The bloody battle of Bothwell hill."
To the left, looking over the haughs or meadows of Hamilton, from Bothwell brig, you discern the top of the present house of Bothwellhaugh over a mass of wood. Here another strange historical event connects itself with this scene. Here lived that Hamilton who shot in the streets of Linlithgow the Regent Murray, the half-brother of the Queen of Scots. The outrage had been instigated by another, which was calculated especially in an age like that when men took the redress of their wrongs into their own hands without much ceremony, to excite to madness a man of honor and strong feeling. The regent had given to one of his favorites Hamilton's estate of Bothwellhaugh, who proceeded to take possession with such brutality that he turned Hamilton's wife out naked, in a cold night, into the open fields, where before morning she became furiously mad. The spirit of vengeance took deep hold of Hamilton's mind, and was fanned to flame by his indignant kinsmen. He followed the regent from place to place seeking an opportunity to kill him. This at length occurred by his having to pass through Linlithgow on his way from Stirling to Edinburgh. Hamilton placed himself in a wooden gallery, which had a window toward the street, and as the regent slowly, on account of the pressure of the crowd, rode past, he shot him dead.
Add to these scenes and histories that Hamilton Palace, in its beautiful park, lies within a mile of the Bothwell brig, and it must be admitted that no poetess could desire to be born in a more beautiful or classical region. Joanna Baillie's father was at the time of her birth minister of Bothwell. When she was four years old he quitted it, and was removed to different parishes, and finally, only three years before his death, was presented to the chair of divinity at Glasgow. After his death Miss Baillie spent with her family six or more years in the bare muirlands of Kilbride, a scenery not likely to have much attraction for a poetical mind, but made agreeable by the kindness and intelligence of two neighboring families. She never saw Edinburgh till on her way to England when about twenty-two years of age. Before that period she had never been above ten or twelve miles from home, and, with the exception of Bothwell, never formed much attachment to places. Since then she has only seen Scotland as a visitor, and at distant intervals.
For many years Joanna Baillie has been a resident of Hampstead, where she has been visited by nearly all the great writers of the age. Scott, as may be seen in his letters to Joanna Baillie, delighted to make himself her guest, and on her visit to Scotland, in 1806, she spent some weeks in his house at Edinburgh. From this time they were most intimate friends; she was one of the persons to whom his letters were most frequently addressed, and he planted, in testimony of his friendship for her, a bower of pinasters, the seeds of which she had furnished, at Abbotsford, and called it Joanna's bower. In 1810 her drama, The Family Legend, was through his means brought out at Edinburgh. It was the first new play brought out by Mr. Henry Siddons, and was very well received, a fortune which has rarely attended her able tragedies, which are imagined to be more suitable for the closet than the stage. There they will continue to charm, while vigor of conception, a clear and masterly style, and healthy nobility of sentiment, retain their hold on the human mind.
Grasmere
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth on the 7th of April, 1770. He was educated at Hawkeshead school, in High Furness, and at St. John's College, Cambridge. He had several brothers. One was lost at sea, as commemorated in his poems in various places, as in vol. iii. p. 96, in the sixth poem on the naming of places; and in vol. iv. p. 332, in Elegiac Stanzas; and again in the very next poem—To the Daisy. He was, as we learn from a note, commander of the East India Company's vessel, the Earl of Abergavenny. Another brother was the late Master of Trinity College, Cambridge; and a third, a solicitor in Staples inn. On quitting college, he lived some time in the west of England, and then traveled abroad; resided a year and a half in France, at Orleans, Nantes, Paris, etc. He then went into Germany. In these countries he traveled much on foot, and often quite alone; passing through the solitary forests, and penetrating into the most obscure villages. I have heard him relate that coming late, accompanied by his sister and Coleridge, into a desolate German hamlet, in Hesse Cassel,—and wretched places they are often, as every one knows who has had to seek rest or refreshment in them,—they were refused admittance, and thought they must have to pass the night in the open street. Knocking, however, pretty determinedly at the door of the village inn, the landlord, as if provoked by being disturbed, suddenly rushed out upon them, and fell upon them with a huge cudgel, so that they considered themselves in great personal danger, as well they might at that time of day, when the visits of foreigners were not very common; and not only were the common village publicans very boorish, but, if we are to believe the hand-books of the traveling handicrafts, many a foul murder was committed in those obscure places for the stranger's purse and knapsack. Neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge, however, were destined to be extinguished in that manner. They succeeded in defending themselves, in making their way into the house, and by appealing to them as Christian people, whose duty it was to entertain, and not abuse strangers, they secured a night's lodging, such as it was. Coleridge relates the anecdote somewhat differently in his Biographia Literaria. He says, the rudeness of the landlord within, was seconded by a rabble without. That the travelers could get neither supper, coffee, nor beds; and finally, asking for some bundles of straw to sleep upon, these possibly might have been granted, but that he, Coleridge, happened to ask impatiently, if there were no Christians left in Hesse Cassel; which so incensed them, that being reported in the street, the rabble rushed in and expelled them from the house, by hurling the burning brands from the hearth at them; and that they bivouacked where they could; Coleridge passing his night under a furz bush, well punctured by its thorns. You may find many traces of Wordsworth's wanderings thus in his poems, particularly in vol. iii., and also in vol. iv., where he very characteristically narrates the adventures of a fly on a cold winter's day, as it traverses the stove before which he sat warming himself.
Before going abroad he lived some time in Dorsetshire and Somersetshire. It is probable that he made the acquaintance of Coleridge at Cambridge. Coleridge had now become connected with Southey and Lovell, two Bristol men, and was in a great measure located there. The spirit of poetry had revived again after a long period of mere imitation; and by these circumstances three of the chief leaders of literary reform were thus brought together. Southey was a Bristol man, Coleridge was a Devonshire man, Wordsworth a Cumberland man; but here they were drawn together, and Bristol for a time seemed as though it were to have the honor of becoming a sort of western Athens. But Bristol itself had no sympathy with any literary spirit. It is one of those places that have the singular fortune to produce great men, though it never cherishes them. It produced Chatterton, and let him perish; it produced Southey, and let him go away to rear the fabric of his fame where he pleased. The spirit of trade, and that not in its most adventurous or liberal character, was and is the spirit of Bristol. By a wretched and penny-wise policy, even of trade, it has allowed Gloucester, at many miles' distance from the sea, to become a great port at its expense; by the same spirit it has created Liverpool; and whoever now sees its wretched docks coming up into the middle of the town, instead of stretching, business-like and compactly, along the banks of the Avon, its dusty and unwatered streets, and altogether dingy and sluggish appearance, feels at once, that not even the poetry of trade can flourish there. Yet Bristol had the honor thrust upon it, of issuing to the world the first productions of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge. Joseph Cottle, the author of Alfred, an epic poem, whom Byron so mercilessly handled, grafting upon him the name of his brother Amos, for the sake of more ludicrous effect—Joseph Cottle was a bookseller here, and became the patron of those three young, aspiring, but far from wealthy young men.
Coleridge had made the acquaintance of a Mr. Thomas Poole, of Nether Stowey, a gentleman of some property, and a magistrate. Mr. Poole was a friend of the two great brother potters, Josiah and Thomas Wedgewood, of Staffordshire; he introduced Coleridge to them, and eventually they settled on him an annuity of £150 a-year. Poole invited Coleridge to come down to Stowey to see him, and after his marriage prevailed on him to go and live in Stowey. The Wedgewoods were accustomed also to visit Mr. Poole; and the same causes drew Wordsworth and Southey occasionally down there. Thus Bristol ceased to be the general rendezvous of this new literary coterie, and the solitudes of Somersetshire received them. People have often wondered what induced this poetical brotherhood to select a scene so far out of the usual haunts of literary men, so inferior to Wordsworth's own neighborhood, as Stowey and its vicinity. These are the circumstances. It was Mr. Poole and cheapness which had a deal to do with it. Poole drew Coleridge, Coleridge and the dreams of Pantisocracy drew most of the others. Wordsworth, I believe, never speculated on the exclusive happiness of following the plough on the banks of the Susquehannah; but the whole of the corps had made the discovery that true poetry was based on nature, and that it was to be found only by looking into their own minds, and into the world of nature around them. They therefore sought, not cities, but solitude, where they could at once read, reflect, and store up that treasury of imagery, full of beauty and truth, which should be reproduced, woven into the living tissue of their own thought and passion, as poetry of a new, startling, and high order. To this life of country seclusion Wordsworth and Southey adhered, from choice, all their after-lives.