FOOTNOTES:
[A] The recovery of Mr. Roby's papers from the wreck of the Orion, June, 1850, when God, in His inscrutable providence, cut short a life so incomparably precious, was even then matter of thankfulness. Many portions of the MS., from which the legends in this volume were printed, bear traces of the sad catastrophe.
[B] The notion of this huge stone being a boulder stone—perhaps from Norway, which was long believed, is now exploded. A friend at Keswick (Sept. 1853) writes me word that the Porphyritic greenstone of which it is composed, runs through many parts of the Lake district, in the immediate neighbourhood, and that this stone must have fallen from the cliff just above. My informant adds, that Mr. Wright, the well known guide, in company with a gentleman, measured the stone and the cavity whence it fell, and found them to correspond; though the cavity is now somewhat overgrown by grass, it is not difficult to perceive.
[C] Esther, in the Jew of York. See Frazer's Mag. for Sept. 1836.
[D] Robert Langland's Visions of Pierce Plowman, were written about the year 1362. He represents himself as falling asleep on the Malvern Hills, and there beholding a series of visions, in describing which, he takes occasion to satirise the vices prevailing in the different classes of society, particularly the corruptions of the clergy. His prediction of the Reformation in England is most remarkable. As the date of these visions preceded Chaucer twenty years, the author must be considered the first English poet. He was a native of Shropshire, and fellow of Oriel College. Whitaker, who styles him the father of English Poetry, does not confirm the supposition that he was a monk of Worcester or Malvern. He thus paraphrases the opening lines.
"In early summer while sunshine was mild, I withdrew myself into a solitary place, surrounded with shrubs, in habit not like an Anchorite who keeps his cell, but like one of those unholy hermits who wander about the world to see and hear wonders; and on a May morning, reclining in a glade among the Malvern Hills, I slept from fatigue, and dreaming, beheld all the wealth and woe of the world."—Whitaker's (of Whalley) Ed. of Pierce Plowman: 1813.
[E] To strangers as well as residents we were much indebted. We received both the warmest sympathy and personal kindness from the Rev. J. Clarke, Incumbent of Stretford near Manchester, whose interesting narrative, published under the title of "The Wreck of the Orion," contains a full account of the mournful catastrophe. And never can be erased from memory the debt of kindness due to an English clergyman of the Episcopal Church in Scotland—the Rev. —— Pugh—who had come to seek his lovely little girl who had just perished in the wreck. The sympathy and encouragement he afforded touching that one supreme desire, and his offer, beyond all price, to take charge of the remains so unutterably dear, with those of his own beloved child, fill the heart with a weight of thankfulness that cannot be expressed. I can only look forward to that world where all the lovely will be gathered together, and the tears wiped from the mourner's eyes, as they already have been from those of the beloved ones we weep over.
[F] He would sometimes ventriloquise for the amusement of his friends. The incessant invention required to sustain the wit of three, and sometimes four, interlocutors, combined with the physical effort, kept the powers of both mind and body on the stretch to a degree that exhausted him more than anything else in which he engaged. See Stewart's Phil. Hum. Mind. III. 229—224.
[G] Foster represents as "the last attainment of a zealously good man, the resignation to be as diminutive an agent as God pleases and as unsuccessful an one."—Essay on the Application of the Epithet Romantic. Letter V.