"Childe Harold" speak in every line of his successful study of Wordsworth. It was we think, however, but a stage in his progress; for with what are, properly speaking, his dramatic works, "Manfred" cannot be classed.

In

Sardanapalus," and the "Two Foscari," for instance, he has passed into a wholly new style; and in the passages of "Don Juan," in which he is true to himself and his better genius-for in truth, some of the latter cantos are not merely unworthy of him, but absolutely worthless, and little better than mere gin-and-water-the style is absolutely his own, never suggesting any other writer.

Of Wordsworth, however, it is our business now to speak. His works cannot but be for many years a study with all persons who cultivate poetry as an art; and the formation and education of a mind producing such ef fects on so many, is a subject of .interest to all men.

The volumes before us can scarcely be called his biography.* Of incident in a life so uneventful as his, there was little to relate. The circumstances in which his poems were created, and the history, which it may be possible now to recover, and only now, that accompanied each, and that cannot but be, if recovered, useful for the purpose of perfectly understanding it, it would be desirable for us to have recorded. This could only be done by a person possessing such opportunities as his nephew, who has drawn up this memoir, appears to have possessed; and even, with such opportunities, in order that the work should be at all satisfactorily accomplished, it would be absolutely necessary that the biographer should have some knowledge of the art which was Wordsworth's great distinction. No biographer could have been selected, in this particular case, combining almost all the qualifications desirable, in so high a degree, as Hartley Coleridge; but death removed him a few months before Wordsworth. The volumes before us are valuable-not as valuable as they might have been-but are certainly valuable, as often giving us passages from the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, the poet's sister, and some dictated to the author by

the poet himself, who was aware of his intention of publishing this me moir, and approved of the design. The book may be regarded rather as a comment on the poems, than a formal biography.

Wordsworth's grandfather was the first of the name of Wordsworth who settled in the border country. The name, however, existed in Yorkshire, and from the Yorkshire family that of the poet traces its descent. An almery, or oakpress, of the date of 1525, was given to Wordsworth by Colonel Beaumont, an inscription on which describes it as made for a William Wordsworth of that time. Wordsworth's mother died in the year 1778, and his father when the poet was in his fourteenth year, and just returned from school at Hawkeshead, where he had been from his ninth year. Wordsworth's schooldays were happy ones, for he could read whatever books he liked; and he read all Fielding's works, "Don Quixote," "Gil Blas," "Gulliver's Travels," and the "Tale of a Tub." His first verses, which are given here, were what we may describe as a finished poem, in which the more familiar cadences of Pope's versification are skilfully imitated; a poem in which there is nothing to remember, and nothing likely to offend the ear, and which we do not feel surprised at hearing was regarded as something wonderful by his schoolmaster and schoolfellows. These verses were followed by other school exercises, and their success led him to write a long poem, running over his own adventures, and the scenery of the country in which he had been brought up.

In 1787, he was sent to St. John's College, Cambridge, of which College his maternal uncle, Dr. Cookson, had been a Fellow. The master, Dr. Chevallier, died soon after; but we must give this part of his life from the poet's own account:

"In the month of October, 1787, I was sent to St. John's College, Cambridge, of which my uncle, Dr. Cookson, had been a Fellow. The Master, Dr. Chevallier, died very soon after; and, according to the custom of that time, his body, after being placed in the coffin, was removed to the hall of the college, and the pall,

spread over the coffin, was stuck over by copies of verses, English or Latin, the composition of the students of St. John's. My uncle seemed mortified when upon inquiry he learnt that none of those verses were from my pen, because,' said he, 'it would have been a fair opportunity for distinguishing yourself.' I did not, however, regret that I had been silent on this occasion, as I felt no interest in the deceased person, with whom I had had no intercourse, and whom I had never seen but during his walks in the college grounds.

"When at school, I, with the other boys of the same standing, was put upon reading the first six books of Euclid, with the exception of the fifth; and also in algebra I learnt simple and quadratic equations; and this was for me unlucky, because I had a full twelvemonth's start of the freshmen of my year, and accordingly got into rather an idle way; reading nothing but classic authors according to my fancy, and Italian poetry. My Italian master was named Isola, and had been well acquainted with Gray the poet. As I took to these studies with much interest, he was proud of the progress I made. Under his correction I translated the Vision of Mirza, and two or three other papers of the Spectator' into Italian. In the month of August, 1790, I set off for the Continent, in companionship with Robert Jones, a Welshman, a fellow-collegian. We went staff in hand, without knapsacks, and carrying each his needments tied up in a pockethandkerchief, with about £20 a-piece in our pockets. We crossed from Dover and landed at Calais on the eve of the day when the king was to swear fidelity to the new constitution: an event which was solemnised with due pomp at Calais. On the afternoon of that day we started and slept at Ardres. For what seemed best to me worth recording in this tour, see the Poem of my own Life.'

6

"After taking my degree in January, 1791, I went to London, stayed there some time; and then visited my friend Jones, who resided in the Vale of Clwydd, North Wales. Along with him I made a pedestrian tour through North Wales, for which also see the Poem.

"In the autumn of 1791 I went to Paris, where I stayed some little time, and then went to Orleans, with a view of being out of the way of my own countrymen, that I might learn to speak the language fluently. At Orleans, and Blois, and Paris, on my return, I passed fifteen or sixteen months. It was a stirring time. The king was dethroned when I was at Blois, and the massacres of September took place when I was at Orleans. But for these matters see also the poem. I came home before the exeVOL. XXXVIII.-NO. CCXXIII,

cution of the king, and passed the subsequent time among friends in London and elsewhere, till I settled with my only sister at Racedown in Dorsetshire, in the year 1796.

"Here we were visited by Mr. Coleridge, then residing at Bristol; and for the sake of being near him when he had removed to Nether-Stowey, in Somersetshire, we removed to Alfoxden, three miles from that place. This was a very pleasant and productive time of my life. Coleridge, my sister, and I, set off on a tour to Linton and other places in Devonshire; and in order to defray his part of the expense, Coleridge on the same afternoon commenced his poem of the Ancient Mariner,' in which I was to have borne my part, and a few verses were written by me, and some assistance given in planning the poem; but our styles agreed so little, that I withdrew from the concern, and he finished it himself.

"In the course of that spring I composed many poems, most of which were printed at Bristol, in one volume, by my friend, Joseph Cottle, along with Coleridge's Ancient Mariner,' and two or three other of his pieces.

"In the autumn of 1798, Mr. Coleridge, a friend of his, Mr. Chester, my sister, and I, crossed from Yarmouth to Hamburgh, where we remained a few days, and saw, several times, Klopstock the poet. Mr. Coleridge and his friend went to Ratzburg, in the north of Germany, and my sister and I preferred going southward; and for the sake of cheapness, and the neighbourhood of the Hartz Mountains, we spent the winter at the old imperial city of Goslar. The winter was perishing cold-the coldest of this century; and the good people with whom we lodged told me one morning that they expected to find me frozen to death, my little sleeping room being immediately over an archway. However, neither my sister nor I took any harm.

"We returned to England in the following spring, and went to visit our friends the Hutchinsons, at Sockburnon-Tees, in the county of Durham, with whom we remained till the 19th of December. We then came, on St. Thomas's Day, the 21st, to a small cottage at Town-end, Grasmere, which, in the course of a tour some months previously with Mr. Coleridge, I had been pleased with, and had hired. This we furnished for about a hundred pounds, which sum had come to my sister by a legacy from her uncle Crackanthorp.

"I fell to composition immediately, and published, in 1800, the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads.'

"In the year 1802, I married Mary

G

Hutchinson, at Brompton, near Scarborough, to which part of the country the family had removed from Sockburn. We had known each other from childhood, and had practised reading and spelling under the same old dame at Penrith, a remarkable personage, who had taught three generations, of the upper classes principally, of the town of Penrith and its neighbourhood.

"After our marriage we dwelt, together with our sister, at Townend, where three of our children were born. In the spring of 1808, the increase of our family caused us to remove to a larger house, then just built, Allan Bank, in the same vale, where our two younger children were born, and who died at the rectory, the house we afterwards occupied for two years. They died in 1812, and in 1813 we came to Rydal Mount, where we have since lived with no further sorrow till 1836, when my sister became a confirmed invalid, and our sister Sarah Hutchinson died. She lived alternately with her brother and with us."

We have, following this rapid sketch of his life by the poet, his nephew's description of Rydal Mount, the poet's residence during the last thirty-eight years of his life. The description is a happy one, as may be readily believed by any one who remembers the power, in this way exhibited, in Mr. Ŵordsworth's sketches of Grecian scenery; and each particular feature of the landscape is sought to be illustrated, by references to passages in Wordsworth's poetry, which, we think, it would have been far wiser to print in full, than trust either to the reader's memory, or to his having it in his power to refer to the edition of the Poems, by the pages of which, and not by the names of the poems, he would direct us in our search for any passage. Instead of giving Mr. Wordsworth's description, which is embarrassed by perpetual references to an edition of the poems, which, though having more than one edition of them, we do not happen to possess, we prefer giving Miss Jewsbury's pleasing picture in her little poem called the "Poet's Home:"

"Low and white, yet scarcely seen

Are its walls for mantling green;
Not a window lets in light

But through flowers clustering bright;
Not a glance may wander there
But it falls on something fair;
Garden choice and fairy mound,
Only that no elves are found;

Winding walk and sheltered nook
For student grave and graver book ;
Or a birdlike bower, perchance
Fit for maiden and romance.
Then, far off, glorious sheen
Of wide and sunlit waters seen;
Hills that in the distance lie,
Blue and yielding as the sky;
And nearer, closing round the nest,
The home of all the 'living crest,'
Other rocks and mountains stand
Rugged, yet a guardian band,
Like those that did, in fable old,
Elysium from the world enfold.

companions meet
Thou shalt have in thy retreat:
One of long-tried love and truth,
Thine in age as thine in youth;
One whose locks of partial grey
Whisper somewhat of decay;

Yet whose bright and beaming eye
Tells of more that cannot die.

Then a second form beyond
Thine too, by another bond,
Sportive, tender, graceful, wild,
Scarcely woman, more than child-
One who doth thy heart entwine
Like the ever-clinging vine;
One to whom thou art a stay,
As the oak that, scarred and grey,
Standeth on and standeth fast,
Strong and stately to the last.

Poet's lot like this hath been;
Such, perchance, may I have seen;
Or in fancy's fairy land,

Or in truth and near at hand:
If in fancy, then, forsooth,
Fancy had the force of truth:
If, again, a truth it were,
Then was truth as fancy fair;
But whichever it might be,
"Twas a Paradise to me.'""

Wordsworth's residence has been rendered familiar to the public by the engraving prefixed to the one-volumed edition of his poems :

"It is a modest mansion, of a sober hue, tinged with weather stains, with two tiers of five windows; on the right of these is a porch, and above, and to the right, are two other windows, the highest looks out of what was the poet's bedroom. The gable end at the east, that first seen on entering the grounds from the road, presents on the groundfloor the window of the old hall or diningroom. The house is mantled over here and there with roses and ivy, and jessamine and Virginia creeper.

"We may pause on the threshold of the porch at the hospitable "SALVE," inscribed on the pavement brought by a

friend from Italy. But the privacy of the interior shall not be invaded. Suffice to say that in the old hall or diningroom stands the ancestral almery brought from Penistone; and here are engravings of poets-Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Ben Johnson, and Miltonand also of the royal children,—a gift from her most gracious Majesty the Queen to the Poet Laureate."

In the library are pictures by Sir George Beaumont, illustrating Wordsworth's poems of "The Thorn," and "The White Doe of Rylstone." In the adjoining room is the portrait which suggested the poem, which commences with the line, "Beguiled into forgetfulness of care," and which, in his edition of the poems before us, is numbered 48, of the class entitled, "Poems of Sentiment and Reflection." On the staircase is a picture, brought from Italy by his son, and which is mentioned in a sonnet of Wordsworth's, beginning with the lines

"Giordino, verily thy pencil's skill

Hath here pourtrayed, with Nature's happiest grace,

The fair Endymion, couched on Latmos' hill."

Opposite is an engraving from Haydon's picture of "The Duke of Wellington upon the field of Waterloo;" and further on is the cuckoo clock, still "warbling its wood-notes wild" as when, in sleepless nights, it cheered the poet.

We have said that the poet's family derive their descent from the Wordsworths of Penniston, in Yorkshire. Pedigrees and heraldic information of one kind or other on the subject is given, from letters to the poet by Mr. Joseph Hunter, together with extracts from his history of Doncaster. The connexion between the Yorkshire family and that of the poet is, we think, sufficiently established by the existence of the same Christian names; but there is nothing which could be regarded as absolute evidence on the subject, or which would give much aid were a question of title or property depending. The name is given from the middle of the fourteenth century, with different variations of spelling: Wadsworth, Wardesworth, Wurdysworth, are some of the forms; but Wordesworth, or Wordsworth, seems the original, of which the others are

varieties. On an old oak chest, of Henry the Eighth's day, which was found at Penniston, and given to the poet, the spelling is Wordesworth. In Percy's "Reliques," in his notes to the

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Dragon of Wantley," we have a Wordesworth described as cousin to the dragon. The old ballad is an amusing one. Under the guise of an encounter with the dragon, is told the story of a lawsuit, in which the question of the right to tithes was tried and determined. We do not think that any one reading the poem without the notes, could ever conjecture its subject; and even with all the assistance that the notes give, there is much which remains doubtful.

Wharncliffe Lodge and Wharncliffe Wood are in the parish of Penniston. Wharncliffe is also called Wantley. The rectory of Penniston was part of the dissolved monastery of St. Stephen's, and was granted to the Duke of Norfolk's family. He endowed therewith an hospital at Sheffield. The trustees of the hospital let the impropriate tithes to the Wortley family. Nicholas Wortley, under this grant, sought to take the tithes in kind; but the parishioners established a modus. The vicarage of Penniston did not go with the rectory. It was purchased from Queen Elizabeth by the Bosville family; and, under some conveyance from them, was, at the time of the ballad, in the possession of a family of the name of Rowlestowne.

The Dragon of Wantley was the great tithe-devouring Wortley :

"This dragon had two furious wings,

Each one upon his shoulder,
With a sting in his tail as long as a flail,

Which made him bolder and bolder.
He had long claws; and in his jaws

Four-and-forty teeth of iron; With a hide as tough as any buff,

Which did him round environ.

"All sorts of cattle this dragon did eat; Some say he ate of trees,

And that the forests here he would

Devour up by degrees;

For houses and churches were to him geese and turkeys;

He ate all, and left none behind, But some stones, dear Jack, which he couldn't crack,

Which on the hills you will find."

The omnivorous dragon, having disposed of houses and churches as if they were titheable articles, left some stones

behind. This, it is conjectured, alludes to the Rollstones, whose claims interfered with his. More, of More-Hall, is described as the conqueror of the dra. gon. More, of More-Hall, at the time when the note in Percy's ballad was written, still attended at the Manor Court of Oxspring, and paid a rose ayear. It is not improbable that the custom is still continued. In Mr. Hunter's letter he mentions that he had seen the document by which the parishioners pledged themselves to each other as to resisting Wortley's claim to tithes, and that it contains the names of several Wordsworths. "The Dragon," however, it would appear, persuaded his cousin Wordesworth not to join the refractory parishioners, under a promise that he would let him have his tithes cheap; and now the estates of Wortley and Wordesworth are the only lands that pay tithes in the parish."*

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Wordsworth's relationship to the Dragon has carried us farther than we could have wished, but a reference to Percy's "Reliques" will be forgiven by every one that cares about Wordsworth.

These cousins of the Dragon of Wantley were land-proprietors in Yorkshire, and were in all probability regarded themselves as having in them something of dragon blood, and might be not unnaturally typified and described under some such mystical character. Mortal men called them tax-gatherers and special attorneys, dreaded and feared more than any other of the old dragon brood. Little of the sentimental, we ween, is recorded of this iron-hearted tribe. There were farmers, too, in this line of probable ancestors; but on the whole we think the record might have been spared. The poet was himself the first of the Family that can be described as bearing a name of any public interest. there was any evidence leading to the inference that the family was of Saxon descent, and that it was settled, as the poet wished to believe, in a particular part of the country before the Saxon conquest, we think such fact worth recording; but, in reality, there is little to support this notion. In the notes to the passage we have quoted from Percy, Wordsworth is a name of

If

place as well as of person; in such case the probability is, that the place gives its name to the family who may occupy it; and we think there is no reasonable ground for much inference of any kind. On such a subject, before the time when surnames were fixed, John of the Hill and Thomas of the Dale might, in such days, have been brothers, though Hill and Dale would in a generation or two, become distinguishing words; and at such a period, the man who farmed the lands of Oakville would have been called by the name of the lands, as also would, his successor of a different family, if they had passed into other hands. The relation indicated by such names in these earlier days is not that of birth or blood; and except that, in the poorer parts of the country, there is little means or little motive to leave the locality in which a family finds itself placed, the evidence of identity of name would be far from conclusive of identity of blood. The Wordsworths of Cumberland and Westmorland seem, however, to have been derived from those of Yorkshire, and in spite of our heretical doubts as to the importance of such minute records as the Canon of Westminster has printed of the Wordsworths of the last century, or two, we should be glad he had given us an engraving of the old almery which was sent from Yorkshire to the poet.

We have said that this biography is chiefly valuable as illustrative of the poems of Wordsworth, and it is probable that it will be read very much as connected with "The Prelude," a poem published since the author's death, but written in his thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year. In that poem, rather than in his nephew's work, will the reader look for descriptions of Wordsworth's earlier life, as the professed object of the work was to record the results of a self-examination into his own mind, as effected by outward incidents. The purpose of this examination is to enable him to determine whether he has, from nature and from education, such powers and such accomplishments as may justify him in devoting his life to poetry, as his proper vocation. He tells of many interesting purposes-plans of epic, and ly