But the two books the worthy doctor has specially made his mark with as regards the general public are 'Folk-Speech Tales and Rhymes of Cumberland and Districts Adjacent,' and 'The Old Man, or Ravings and Ramblings around Coniston.' The first has passed through several editions, and is to be had quite cheaply through second-hand booksellers; the second is scarcer and dearer. Of the first the Saturday Review wrote: 'Few people will dare to attack this odd-looking book, with its unusual accents and its rude phonetic spelling, and if they do they will not understand it if they have not had some previous education. But to those who can read it it is full of racy jokes and rich humour, and will afford infinite amusement when intelligently undertaken.' This seems to be a tolerably correct estimate, for, as he tells us in his preface, the tales relating to Cumberland and Dumfriesshire are in pure Cumbrian—unadulterated, old Norse-rooted Cumbrian vernacular—and pure Scotch folk-speech. The High Furness dialect, he says, is rendered impure by the influx of emigrants from across Morecambe Sands. How can I find specimens short enough? 'Joe and the Geologist' is in the Cumberland mode. It tells of a lad hired by a Savant to carry the stones and fossils collected in a two days' excursion, and how the lad, thinking one stone as good as another, emptied the leather bag on the sly, filled it again from a stone-breaker's heap, earned his meals and half a sovereign for his 'hard work,' and managed to send his employer off by coach none the wiser till he should reach home.
'When I com nar to Skeal-hill, I fund oald Aberram Achisson sittin' on a steul breckan steans to mend rwoads wid, an' I axt him if I med full my ledder pwokes frae his heap. Aberram was varra kaim't an' tell't ma to tak them as wasn't brocken if I want'd steans, sooa I tell't hoo it was an' oa' aboot it. T' oald maizlin was like to toytle of his steul wid' laughin', and said me mudder sud tak gud care on ma, for I was ower sharp a chap to leeve varra lang i' this warld; but I'd better full ma pwokes as I liked an' mak on wid' them.' 'The Skulls of Calgarth,' a North Country Naboth vineyard story with additions, is the only tale in Westmorland talk.
'A house ligs la' an' leansome theear, doon in that oomer dark,
Wi' wide, heigh-risin' chimla-heads, la' roof, an' crumlin' wo',
O' wedder-gra'n an' weed-be grown—for time hes setten t' mark
O' scooers an' scooers o' wearin' years on hantit Co'garth Ho'.'
To the reader uninstructed in the vernacular his little work, entitled 'The Old Man; or, Ravings and Ramblings Round Coniston,' is more interesting than 'Folk-Speech.' It contains capital descriptive passages, some in pointed prose, and some in rhyme. Example of the latter may be found in 'The Sunken Graves.'
'Near Esthwaite Head, remote and lone,
Where crag-born Dudden chafes and raves—
Unblest by priest—unmarked by stone—
Were lengthened rows of dateless graves.'
Of the prose, take these words about Coniston: 'Nowhere else have you seen wood and water, hill and valley, green-sward and purple heather, rugged crag and velvet lawn, gray rock and bright-blossoming shrub, waving forest and spreading coppice brought under the eye at once in such magnificent proportion and in such bewildering contrast.' He narrates some exciting fox-hunting experiences of the fell-side farmers and their hounds; he has some pithy tales of the native peasantry and their folklore and their customs, as well as of their parsons, poor as Goldsmith's 'Christian Hero'—passing rich at £40 a year, yet learned and of cultured minds, though dressed in homespun, and toiling on the land to eke out a living. His own adventures as a medical man in mists and storms sweeping across the mountains are sometimes graphic. This paragraph must suffice us: 'There had been a heavy snow, which for a day or two, under the influence of soft weather and showers, had been melting; the whole country was saturated with wet—every road was a syke, every syke a beck, and every beck a river. The high lands were covered with a thick, cold, driving, suffocating mist, which every now and then thinned a little to make way for one of those thorough-bred mountain showers, of which none can have any conception who have not faced them on the fells in winter—wetting to the skin and chilling to the marrow in three seconds, and piercing exposed parts like legions of pins and needles. The hollows in the roads, which are neither few nor far between, were filled with snow in a state of semi-fluidity, cold as if it had been melted with salt, through which I splashed and struggled, dragging my floundering jaded pony after me with the greatest difficulty.'