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.