December 31 :—

88, f.; 93, m.

January 7, 1871:

81, f.; 86, m.; 85, m.; 85, f.; 92, f.; 93, m.

January 14:

93, m.; 82, m.; 85, f.; 89, m.; 81, f.; 87, m.; 88, m.

January 21:

84, m.; 84, m.; 85, m.; 81, f.; 82, f.; 98 (!), f.

January 28:

84, m.; 81, m.; 83, f.; 94, f.; 89, f.

Now, I take this to be a very remarkable list. In nine weeks of our last severe winter there died in Lakeland fifty persons, octogenarian and over, twenty-five of each sexand the average of that fifty is above eightyfive years; and I can assert confidently that scarce a week passes wherein the Westmorland Gazette does not contain obituary notice of more than one octogenarian. At the risk of inducing speculative builders to invade the shores of lovely Windermere, wild Wast

water, poetic Rydal, I place these facts before the public. Was not Wordsworth right in his theory? Is not a land of hills and streams a land of life?

I take it however that the reasons of long life in Lakeland are not exhausted when you have mentioned the health-giving soil, the fresh air of the hills, the soft climate of the lake-valleys. There is something, be assured, in the wonderful beauty of the district, fertile in ideas to all who are capable of apprehending landscapebeauty, which is of infinite value. When you walk upon the terrace at Rydal Mount, where Wordsworth dwelt, and pass the noble laurels which he planted from slips he had cut off those set by Petrarch over Virgil's tomb, you see a line of lakes below you on the one hand, you see an aërial rock above you on the other. Now, it is often urged that such scenery can have effect only on poetic minds: but to this I reply that all

minds are poetic-in the sense of being recipient of poetry. If there were no poetic apprehension in the souls of men, where would the forgetive poet find an audience? Am I to be told that beautiful scenery put into words will affect men whom the scenery itself would not affect? Doubtless the poet has a power over nature and the lovers of nature, and can by a single lyric make the scene more magical; but he would have no universal influence were there not a universal love of beauty-a love which it is his function to encourage and guide. A man entirely without poetic faculty may have poetic vision -may obtain from lovely scenes ideas which he can by no means communicate. Such men are numerous, and are the poet's best auditory. Coleridge's famous cloud-sonnet is a case in point. You look at a sunset, and think it beautiful: let an imaginative friend indicate great cities around an ocean-bay, or village-dwellings with green lanes between,

or vast forms of lions and rhinoceroses, and you follow him at once. His cloudy lions roar. There is odour of honeysuckle and murmur of rustic sweethearts in the villagelane There are crowds around an orator in the civic agora, while the great ships slowly furl their sails in the bay. Once you have found out the significance of a sunset, every sunset becomes a poem.

Now, while most emphatically asserting that in the soil and air of Lakeland there is something which tends to longevity, I maintain that the marvellous beauty of the country-so varied that Christopher North declared it a cabinet gallery of all conceivable natural pictures-has a great deal to do with it. To the critic who gets his notions of nature from Royal Academy canvas, it may very well seem that the old Westmorland statesman derives no special pleasure from the silver light on

Winding Windermere, the river-lake,

or from the play of cloud on innumerable peaks and fells. But this is an error. They do not try to put their impressions into words. Why should they, not having to write for the papers? But they enjoy all the same; they appreciate the changeful beauty which is so wondrous that during their eighty or ninety years of life the Omnipotent Artist has never given them a duplicate sunrise or sunset to look at. And in this, I say, they obtain lengthened lives.

Let me remark, in passing, that though supreme sunrises and sunsets are about equal in beauty, a supreme sunrise is more frequent than a supreme sunset. I often enjoy a sunrise just before going to bed.