“Sir Simon, Lord Mayor of fair London,
He was a shoemaker by trade.”
It is hard to think that the writer of The Shoomaker’s Holyday, in which the ways of shoemakers and the details of the craft are described with all the ease and exactitude of familiarity, was not a brother of the craft.[135] When the famous quarrel arose between the quondam friends and coworkers, Ben Jonson and Dekker, Jonson in his Poetaster satirized the author of The Shoomaker’s Holyday under the name of Crispinus. This epithet may be simply an allusion to the subject of Dekker’s well-known comedy; but may it not also be regarded as a veritable “cut at a cobbler?”
JAMES WOODHOUSE, THE FRIEND OF SHENSTONE.
James Woodhouse stands first on our list in point of time, but not in regard to ability. He evidently owed his little brief popularity to the friendship of William Shenstone, author of “The Schoolmistress.” Shenstone lived at Leasowes, seven miles from Birmingham, in a charming country-house surrounded by gardens, artistically laid out and cultivated with the utmost care by the eccentric, fantastic poet. Woodhouse, who was born about 1733, was a village shoemaker and eke a schoolmaster at Rowley, two miles off. Shenstone had been obliged to exclude the public from his gardens and grounds at Leasowes on account of the wanton damage done to flowers and shrubs. Whereupon the village shoemaker addressed the poet in poetical terms asking to be “excluded from the prohibition.” In reply Shenstone admitted him not only to wander through his grounds, but to make a free use of his library. “Shenstone found,” says Southey, “that the poor applicant used to work with a pen and ink at his side while the last was in his lap—the head at one employ, the hands at another; and when he had composed a couplet or a stanza, he wrote it on his knee.” Woodhouse was then about twenty-six years of age. His lot must have been rather hard at that time, for, speaking of his wife’s work and his own, he says in one of his poems—
“Nor mourn I much my task austere,
Which endless wants impose;
But oh! it wounds my soul to hear
My Daphne’s melting woes!