere girl, took upon herself the care of the other children and their loving and famous, but most eccentric, father. She removed the household to the village of Lasswade, and their cottage made for them and all their visitors a bright and happy centre of attraction. It is night ere he reaches his home, but that is no matter, for he is in the habit of taking long and lonely rambles far into the night and early morning, flitting about so silently as to startle benighted travellers as if they had seen a ghost. This night he has walked enough, and retires to his own room--a room crowded with a confused mass of books, which leave only a narrow passage along which he can just screw himself into his chair by the fire. A wineglassful of laudanum is poured out by him from a decanter close at hand, and he drinks it off, though it is of strength sufficient to kill two or three ordinary people. Now, for a while, is his season of recuperation and brilliant writing, till, as daylight approaches, he turns into his simple bedroom and sleeps. Next day, probably, and for many days thereafter we should seek him in vain at these his headquarters, for he has other lodgings, two or three of them, in the City, each simply running over with books. Into one of these hiding-places we are introduced by one of his own essays, wherein he amusingly describes his efforts, aided by his daughters, to discover a manuscript which he desired to publish, and which was found at last at the bottom of a metal bath crammed with papers, receipts, letters, and folios of his own neat handwriting. He has left some other bundles of valuable books and essays at some booksellers, whose very name and address he has forgotten, for he has literally no memory at all for such mundane things, and no kind of idea of the value of money. He would sue for the loan of a few shillings _in forma pauperis_ when scores of pounds were due to him from publishers who would have been only too glad to settle with him promptly. A bank bill or a large note would lie inside some book till its hiding-place was forgotten, simply because he had not the remotest idea how to turn it into cash. On the other hand, when it was cashed he was lavishly generous to every beggar and impostor whom he came across, being one of the most genuinely sympathetic of men, ready to talk with the unfortunates of the pavements, with no thought of sin or shame in his heart, and to do them a good turn; and so fond of little children that one of his greatest griefs--the death of Wordsworth's infant daughter--was undoubtedly amongst the acutest pains of his life. Earning money, after his early struggles were over, more freely than most literary men of the day, so careless and so simple-minded was he that he had to fly for sanctuary from his creditors within the precincts of Holyrood, from whence he was only free to come forth on Sundays, and if perchance he was decoyed into some friend's house, and stayed late unwittingly, entrancing the company with his torrents of living eloquence and unexampled knowledge, there he had to lie _perdu_ till Sunday came round again.

Loving, and beloved of all who knew him, unsophisticated and child-like as he was in middle and later manhood, he had had as rough an experience of the dark and troublous side of the world as any man of his century.

He was born in Manchester, where his father, who died early of consumption, was a well-to-do manufacturer. His mother, who was of a socially higher grade, and of a rigid Puritan character, never understood her sensitive son, and never took him to her heart or entered his. Very touching are the autobiographic accounts he gives of his sensations on the death of a little sister; how he stole into the silent chamber and kissed the cold lips, and fell apparently into a kind of trance, which, young as he was, made his eyes fill 'with the golden fulness of life'; 'a vault,' he says, 'seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up for ever. I, in spirit, rose as if on billows that also ran up the shaft for ever; and the billows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but that also ran before us and fled away for ever,' and so he goes on, 'till,' says he, 'I slept ... and when I awoke I found myself standing, as before, close to my sister's bed.' Later, too, in church, the organ music awoke within him the deep mysticism of his nature, and he beheld with inner vision, as the solemn notes pealed and sobbed, dreams and visions, and heard oracles, and had with God, as he supposed, 'communion undisturbed.' These dream-echoes haunted him more or less all his life. And it was this delicate, refined nature which was terrorized and domineered over by a rough, fighting elder brother, who forced him into conflict with town boys and victimized him incessantly at home. It was this quick-learning, preternaturally intelligent boy--who could beat all his schoolmates at Greek and other book-knowledge--who was sent to dull and cruel masters, who misused him and drove him in the end to run away and hide himself in Wales, and afterwards in London. In the great Metropolis, in a desolate old house at the corner of Greek Street and Soho Square, with only a little waif of a girl to share his misery and solitude, he spent many months, his only other acquaintances a hard old lawyer, who made him a tool, and a girl of the streets, whom he calls 'Poor Ann of Oxford Street,' who had rescued him from death when he lay famishing on a doorstep.

How he was discovered by his family; how he was sent to Oxford, and how when there his sensitiveness led him to shirk the examinations for his degree; how he went to the lakes of Westmorland to live, edited a Kendal newspaper, associated with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Professor Wilson, and many another celebrity of the day; how he married a farmer's daughter, who made him an exemplary wife; how he had contracted the terrific opium habit, and how he fought it, conquered it, and fell again before it; how he filled, even in the days of his poverty and struggling life, one cottage after another with precious volumes of ancient and modern lore; and how he migrated northward, and lived in and near Edinburgh, as he was doing when we first met him--all these things you must read for yourselves in his 'English Opium Eater,' and in his entrancing 'Autobiographic Sketches,' or else in a Life of him by Dr. Japp or by Professor Masson.

His death came not unawares to terminate a period of helpless weariness with some delirium, the after-effects of opium doses. But even in delirium his dreams, though they greatly tried him, revealed the gentle spirit of the man. Telling his daughter one of them, he said: 'You know I and the children were invited to the Great Supper--the Great Supper of Jesus Christ. So, wishing the children to have suitable dresses for such an occasion, I had them all dressed in white. They were dressed from head to foot in white. But some rough men in the streets of Edinburgh, as we passed on our way to the Supper, seeing the little things in complete white, laughed and jeered at us, and made the children much ashamed.' His daughter records: 'As the waves of death rolled faster and faster over him, suddenly out of the abyss we saw him throw up his arms, which to the last retained their strength, and he said distinctly, and as if in great surprise, "Sister, sister, sister!"' So he fell on sleep.

OF BOOKS AND CONVERSATION

'A great scholar, in the highest sense of the term, is not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination, bringing together from the four winds, like the Angel of the Resurrection, what else were dust from dead men's bones, into the unity of breathing life.

'And of this let everyone be assured--that he owes to the impassioned books which he has read, many a thousand more of emotions than he can consciously trace back to them. Dim by their origination, these emotions yet arise in him, and mould him through life like the forgotten incidents of childhood.

'Books teach by one machinery, conversation by another; and if these resources were trained into correspondence to their own separate ideals, they might become reciprocally the complements of each other.'--THOMAS DE QUINCEY: _Essay on Pope_.

THE ENGLISH OPIUM EATER

THOMAS DE QUINCEY

II.--HIS BOOKS

'De Quincey! farewell! Many pleasing hours have we spent in the perusal of thy eloquent page, and not a few in listening to thy piercing words. Not a few tears have we given to thy early sorrows. With no little emotion have we followed the current of thy romantic narrative.' --GILFILLAN'S _Literary Portraits_.

We have already seen that De Quincey's collected essays filled, in the edition prepared by himself, as many as fourteen volumes. How many there are in the more recent edition by Professor Masson I do not at the moment remember, but they are in most public libraries, and can be heartily commended both for their careful annotation and the excellence of their typography. This latter point is a great one for the book-lover, who believes that everything he reads should be pleasant to handle and a delight to the eyes, provided always that its price is within reach of a moderately-filled purse.

Of the quality of the contents of the fourteen volumes there are diverse critical opinions. Let me appraise a few of them before offering my own. Dr. Traill ('Social England'), while speaking highly of our author's remarkable powers of literary expression, his wit, pathos, and humour, considers him 'unequal' in merit, and is almost absurdly wrong when he talks of De Quincey dividing a certain portion of his life 'between Bohemianizing in London and lion-hunting in the Lake District.' Two more utterly unsuitable words could hardly have been found with which to describe the early experiences of our quaint, little, oversensitive 'Thomas Paperverius,' as Hill Burton calls him in 'The Book Hunter,' than 'Bohemianizing' and 'lion-hunting.' We will, however, forgive Dr. Traill, since one who was by nature an unsympathetic critic could not possibly rise above his own customary level, and also because he gives De Quincey a place of honour as the originator of the modern school of 'prose poets,' represented by Professor Wilson, his contemporary, and in later years by John Ruskin.

The Professor Wilson here named is, of course, he who is still known by his _nom de plume_ of 'Christopher North.' Close friends were these two great walkers, great talkers, and great writers. At first sight an ill-assorted pair must they have seemed to anyone who met them together on the hills above Windermere, the Celtic giant striding along, like one of Ossian's heroes, with 'his yellow hair streaming upon the wind,' and his undersized comrade half running by his side. As they climbed the mountain they were fain to discourse of all things in heaven and on earth, for they were both eclectics of a high order, both deeply versed in German literature and metaphysics, both keenly observant of Nature and of current events, and both excellent classical and English scholars. The more Wilson knew of De Quincey the better he liked and appreciated him, even though an occasional little breeze ruffled the calmness of their intercourse. The latter owed to 'Kit' his introduction to _Blackwood's Magazine_, of which he was then editor-in-chief. You will also remember--you, at any rate, who are familiar with the charming 'Noctes Ambrosianæ' (though, I fear, you are in a sad minority in these days of scrappy periodicals and flimsy popular fiction)--but you of the elect few will remember the genial fun which Wilson pokes at 'The Opium Eater,' and how cleverly he imitates his all but inimitable style, and banters him on his out-of-the way bits of Attic or Teutonic lore, as well as on his habits of tagging on one idea to another till he bids fair to lay the whole universe under contribution to his analytical and illuminative conversation. You will remember, further, that he puts into the mouth of 'The Ettrick Shepherd' many such passages as the following, professing to tease pleasantly the subject of them: 'As for "The Opium Eater," he lives in a world o' his ain, where there are nae magazines o' ony sort, but o' hail and sleet, and thunder, and lichtnin', and pyramids, and Babylonian terraces, covering wi' their fallen gardens, that are now naething but roots and trunks o' trees, and bricks o' pleasure houses, the unknown tombs o' them that belonged once to the Beasts o' the Revelation,' and much more of the same sort of chaff, running into a paragraph three times the length of this quotation.

Crabbe Robinson, in his 'Diary,' that wonderful repertoire of chit-chat about the celebrities of his day, says 'all that De Quincey wrote is curious if not valuable; commencing with his best-known "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," and ending with his scandalous but painfully-interesting autobiography in _Tait's Magazine_.' Scandalous quotha! This most 'valuable' production has passed into our choicest literature, while Mr. Robinson's own memoranda are barely known, if at all, beyond a small circle of bookworms. The 'Diary' has become a mere quarry in which historians and biographers dig for their building materials, while De Quincey's life is a more enduring monument to his fame than if it had been of marble.

George Gilfillan has far more nearly hit the mark when he pens this critique: 'In all his writings we find a lavish display of learning. You see it bursting out, whether he will or no; never dragged in as by cart-ropes; and his allusions, glancing in all directions, show even more than his direct quotations that his learning is encyclopædic. His book of reference is the brain. Nor must we forget his style. It is massive, masculine, and energetic; ponderous in its construction, slow in its motion, thoroughly English, yet thickly sprinkled with archaisms and big words, peppered to just the proper degree with the condiments of simile, metaphor, and poetic quotation; select, without being fastidious; strong, without being harsh; elaborate, without being starched into formal and false precision.'