'Turn again, Whittington,
Thrice Lord Mayor of London,'
is well known.—Ed.
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[Footnote M:] Tea-gardens, till well on in this century; now built over.—Ed.
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[Footnote N:] Bedlam, a popular corruption of Bethlehem, a lunatic hospital, founded in 1246. The old building, with its "carved maniacs at the gates," was taken down in 1675, and the hospital removed to Moorfields. The second building —the one to which Wordsworth refers—was demolished in 1814.—Ed.
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[Footnote O:] The London "Monument," erected from a design by Sir Christopher Wren, on the spot where the great London Fire of 1666 began.—Ed.
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[Footnote P:] The historic Tower of London.—Ed.
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[Footnote Q:] A theatre in St. John's Street Road, Clerkenwell, erected in 1765.—Ed.
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[Footnote R:] See Samson Agonistes, l. 88.—Ed.
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[Footnote S:] See Hamlet, act I. sc. v. l. 100.—Ed.
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[Footnote T:] The story of Mary, "The Maid of Buttermere," as told in the guidebooks, is as follows:
'She was the daughter of the inn-keeper at the Fish Inn. She was much admired, and many suitors sought her hand in vain. At last a stranger, named Hatfield, who called himself the Hon. Colonel Hope, brother of Lord Hopetoun, won her heart, and married her. Soon after the marriage, he was apprehended on a charge of forgery, surreptitiously franking a letter in the name of a Member of Parliament, tried at Carlisle, convicted, and hanged. It was discovered during the trial, that he had a wife and family, and had fled to these sequestered parts to escape the arm of the law.'
See Essays on his own Times, by S. T. Coleridge, edited by his daughter Sara. A melodrama on the story of the Maid of Buttermere was produced in all the suburban London theatres; and in 1843 a novel was published in London by Henry Colburn, entitled James Hatfield and the Beauty of Buttermere, a Story of Modern Times, with illustrations by Robert Cruikshank.—Ed.
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[Footnote U:] Compare S. T. C.'s Essays on his own Times, p. 585.—Ed.
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[Footnote V:] He first went south to Cambridge, in October 1787; and he left London, at the close of his second visit to Town, in the end of May 1791.—Ed.
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[Footnote W:] Compare Macbeth, act II. sc. i. l. 58:
'Thy very stones prate of my whereabout.'
Ed.
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[Footnote X:] The Houses of Parliament.—Ed.
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[Footnote Y:] See Shakespeare's King Henry the Fifth, act IV. sc. iii. l. 53.—Ed.
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[Footnote Z:] Solomon Gesner (or Gessner), a landscape artist, etcher, and poet, born at Zürich in 1730, died in 1787. His Tod Abels (the death of Abel), though the poorest of all his works, became a favourite in Germany, France, and England. It was translated into English by Mary Collyer, a 12th edition of her version appearing in 1780. As The Death of Abel was written before 1760, in the line "he who penned, the other day," Wordsworth probably refers to some new edition of the translation.—Ed.
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[Footnote a:] Edward Young, author of Night Thoughts, on Life, Death, and Immortality.—Ed.
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[Footnote b:] In Argyleshire.—Ed.
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[Footnote c:] Permission was given by Henry I. to hold a "Fair" on St. Bartholomew's day.—Ed.
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[Footnote d:] In one of the MS. books in Dorothy Wordsworth's handwriting, on the outside leather cover of which is written, "May to December 1802," there are some lines which were evidently dictated to her, or copied by her, from the numerous experimental efforts of her brother in connection with this autobiographical poem. They are as follows:
'Shall he who gives his days to low pursuits
Amid the undistinguishable crowd
Of cities, 'mid the same eternal flow
Of the same objects, melted and reduced
To one identity, by differences
That have no law, no meaning, and no end,
Shall he feel yearning to those lifeless forms,
And shall we think that Nature is less kind
To those, who all day long, through a busy life,
Have walked within her sight? It cannot be.'
Ed.
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[Contents—The Prelude]
[Main Contents]