Note:
To this poem, when first published in the "Poems of Early and Late Years" (1842), Wordsworth appended the note,
"See, upon the subject of the three foregoing pieces, The Fountain [p. 91], etc. etc. in the fifth volume of the Author's Poems."
He thus connects it with the poems referring to Matthew in such a way that it may be said to belong to that series; and, while he assigned it to the year 1798, both in the edition of 1845, and in that of 1849-50, it is quite possible that it was written in 1799. "The village school" was the Grammar School of Hawkshead, where Wordsworth spent his boyhood; and the schoolmaster was the Rev. William Taylor, M. A., Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who was the third of the four masters who taught in it during Wordsworth's residence there. He was master from 1782 to 1786. Just before his death he sent for the upper boys of the school (amongst whom was Wordsworth), and calling them into his room, took leave of them with a solemn blessing. This farewell doubtless suggested the lines:
the blessing which to you
Our common Friend and Father sent.
Mr. Taylor was buried in Cartmell Churchyard. In The Prelude, Wordsworth writes of him as "an honoured teacher of my youth;" and there describes, with some minuteness, a visit to his grave. (See book x. l. 532.) It will be seen, however, from the Fenwick note to [Matthew], that the Hawkshead Schoolmaster, like the Wanderer in The Excursion, was "made up of several both of his class and men of other occupations;" but of the four masters who taught Wordsworth at Hawkshead—Peake, Christian, Taylor, and Bowman—Taylor was far the ablest, the most interesting, and the most beloved by the boys, and it was doubtless the memory of this man that gave rise to the above poem, and the four which follow it. He was but thirty-two years old when he died, 12th June, 1786. This fact, taken in connection with line 14 of the Address, may illustrate the composite character of Matthew.—Ed.
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