Part 15

Mr. Atkinson, in his 'Worthies of Westmorland,' calls him a 'strolling minstrel.' A stroller he was, of course, but not a minstrel in any other sense than as a keeper of a rhyming diary. He also says that 'Drunken Barnaby' was a nickname of his own choice. This is too cruel! Braithwaite never called himself so, and the term, when more than a quarter of a century after his death it was invented for trade purposes, was supposed to belong, not to Braithwaite at all, but to a certain 'Barnaby Harrington,' a supposed Yorkshire schoolmaster and horse-dealer. 'Barnabæ Itinerarium' has little merit as poetry. It is mainly of interest to moderns for the light it throws--like the water-poet, Taylor's, 'Penniless Pilgrimage,' and his 'Merry-wherry-ferry Voyage'--on the social condition of Stuart and Commonwealth England, as well as for its local allusions. Take of the latter, for example, these:

'Thence to Sedbergh, sometimes joy-all, Gamesome, gladsome, richly royal, But those jolly boys are sunken, Now scarce once a year one drunken; There I durst not well be merry, Farre from home old Foxes werry.[B]

* * * * *

'Thence to Kendall, pure her state is, Prudent too her magistrate is, In whose Charter to them granted. Nothing but a Mayor is wanted;[C] Here it likes me to be dwelling, Bousing, loving, stories telling.'

* * * * *

'Thence to Garestang, where are feeding Heards with large fronts freely breeding; Thence to Ingleforth I descended, Where choice bull-calfs will be vended; Thence to Burton's boundiers pass I, Faire in flocks, in pastures grassie.

* * * * *

'Thence to Lonesdale, where were at it Boys that scorn'd quart-ale by statute, Till they stagger'd, stammer'd, stumbled, Railed, reeled, rowled, tumbled, Musing I should be so stranged, I resolv'd them, I was changed.

'To the sinke of sin they drew me, Where like Hogs in mire they tew me, Or like Dogs unto their vomit, But their purpose I o'recommed; With shut eyes I flung in anger From those Mates of death and danger.'

[B] (Old foxes are wary when far from home.)

[C] It seems a Mayor was granted subsequently.

On another journey he came to 'Kendall,' and there he did 'what men call spend all,' drinking 'thick and clammy ale,' and, passing on to Staveley, drank again all night. He might in those days have well deserved to be ear-marked for a 'drunken' vagabond, yet it is not fair to the memory of any man to brand him only and for ever with frolics and follies and evil deeds of which he afterwards repented, and would gladly have atoned for.

We, at all events, would prefer to think of Richard Braithwaite at his best, and not at his worst. He was the author of fully three score volumes of prose and poetry, in Latin and in English, essays, sonnets, madrigals. The titles of only a few can be quoted--'A Strappado for the Devil,' 'Love's Labyrinth,' 'Shepherd's Tales or Eclogues,' 'Nature's Embassie,' 'The English Gentleman,' 'The English Gentlewoman,' 'Whimsies, or a New Cast of Characters.' There is a good deal of telling satire in the last of these:

'An Almanack-maker is the most notorious knave pickt out of all these, for under colour of astrology he practices necromancy.'

'A Gamester--professes himself honest, and publishes himself Cheat upon discovery.

'A Traveller is a fraud, if he travaile to novellize himself and not to benefit his country.

'A Launderer is also one if she wash her skinne, but staine her soule, and so soile her inward beauty.'

In 'A Spiritual Spicerie' he begins a poem:

'Morall mixtures or Divine Aptly culled, and Couch'd in order, Are like Colours in a Shrine, Or choice flowers set in a border.'

In 'Holy Memorials' he bemoans his past waywardness and looseness, and speaks of being sore perplexed when his own wanton verses were repeated in his hearing, and 'though I did neither own them nor praise them, yet must I in another place answer for them, if Hee, on whom I depend, shall not in these teares which I shed drowne the memory of them.' Like many of his pious contemporaries, he tried his hand at turning the Psalms of David into English verse. If they fall short in his translations of the beauty and strength of our prose versions--and they have in no degree gripped the churches--these sacred hymns helped to ripen his own character and faith, and he is very sincere in concluding his efforts with:

'Praise to the God of Heaven, Be given by Mee a Worme, That David's numbers in this forme, To Mee a Worme hath given.'

Adding on the last leaf, 'Other errours favourably excuse, and amend at pleasure.'

The quaintness of his spelling, of his metres, of his expressions, commend his works to lovers of old literature. Some are reprinted, others are scarce. The first edition of 'Barnaby' is almost unobtainable, and that of 'A Survey of History,' a quarto volume with portrait, has just been offered me for £2.

SWARTHMORE HALL

'I went through a gate and found myself in a little green paddock, where there was not even one rose left "to mark where a garden had been." There were the principal windows--one little window looking out from George Fox's study; the other two were old-fashioned bay-windows, much larger. From the uppermost windows Fox used to preach, sometimes, to his friends in the garden below. Near the bay-window is the little old doorway, to which two rude stone steps led up. All else was plain and unpretending. Inside I was shown the "hall," a quaint, flagged apartment, on the ground-floor, with a great, old-fashioned fireplace, and with a kind of stone daïs in the recess of the mullioned window. Here I was told the earliest meetings of the "Friends" were held. From this room, two steps led up to a little sanctuary, which was Fox's study; and I felt as if every footfall there was an intrusion, for that dim-lighted room, with its tiny lattice and quaint furniture, was the cell of a saint, "of whom the world was not worthy."'--EDWIN WAUGH: _Rambles in the Lake Country_.

XXII

LAST WORDS ABOUT OUR CELEBRITIES

'Adjust your proposed amount of reading to your time and inclination; but whether that amount be large or small, let it be varied in its kind, and widely varied. If I have a confident opinion on any one point connected with the improvement of the human mind, it is on this.'--DR. THOMAS ARNOLD.

This lovely land of lake and mountain, dale and fell, in which my lot is happily cast in old age, is too full of literary and artistic memories, as well as ethnological and historic associations for anything to be given in great detail. Over and above the beauty of its scenery and the wealth of its natural productions, it offers to the traveller such visions and glimpses of eminent men and women in the world of letters as no other spot in the British Islands can show. Almost every village and hamlet has some connection with a departed worthy of whom it is still proud. Not to speak for the moment of the relation of Keswick to Coleridge and Southey, or of Grasmere to De Quincey and the Wordsworths, or of Coniston to Ruskin, of Ambleside to the Arnolds, or of Windermere to 'Christopher North,'--of all whom I have treated at length--we have roadside cottages, pleasant villas, and town houses, laying claim to special distinction because someone of whom the nation is proud was born, or lived, or died there. At Ambleside, for instance, near to Fox How, dwelt William Edward Forster, the unfortunate statesman who would have been more happily remembered in Ireland, and in connection with national education by a larger section of his fellow countrymen, had he entertained, during his public career, the enlightened views of his devoted father, and the circle in which he and John Bright were trained. Near there, too, for a time, Felicia Hemans found a peaceful home, after her many trials, in a cottage still marked on the map as 'Dove's Nest,' a lovely retreat for a poetess, in good sooth. The archæologist Nicholson, poor in this world's gear, but rich in ancient lore, helps to complete the galaxy of 'bright particular stars' that clustered about the water-head of Winander.

Here in Kendal we have a tablet on the front of the house where Romney, the portrait painter, died, carefully and undeservedly (as some think) tended by the wife whom he had left alone so long. We show the yard in which was the shop wherein he learned his first trade, and in our town hall are several valuable pictures of his which will amply repay visitors for a pilgrimage to our borough. Here lived Dr. Dalton, the great chemist, once a tutor in our ancient Friends' School; and here also Gough, the blind botanist, who knew any and every flower by the feel of it upon his fingers and lips. Mrs. Humphrey Ward has given us delightful word-pictures of the dales whose gateways we see from our hillside garden as we look to the mighty summits across the verdant valley of the Kent. Within a walk from our house stands the old Baronial Hall where Agnes Strickland gathered material for her 'Queens of England,' and where she wrote 'copy' for her publishers. The straggling village of Troutbeck, just beneath yonder huge mountain-dome, whereon the Baal-fires used to be lighted every midsummer eve, was the ancestral home of the Hogarths; and in that valley Charlotte Brontë pondered some of her best works, and sketched her backgrounds from the moorland heights. Not all her scenery is Yorkshire, whatever Yorkshire folk may imagine.

Further afield still, and across the watershed of our Westmorland ramparts, on the edge of Thirlmere, Hall Caine spent his days in producing 'The Shadow of a Crime.'

Away to the westward of us, at the foot of Windermere, where we often take our Southern friends for afternoon tea in the sweet summer-time, is Newby Bridge--a place that, with its river and its woods, would have surely inspired in Kingsley, had he seen it as we have done, another song like 'Clear and Cool.'

Here Mrs. Gaskell indited her charming novels of old-world, homely people, and their ways. Here came up Nathaniel Hawthorne from his Liverpool Consulate to compose his essays and write appreciative notes upon the district.

To the north of us, just beyond the farthest loop of the steep and winding railway incline, up and down which two-engined trains career all day long, is Shap, the birthplace of antediluvian glaciers and the celebrated Egyptologist, Wilkinson.

Mrs. Ratcliffe, the romancist; Grey, the elegist; William Watson, of 'Wordsworth's Grave'; Turner, the artist; Gilpin, the lover of rough woodlands; and another Gilpin, 'the Apostle of the North,' in Queen Mary's days; George Fox and his farmer preachers--founders of Quakerism; Philip Sidney's sister, the lovely Countess of Pembroke--all these belong more or less to the Lake Counties, and the homes of most of them, while resident here, are yet to be seen. Brantwood looks over Coniston Water to the quaint round chimneys and the gables of the century-stained hall of the Le Flemings, and beyond it towers the gigantic cone of the Old Man mountain. Dove Cottage, with its pretty garden laid out by the hands of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, nestles beneath the wooded hill at Grasmere. Greta Hall yet stands in Keswick, and the row of lodging-houses where the author of 'Thorndale' and of 'Gravenhurst' met the wife who proved the soul of his soul, and has written so sweetly of her spouse. William Clarkson's retreat is on Ullswater's shore-lands; and the honeymoon home of Tennyson, 'Tent Lodge,' on those of Coniston.

Yet long, long after the last stone of all these honoured buildings has been overthrown to form part of a cottage or a mansion for someone of a future generation--long, long after the poets' bones laid in Grasmere burial-ground have mouldered into dust and become part of the life of the overshadowing trees--long, long after the commemorative marbles in Crossthwaite Church have become marred beyond recognition--the hills and streams whose glories were chanted by our Minnesingers of prose and verse will remain virtually unchanged though with an added glory not theirs in olden days--the glory of the human soul awakened by them to truth and beauty--the glory of art and song shining on every valley and peak.

There are still some few living amongst us in this 'playground of England' who are carrying on the literary traditions peculiar to it, of whom another hand than mine will write hereafter, for they will be men of mark ere their life-work closes. They have begun well and will finish better. Nor are the possibilities of further expansions of poetry, or legend, or history, or prose idylls yet exhausted. There are fields unbroken awaiting the arrival of him who shall help to brighten a new age. There are romances, and novels, and epic poems still stored away in the narrative of the Roman Conquest and occupation; of the creeping northward of the Saxons from land and sea; of the coming of the fair-haired Norsemen in their long ships from the north seashores; of the Kingdom of Strathclyde, with its varying fortunes; of the medieval barons and their castles; of the dark-age church and its abbeys. There are odes and lyrics still lingering among the heath-clad fells, and the sounding forces, and the purling becks, that will be captured and given to the world some day through the help of him by whom the in-breathing of the spirit is felt. Our snow-fields on wintry uplands, in sunshine or glimmering moonlight, are awaiting the pen that can adequately picture them.

There are tales of border-raids, and Arthurian legends, and wealth of fairy lore to be gathered, and 'country memories rich inlaid' by one who shall be born here, or choose our shires for his home, and shall put on singing-robes of sufficient quality and colour. 'I would I were a poet happy-mad,' exclaims one of those whose lives I have epitomized:

'I would I were a poet happy-mad, Up like a lark i' the morning of the times, To sing above the human harvesters; Drop fancies, dainty-sweet, to cheer their toil, And hurry out a ripe luxuriance Of life in song, as though my heart would break And sing them sweet and precious memories, And golden promises, and throbbing hopes; Hymn the great future with its mystery, That startles us from out the dark of time, With secrets numerous as a night of stars.'

THE END

_Elliot Stock, 62, Paternoster Row, London, E.C._