[175] "Mighty Fairfield":
"And Mighty Fairfield, with her chime
Of echoes, still was keeping time."—Wordsworth's "Waggoner."
I have retained the English name of Fairfield; but, when I was studying Danish, I stumbled upon the true meaning of the name, unlocked by that language, and reciprocally (as one amongst other instances which I met at the very threshold of my studies) unlocking the fact that Danish (or Icelandic rather) is the master-key to the local names and dialect of Westmoreland. Faar is a sheep: fald a hill. But are not all the hills sheep hills? No; Fairfield only, amongst all its neighbours, has large, smooth, pastoral savannas, to which the sheep resort when all the rocky or barren neighbours are left desolate.
[176] From Tait's Magazine for August 1840.—M.
[177] Potter is the local term in northern England for a hawker of earthen ware; many of which class lead a vagrant life, and encamp during the summer months like gipsies.
[178] This brutal boast might, after all, be a falsehood, and, with respect to mere numbers, probably was so.
[179] Byron's letter was not to Hogg, but to Moore, concerning a letter received from Hogg; and the extract from it in Lockhart to which De Quincey refers was as follows:—"Oh! I have had the most amusing letter from Hogg, the Ettrick Minstrel and Shepherd. I think very highly of him as a poet; but he and half of those Scotch and Lake troubadours are spoilt by living in little circles and petty coteries. London and the world is the only place to take the conceit out of a man." The letter is dated 3d August 1814.—M.
[180] Scott, at all events, who had been personally acquainted with Wordsworth since 1803,—when Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy in the course of their Scottish tour visited Scott and his wife at Lasswade,—had always been an admirer of Wordsworth, even while dissenting from his poetical views. Scott and his wife had paid a return visit to Wordsworth at Grasmere in 1805; and the two poets had corresponded occasionally since then,—Scott decidedly more deferential to Wordsworth than Wordsworth was to Scott.—M.
[181] The story will appear in a future volume.—M.
[182] It is entitled "Characteristics of a Child Three Years Old"; and is dated at the foot 1811, which must be an oversight, for she was not so old until the following year. I may as well add the first six lines, though I had a reason for beginning the extract where it does, in order to fix the attention upon the special circumstance which had so much fascinated myself, of her all-sufficiency to herself, and the way in which she "filled the air with gladness and involuntary songs." The other lines are these: