CHAPTER XXI.

COLEORTON: SIR GEORGE AND LADY BEAUMONT.

WHEN Dove Cottage proved too small for the accommodation of the Wordsworth household, and no suitable home could be found in the vale of Grasmere, the poet accepted an invitation from Sir George Beaumont to occupy the Farm House of Coleorton, during the winter of 1806-7. In the long summer days the Town End residence sufficed for the modest requirements of an unambitious family. They were much in the open air, and often spent the entire day in the "moss hut" of their orchard, where many poems were composed and long letters written; but, in the dark winter nights, with broken weather and smoky chimneys, it was impossible to get on in the cottage of the "Dove and Olive Bough," which the Wordsworths had entered in 1799.

On the 2nd of June 1806, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote thus to Mrs Marshall::

old.

We have no servant but a little girl, twelve years

My brother has been in London for two months. [He was visiting Richard at Lambeth, and the Cooksons at Windsor.] As for us, we shall at last be driven out of our cottage, for we do not think we ought to live here another winter, and with a third child. It is so very unwholesome for a large family; the rooms being so small and low (only one sitting-room, &c.), and no other suitable house in the neighbourhood, we are quite undetermined what to do. . . . We have got a beautiful hut, lined with moss, at the top of

our orchard, and we live there almost constantly in fine weather."

Sir George and Lady Beaumont were leaving Coleorton for the winter of 1806-7, and they placed their temporary residence at the disposal of the Wordsworths.

Coleorton is about four miles to the south-east of Ashbyde-la-Zouche in Leicestershire. For details as to the Beaumont family, and the numerous letters addressed to Sir George and Lady Beaumont by the Wordsworths, Coleridge, Southey, and Sir Walter Scott, I must refer to the Memorials of Coleorton, published by Mr Douglas, Edinburgh, in 1887. Only a few facts need be mentioned here.

The pedigree of the Beaumonts of Coleorton may be traced to the times of William of Normandy. Robert de Beaumont, one of the "Companions of the Conqueror," came over to England in 1066.* Francis Beaumont, the dramatist -Fletcher's friend and fellow-worker, and Sir John Beaumont, Francis' elder brother, and author of Bosworth Field— were of the same family.

With Sir George, the seventh Baronet, the present mansion of Coleorton is specially identified. He rebuilt it, and by his friendship with the men of letters and artists of his time, he made the Hall a centre of associations which posterity will not willingly let die.

Sir George had visited the district of the English Lakes long before he became acquainted with its poets. Southey tells us that he spent part of the summer in which he was married (1774), at Keswick. In 1803 he lodged for a time

Rogier li Veil, eil de Belmont,
Assalt Engleis al primier front.

-Roman de Rou, 1. 13,462.

(Compare The Conqueror and his Companions, by P. R. Planché, vol. i.,

pp. 203-216.)

at Greta Hall after Coleridge had begun to reside there, and he knew Coleridge before he met with Wordsworth.

He was one of the first to appreciate the genius of these two men; and knowing that they had lived near each other in Somersetshire, when they wrote the Lyrical Ballads in concert-and were desirous to resume the easy and familiar intercourse of former days-he purchased a small property at Applethwaite, about three miles to the west of Greta Hall, on the southern flank of Skiddaw, and presented it to Wordsworth, whom he had not as yet seen. Sir George wrote thus to Wordsworth on the 24th October 1803:

"I had a most ardent desire to bring you and Coleridge together. I thought with pleasure on the increase of enjoyment you would receive from the beauties of Nature, by being able to communicate more frequently your sensations to each other; and that this would be a means of contributing to the pleasure and improvement of the world, by stimulating you both to poetical exertions."

This wish, however, was not to be realised. Several concurrent causes led Coleridge to leave Cumberland; while Wordsworth, as we have seen, lived on at Dove Cottage, Grasmere. It was thus that he described the Applethwaite property to Miss Fenwick:

"This little property lies beautifully upon the banks of a rill that gurgles down the side of Skiddaw; and the orchard and other parts of the grounds command a magnificent prospect of Derwent Water, the mountains of Borrowdale, and Newlands."

It was formally conveyed to Wordsworth in 1803 or 1804, and it is still in the possession of the family. Dora Wordsworth pencilled on the MS. of one of the Fenwick notes that her father had made it over to her when she was a "frail, feeble monthling."

The Beaumont family visited Grasmere at intervals from

1803 to 1806, and Wordsworth hoped they might be his permanent neighbours during the summer or autumn months. Sir George had been specially struck with the beauty of Loughrigg Tarn-so often likened to Lake Nemi in Italy, the Speculum Diana-and he purchased the property, intending to build a summer cottage upon it. In his Epistle to Sir George Beaumont from the South-West Coast of Cumberland, written in 1811, Wordsworth refers to this once contemplated cottage, and in imagination sees it completed.

A glimpse I caught of that abode, by thee
Designed to rise in humble privacy,
A lowly dwelling, here to be outspread,
Like a small hamlet, with its bashful head
Half hid in native trees. Alas! 'tis not,
Nor ever was; I sighed, and left the spot,
And thought in silence, with regret too keen,
Of unexperienced joys that might have been ;

Of neighbourhood, and intermingling arts,

And golden summer days uniting cheerful hearts.

The house, however, was not built. The tarn was resold. and the money obtained from it-given by Beaumont to Wordsworth-was spent by him in the purchase of yew trees, which he planted in Grasmere churchyard. There they still grow, and one of them now overshadows the poet's grave.

Sir George Beaumont had been occupying the farm house adjoining Coleorton Hall for some time, while the family mansion was being rebuilt and extended; but, during the winter of 1806-7 and the spring and summer following, he lived either in his town house in London, or at Dunmow in Essex, and (as already mentioned) he handed over the Coleorton farm house to the Wordsworths. Thither they all migrated from Grasmere, Sarah Hutchinson accompanying them, in the end of October 1806.

It was a good sample of a Leicestershire farm-house, and still stands, as do Racedown, Alfoxden, Dove Cottage, the Parsonage, and Rydal Mount-the Wordsworths' successive residences very much as it was when they lived in it. Whatever the cause, that winter of 1806-7 was not so productive poetically as the earlier years at Grasmere had been, but some poems were composed, and others advanced several stages. The Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle was murmured out on the path between the farm-house and the Hall, where also the sonnet beginning

was composed.

Two voices are there; one is of the sea,
One of the mountains,

Other sonnets, as well as the poem entitled Gipsies, and the lines to the nightingale beginning

O Nightingale! thou surely art

A creature of a fiery heart,

were thought out in the glades, or amid the shadowy recesses of the garden.

But it is with Wordsworth's Inscriptions for the grounds at Coleorton that the place is chiefly associated. Two of these were written during his residence, in 1808; the other two at Grasmere in 1811. Only three of them, however, were actually cut on stone, and set up in the grounds. The one commencing

The embowering rose, the acacia, and the pine

was placed near a magnificent cedar-tree, which was unfortunately blown down in a gale in 1854. Though replanted, it fell a second time, during the great storm of 1880, and perished. The memorial stone remains, somewhat injured, and the inscription is more than half obliterated.

The second inscription, written in 1808, "at the request of Sir George Beaumont, and in his name, for an Urn, placed