"What's in a Name?"
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"Brutus will start a Spirit as soon as Cæsar!"
Ed.
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[Footnote B:] See The Seasons (Summer), ll. 977-79.—Ed.
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[Footnote C:] Such is the progress of refinement, this rude piece of self-taught art has been supplanted by a professional production.—W. W. 1819.
Mr. William Davies writes to me,
"I spent a week there (the Swan Inn) early in the fifties, and well remember the sign over the door distinguishable from afar: the inn, little more than a cottage (the only one), with clean well-sanded floor, and rush-bottomed chairs: the landlady, good old soul, one day afraid of burdening me with some old coppers, insisted on retaining them till I should return from an uphill walk, when they were duly tendered to me. Here I learnt many particulars of Hartley Coleridge, dead shortly before, who had been a great favourite with the host and hostess. The grave of Wordsworth was at that time barely grassed over."
Ed.
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[Footnote D:] See Wordsworth's [note], p. 109.—Ed.
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[Footnote E:] A mountain of Grasmere, the broken summit of which presents two figures, full as distinctly shaped as that of the famous cobler, near Arracher, in Scotland.—W. W. 1819.
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[Footnote F:] A term well known in the North of England, as applied to rural Festivals, where young persons meet in the evening for the purpose of dancing.—W. W. 1819.
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[Footnote G:] At the close of each strathspey, or jig, a particular note from the fiddle summons the Rustic to the agreeable duty of saluting his Partner.— W. W. 1819.
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[Footnote H:] Compare in Tristram Shandy:
"And this, said he, is the town of Namur, and this is the citadel: and there lay the French, and here lay his honour and myself."
Ed.
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[Footnote J:] See Wordsworth's [note], p. 109.—Ed.
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[Footnote K:] The crag of the ewe lamb.—W. W. 1820.
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[Footnote L:] Compare Tennyson's "Farewell, we lose ourselves in light."—Ed.
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[Footnote M:] Compare Wordsworth's lines, beginning, ["She was a Phantom of delight,"] p. i, and Hamlet, act II. sc. ii. l. 124.—Ed.
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[Footnote a:] See Wordsworth's [note], p. 109.—Ed.
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Note I: Several years after the event that forms the subject of the foregoing poem, in company with my friend, the late Mr. Coleridge, I happened to fall in with the person to whom the name of Benjamin is given. Upon our expressing regret that we had not, for a long time, seen upon the road either him or his waggon, he said:—"They could not do without me; and as to the man who was put in my place, no good could come out of him; he was a man of no ideas."
The fact of my discarded hero's getting the horses out of a great difficulty with a word, as related in the poem, was told me by an eye-witness.