The head is innocent that moves the hand.
A fount impure may taint a thousand streams.
The devil did not do the work he planned.
He is the very worst of evil pests
Who fears to execute, and but suggests.'
S. C. HALL: _The Trial of Sir Jasper_.
A mile or so from the picturesque town of Kendal is a village, standing
on both sides of the rushing little river Kent, now called Burneside,
though anciently Barnside. It has a church of old foundation, rebuilt
early in last century, chiefly by private subscription, but partly by
enforced church rates, after the custom of that age. It has a fine
bridge crossed by the road leading to the mountain heights and the long,
deep valleys, so wildly beautiful, and beginning to be so far-famed
through Mrs. Humphrey Ward's romances. Adjoining the bridge is a large
paper-mill, where formerly stood a worsted-mill and patent candle-wick
cutting factory. The village possesses an institute and library, and a
public-house of the Earl Grey type. The people seem contented and
intelligent, and as the number of them has grown from 650 in 1830 to
over 1,000 within fifty years, we may fairly point to it as an
object-lesson for those who desire to see village industries and 'garden
manufacturing villages' multiplied, and through them the neighbouring
farming interests improved and enriched.
A short stroll towards the northern uplands brings the visitor to a
ruined, ivy-clad Peel-tower, one of those relics of border-warfare days
with which these regions abound. As in many other cases, so in this,
when the times became more settled, a manor-house grew up around the
grim, square-built battlemented tower, which mansion is now, in still
later and quieter days, a farmhouse. To the manor and dwelling succeeded
the subject of this sketch on his father's death in 1610, or shortly
afterwards. He came of a race of Westmorland landed gentry, owning
estates here, and at Ambleside and Appleby. It is not known where he was
born. He was entered as a gentleman commoner at Oriel College, Oxford,
as a native of Northumberland, and it is, of course, possible that his
father, a wealthy man, held residential property in that county. The
internal evidence of his writings, however, has been of late held to be
sufficiently strong to prove him a native of Kendal. His words, in an
address to 'The Aldermen of Kendall,' seem very explicit:
'Within that native place where I was born,
It lies in you, dear townsmen, to reforme.'
Anthony a'Wood, in his 'Athenæ Oxoniensis,' tells how Braithwaite--or,
as he spells the name, Brathwayte--was sent to the University at sixteen
years of age in 1604. He remained there three years, 'avoiding as much
as he could the rough pathes of Logic and Philosophy, and tracing those
smooth ones of Poetry and Roman History, in which at length he did
excell.' Thence he went to Cambridge, studying literature 'in dead and
living authors.' From Cambridge he proceeded to London to read law in
the Inns of Court. In his father's will there are indications, and in
his own later writings there are sorrowful confessions, that, for a
while, at all events, he lived a wild, roystering life in the
Metropolis. 'The day seemed long wherein I did not enjoy these
pleasures; the night long wherein I thought not of them. I knew what
sinne it was to sollicit a maid into lightnesse; or to be drunken with
wine, wherein was excesse; or to suffer mine heart to be oppressed with
surfetting and drunkennesse; yet for all this, run I on still in mine
evil wayes.' His father's death-bed doubts of him, and the tying up of
the estate bequeathed to him, till he had amended, seem to have brought
him to himself. While living at Burneside Hall, during the early days of
the Civil Wars he was made a Captain of the local Royalist trained
bands, a Deputy-Lieutenant, and J.P. for the county, and spent his
leisure in composing and publishing the more serious of his books. Seven
years after entering on his possessions, he married Miss Frances Lawson,
of Darlington, but surreptitiously, probably because of objections
raised by the young lady's parents. It seems to have been more than a
love-match--a happy union of sixteen years' duration--producing a family
of nine--six sons and three daughters. Six years of widowhood, and then
he married a Yorkshire lady, who brought him another manor, Catterick,
where for the future he resided till his death. The sole issue of this
second marriage was a son--Strafford--who was knighted, and was killed
in an engagement with an Algerian man-of-war--in the ship _Mary_, of
which Sir Roger Strickland was commander. In 1673 Richard Braithwaite
died, and was buried in Catterick Parish Church, a mural monument duly
setting forth the fact in customary Latin. Anthony a'Wood says he bore
during his steady years 'the character of a well-bread (_sic_) gentleman
and a good neighbour.' Mr. Haslewood, his most competent editor, has
collected, I know not from whence, some oral traditions of his personal
appearance, interesting as a picture of the seventeenth-century northern
gentry, as well as of the individual. He was, although below the common
stature, one of the handsomest men of the time, and well proportioned,
remarkable for ready wit and humour, and of polished manners and
deportment. He usually wore a light gray coat, a red waistcoat, leather
breeches, and a high-crowned hat. From a full-length portrait in the
first edition of his 'English Gentleman,' which is believed to be his
likeness, he wore also boots, spurs, sword, belt, and cloak. He was so
neat in his appearance, and lively in manner, that his equals bestowed
upon him the nickname of 'Dapper Dick.'
He earned from later generations a far less enviable soubriquet--that of
'Drunken Barnaby.' This is because he is--and rightly so, without
doubt--credited with the authorship of a notorious book called by him
originally 'Barnabæ Itinerarium, or Barnabee's Journal.' It was done in
Latin and English on opposite pages, to 'most apt numbers reduced, and
to the old tune of Barnabe commonly chanted.' The poem would seem to
have passed out of general recollection, till in 1716 it was
republished by London booksellers under the title of 'Drunken Barnaby's
Four Journeys to the North of England,' and alleged to have been found
among some musty old books that had a long time lain by in a corner, and
now at last 'made publick.' This was a fabricated title with the
intention of catching the public taste, because of a popular ballad of
the same name then current. The Itinerary may well have been the
production of his muse during his London wild-oat days. Drunken and
licentious the traveller certainly was. He gives a rough, coarse picture
of the depraved manners of the times, against which zealous Puritans
were preaching and vigorously protesting.
Mr. Atkinson, in his 'Worthies of Westmorland,' calls him a 'strolling
minstrel.' A stroller he was, of course, but not a minstrel in any other
sense than as a keeper of a rhyming diary. He also says that 'Drunken
Barnaby' was a nickname of his own choice. This is too cruel!
Braithwaite never called himself so, and the term, when more than a
quarter of a century after his death it was invented for trade purposes,
was supposed to belong, not to Braithwaite at all, but to a certain
'Barnaby Harrington,' a supposed Yorkshire schoolmaster and
horse-dealer. 'Barnabæ Itinerarium' has little merit as poetry. It is
mainly of interest to moderns for the light it throws--like
the water-poet, Taylor's, 'Penniless Pilgrimage,' and his
'Merry-wherry-ferry Voyage'--on the social condition of Stuart and
Commonwealth England, as well as for its local allusions. Take of the
latter, for example, these:
'Thence to Sedbergh, sometimes joy-all,
Gamesome, gladsome, richly royal,
But those jolly boys are sunken,
Now scarce once a year one drunken;
There I durst not well be merry,
Farre from home old Foxes werry.[B]
* * * * *
'Thence to Kendall, pure her state is,
Prudent too her magistrate is,
In whose Charter to them granted.
Nothing but a Mayor is wanted;[C]
Here it likes me to be dwelling,
Bousing, loving, stories telling.'
* * * * *
'Thence to Garestang, where are feeding
Heards with large fronts freely breeding;
Thence to Ingleforth I descended,
Where choice bull-calfs will be vended;
Thence to Burton's boundiers pass I,
Faire in flocks, in pastures grassie.
* * * * *
'Thence to Lonesdale, where were at it
Boys that scorn'd quart-ale by statute,
Till they stagger'd, stammer'd, stumbled,
Railed, reeled, rowled, tumbled,
Musing I should be so stranged,
I resolv'd them, I was changed.
'To the sinke of sin they drew me,
Where like Hogs in mire they tew me,
Or like Dogs unto their vomit,
But their purpose I o'recommed;
With shut eyes I flung in anger
From those Mates of death and danger.'
[B] (Old foxes are wary when far from home.)
[C] It seems a Mayor was granted subsequently.
On another journey he came to 'Kendall,' and there he did 'what men call
spend all,' drinking 'thick and clammy ale,' and, passing on to
Staveley, drank again all night. He might in those days have well
deserved to be ear-marked for a 'drunken' vagabond, yet it is not fair
to the memory of any man to brand him only and for ever with frolics and
follies and evil deeds of which he afterwards repented, and would gladly
have atoned for.
We, at all events, would prefer to think of Richard Braithwaite at his
best, and not at his worst. He was the author of fully three score
volumes of prose and poetry, in Latin and in English, essays, sonnets,
madrigals. The titles of only a few can be quoted--'A Strappado for the
Devil,' 'Love's Labyrinth,' 'Shepherd's Tales or Eclogues,' 'Nature's
Embassie,' 'The English Gentleman,' 'The English Gentlewoman,'
'Whimsies, or a New Cast of Characters.' There is a good deal of telling
satire in the last of these:
'An Almanack-maker is the most notorious knave pickt out of all these,
for under colour of astrology he practices necromancy.'
'A Gamester--professes himself honest, and publishes himself Cheat upon
discovery.
'A Traveller is a fraud, if he travaile to novellize himself and not to
benefit his country.
'A Launderer is also one if she wash her skinne, but staine her soule,
and so soile her inward beauty.'
In 'A Spiritual Spicerie' he begins a poem:
'Morall mixtures or Divine
Aptly culled, and Couch'd in order,
Are like Colours in a Shrine,
Or choice flowers set in a border.'
In 'Holy Memorials' he bemoans his past waywardness and looseness, and
speaks of being sore perplexed when his own wanton verses were repeated
in his hearing, and 'though I did neither own them nor praise them, yet
must I in another place answer for them, if Hee, on whom I depend,
shall not in these teares which I shed drowne the memory of them.' Like
many of his pious contemporaries, he tried his hand at turning the
Psalms of David into English verse. If they fall short in his
translations of the beauty and strength of our prose versions--and they
have in no degree gripped the churches--these sacred hymns helped to
ripen his own character and faith, and he is very sincere in concluding
his efforts with:
'Praise to the God of Heaven,
Be given by Mee a Worme,
That David's numbers in this forme,
To Mee a Worme hath given.'
Adding on the last leaf, 'Other errours favourably excuse, and amend at
pleasure.'
The quaintness of his spelling, of his metres, of his expressions,
commend his works to lovers of old literature. Some are reprinted,
others are scarce. The first edition of 'Barnaby' is almost
unobtainable, and that of 'A Survey of History,' a quarto volume with
portrait, has just been offered me for £2.
SWARTHMORE HALL
'I went through a gate and found myself in a little green paddock,
where there was not even one rose left "to mark where a garden had
been." There were the principal windows--one little window looking
out from George Fox's study; the other two were old-fashioned
bay-windows, much larger. From the uppermost windows Fox used to
preach, sometimes, to his friends in the garden below. Near the
bay-window is the little old doorway, to which two rude stone steps
led up. All else was plain and unpretending. Inside I was shown the
"hall," a quaint, flagged apartment, on the ground-floor, with a
great, old-fashioned fireplace, and with a kind of stone daïs in the
recess of the mullioned window. Here I was told the earliest
meetings of the "Friends" were held. From this room, two steps led
up to a little sanctuary, which was Fox's study; and I felt as if
every footfall there was an intrusion, for that dim-lighted room,
with its tiny lattice and quaint furniture, was the cell of a saint,
"of whom the world was not worthy."'--EDWIN WAUGH: _Rambles in the
Lake Country_.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside._
SWARTHMORE HALL, ULVERSTONE.
The Home of Judge and Margaret Fell, and afterwards of George Fox.]
XXII
LAST WORDS ABOUT OUR CELEBRITIES
'Adjust your proposed amount of reading to your time and
inclination; but whether that amount be large or small, let it be
varied in its kind, and widely varied. If I have a confident opinion
on any one point connected with the improvement of the human mind,
it is on this.'--DR. THOMAS ARNOLD.
This lovely land of lake and mountain, dale and fell, in which my lot is
happily cast in old age, is too full of literary and artistic memories,
as well as ethnological and historic associations for anything to be
given in great detail. Over and above the beauty of its scenery and the
wealth of its natural productions, it offers to the traveller such
visions and glimpses of eminent men and women in the world of letters as
no other spot in the British Islands can show. Almost every village and
hamlet has some connection with a departed worthy of whom it is still
proud. Not to speak for the moment of the relation of Keswick to
Coleridge and Southey, or of Grasmere to De Quincey and the Wordsworths,
or of Coniston to Ruskin, of Ambleside to the Arnolds, or of Windermere
to 'Christopher North,'--of all whom I have treated at length--we have
roadside cottages, pleasant villas, and town houses, laying claim to
special distinction because someone of whom the nation is proud was
born, or lived, or died there. At Ambleside, for instance, near to Fox
How, dwelt William Edward Forster, the unfortunate statesman who would
have been more happily remembered in Ireland, and in connection with
national education by a larger section of his fellow countrymen, had he
entertained, during his public career, the enlightened views of his
devoted father, and the circle in which he and John Bright were trained.
Near there, too, for a time, Felicia Hemans found a peaceful home, after
her many trials, in a cottage still marked on the map as 'Dove's Nest,'
a lovely retreat for a poetess, in good sooth. The archæologist
Nicholson, poor in this world's gear, but rich in ancient lore, helps to
complete the galaxy of 'bright particular stars' that clustered about
the water-head of Winander.
Here in Kendal we have a tablet on the front of the house where Romney,
the portrait painter, died, carefully and undeservedly (as some think)
tended by the wife whom he had left alone so long. We show the yard in
which was the shop wherein he learned his first trade, and in our town
hall are several valuable pictures of his which will amply repay
visitors for a pilgrimage to our borough. Here lived Dr. Dalton, the
great chemist, once a tutor in our ancient Friends' School; and here
also Gough, the blind botanist, who knew any and every flower by the
feel of it upon his fingers and lips. Mrs. Humphrey Ward has given us
delightful word-pictures of the dales whose gateways we see from our
hillside garden as we look to the mighty summits across the verdant
valley of the Kent. Within a walk from our house stands the old
Baronial Hall where Agnes Strickland gathered material for her 'Queens
of England,' and where she wrote 'copy' for her publishers. The
straggling village of Troutbeck, just beneath yonder huge mountain-dome,
whereon the Baal-fires used to be lighted every midsummer eve, was the
ancestral home of the Hogarths; and in that valley Charlotte Brontë
pondered some of her best works, and sketched her backgrounds from the
moorland heights. Not all her scenery is Yorkshire, whatever Yorkshire
folk may imagine.
Further afield still, and across the watershed of our Westmorland
ramparts, on the edge of Thirlmere, Hall Caine spent his days in
producing 'The Shadow of a Crime.'
Away to the westward of us, at the foot of Windermere, where we often
take our Southern friends for afternoon tea in the sweet summer-time, is
Newby Bridge--a place that, with its river and its woods, would have
surely inspired in Kingsley, had he seen it as we have done, another
song like 'Clear and Cool.'
Here Mrs. Gaskell indited her charming novels of old-world, homely
people, and their ways. Here came up Nathaniel Hawthorne from his
Liverpool Consulate to compose his essays and write appreciative notes
upon the district.
To the north of us, just beyond the farthest loop of the steep and
winding railway incline, up and down which two-engined trains career all
day long, is Shap, the birthplace of antediluvian glaciers and the
celebrated Egyptologist, Wilkinson.
Mrs. Ratcliffe, the romancist; Grey, the elegist; William Watson, of
'Wordsworth's Grave'; Turner, the artist; Gilpin, the lover of rough
woodlands; and another Gilpin, 'the Apostle of the North,' in Queen
Mary's days; George Fox and his farmer preachers--founders of Quakerism;
Philip Sidney's sister, the lovely Countess of Pembroke--all these
belong more or less to the Lake Counties, and the homes of most of them,
while resident here, are yet to be seen. Brantwood looks over Coniston
Water to the quaint round chimneys and the gables of the century-stained
hall of the Le Flemings, and beyond it towers the gigantic cone of the
Old Man mountain. Dove Cottage, with its pretty garden laid out by the
hands of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, nestles beneath the wooded hill
at Grasmere. Greta Hall yet stands in Keswick, and the row of
lodging-houses where the author of 'Thorndale' and of 'Gravenhurst' met
the wife who proved the soul of his soul, and has written so sweetly of
her spouse. William Clarkson's retreat is on Ullswater's shore-lands;
and the honeymoon home of Tennyson, 'Tent Lodge,' on those of Coniston.
Yet long, long after the last stone of all these honoured buildings has
been overthrown to form part of a cottage or a mansion for someone of a
future generation--long, long after the poets' bones laid in Grasmere
burial-ground have mouldered into dust and become part of the life of
the overshadowing trees--long, long after the commemorative marbles in
Crossthwaite Church have become marred beyond recognition--the hills and
streams whose glories were chanted by our Minnesingers of prose and
verse will remain virtually unchanged though with an added glory not
theirs in olden days--the glory of the human soul awakened by them to
truth and beauty--the glory of art and song shining on every valley and
peak.
There are still some few living amongst us in this 'playground of
England' who are carrying on the literary traditions peculiar to it, of
whom another hand than mine will write hereafter, for they will be men
of mark ere their life-work closes. They have begun well and will finish
better. Nor are the possibilities of further expansions of poetry, or
legend, or history, or prose idylls yet exhausted. There are fields
unbroken awaiting the arrival of him who shall help to brighten a new
age. There are romances, and novels, and epic poems still stored away in
the narrative of the Roman Conquest and occupation; of the creeping
northward of the Saxons from land and sea; of the coming of the
fair-haired Norsemen in their long ships from the north seashores; of
the Kingdom of Strathclyde, with its varying fortunes; of the medieval
barons and their castles; of the dark-age church and its abbeys. There
are odes and lyrics still lingering among the heath-clad fells, and the
sounding forces, and the purling becks, that will be captured and given
to the world some day through the help of him by whom the in-breathing
of the spirit is felt. Our snow-fields on wintry uplands, in sunshine
or glimmering moonlight, are awaiting the pen that can adequately
picture them.
There are tales of border-raids, and Arthurian legends, and wealth of
fairy lore to be gathered, and 'country memories rich inlaid' by one who
shall be born here, or choose our shires for his home, and shall put on
singing-robes of sufficient quality and colour. 'I would I were a poet
happy-mad,' exclaims one of those whose lives I have epitomized:
'I would I were a poet happy-mad,
Up like a lark i' the morning of the times,
To sing above the human harvesters;
Drop fancies, dainty-sweet, to cheer their toil,
And hurry out a ripe luxuriance
Of life in song, as though my heart would break
And sing them sweet and precious memories,
And golden promises, and throbbing hopes;
Hymn the great future with its mystery,
That startles us from out the dark of time,
With secrets numerous as a night of stars.'
THE END
_Elliot Stock, 62, Paternoster Row, London, E.C._