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until three o'clock in the morning—at which time, hearing a stealthy step moving up the staircase, he issued with firearms, and met the man at the lady's door, so equipped as to leave no doubt of his intentions; which possibly contemplated only robbing of the lady's jewels, but possibly also murder in a case of extremity. There are other stories with some of the same circumstances; and, in particular, I remember one very like it in Dr. Abercrombie's "Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers" [1830], p. 283. But in this version of Dr. Abercrombie's (supposing it another version of the same story) the striking circumstance of anticipating the servant's features is omitted; and in no version, except this of Miss Cullen's, have I heard the names mentioned both of the parties to the affair, and also of the place at which it occurred.

CHAPTER VIII

SOCIETY OF THE LAKES: CHARLES LLOYD

1

IMMEDIATELY below the little village of Clappersgate, in which the Scottish ladies resided-Mrs. Millar and Mrs. Cullen-runs the wild mountain river called the Brathay, which, descending from Langdale Head, and soon after be coming confluent with the Rothay (a brook-like stream that comes originally from Easedale, and takes its course through the two lakes of Grasmere and Rydal), finally composes a considerable body of water, that flows along, deep, calm, and steady no longer brawling, bubbling, tumultuous-into the splendid lake of Windermere, the largest of our English waters, or, if not, at least the longest, and of the most extensive circuit. Close to this little river, Brathay, on the farther side as regards Clappersgate (and what, though actually part and parcel of a district that is severed by the sea, or by Westmoreland, from Lancashire proper, is yet, from some old legal usage, denominated the Lancashire side of the Brathay), stands a modest family mansion, called Low Brathay, by way of distinction from another and a larger mansion, about a quarter of a mile beyond it, which, standing upon a little eminence, is called High Brathay.

In this house of Low Brathay lived, and continued to live, for many years (in fact, until misery, in its sharpest form, drove him from his hearth and his household happiness), Charles Lthe younger 2 ;-on his own account,

1 From Tait's Magazine for March 1840.-M.

2 The name was Charles Lloyd, and we shall fill up De Quincey's blanks in the sequel.-M.

and for his personal qualities, worthy of a separate notice in any biography, howsoever sparing in its digressions; but, viewed in reference to his fortunes, amongst the most interesting men I have known. Never do I reflect upon his hard fate, and the bitter though mysterious persecution of body which pursued him, dogged him, and thickened as life advanced, but I feel gratitude to Heaven for my own exemption from suffering in that particular form; and, in the midst of afflictions, of which two or three have been most hard to bear, because not unmingled with pangs of remorse for the share which I myself may have had in causing them,—still, by comparison with the lot of Charles Lloyd, I acknowledge my own to have been happy and serene. Already, on my first hasty visit to Grasmere in 1807, I found Charles Lloyd settled with his family at Brathay, and a resident there, I believe, of some standing. It was on a wet gloomy evening; and Miss Wordsworth and I were returning from an excursion to Esthwaite Water, when, suddenly, in the midst of blinding rain, without previous notice, she said—Pray, let us call for a few minutes at this house. A garden gate led us into a little shrubbery, chiefly composed of lawns, beautifully kept, through which ran a gravel road, just wide enough to admit a single carriage. A minute or so saw us housed in a small comfortable drawing-room, but with no signs of living creatures near it; and, from the accident of double doors, all covered with baize, being scattered about the house, the whole mansion seemed the palace of silence, though populous, I understood, with children. In no long time appeared Mr. Lloyd, soon followed by his youthful wife, both radiant with kindness; and it may be supposed that we were not suffered to depart for some hours. I call Mrs. Lloyd youthful; and so I might call her husband; for both were youthful, considered as the parents of a numerous family, six or seven children then living-Charles Lloyd himself not being certainly more than twenty-seven, and his "Sophia" perhaps not twenty-five.

On that short visit I saw enough to interest me in both; and, two years after, when I became myself a permanent resident in Grasmere, the connexion between us became close and intimate. My cottage stood just five miles from

Brathay; and there were two mountain roads which shortened the space between us, though not the time nor the toil. But, notwithstanding this distance, often and often, upon the darkest nights, for many years, I used to go over about nine o'clock, or an hour later, and sit with him till one. Mrs. Lloyd was simply an amiable young woman, of pleasing person, perfectly well principled, and, as a wife and mother, not surpassed by anybody I have known in either of those characters. In figure she somewhat resembled the ever memorable and most excellent Mrs. Jordan; she was exactly of the middle, height and having that slight degree of embonpoint, even in youth, which never through life diminishes or increases. Her complexion may be imagined from the circumstance of her hair being tinged with a slight and not unpleasing shade of red. Finally, in manners she was remarkably self-possessed, free from all awkward embarrassment, and (to an extent which some people would wonder at in one who had been brought up, I believe, wholly in a great commercial town) perfectly lady-like. So much description is due to one who, though no authoress, and never making the slightest pretension to talents, was too much connected subsequently with the lakers to be passed over in a review of their community. Ah! gentle lady! your head, after struggling through many a year with strange calamities, has found rest at length; but not in English ground, or amongst the mountains which you loved: at Versailles it is, and perhaps within a stone's throw of that Mrs. Jordan whom in so many things you resembled, and most of all in the misery which settled upon your latter years. There you lie, and for ever, whose blooming matronly figure rises up to me at this moment from a depth of thirty years! and your children scattered into all lands!

But for Charles Lloyd: he, by his literary works, is so far known to the public, that, on his own account, he merits some separate notice.1 His poems do not place him in the class of powerful poets; they are loosely conceived-faultily even at times-and not finished in the execution. But they have a real and a mournful merit under one aspect, which

1 Blank Verse by C. L. and Charles Lamb, 1798. Poetical Essays on Pope, and Desultory Thoughts on London, &c., 1821.-M.

might be so presented to the general reader as to win a peculiar interest for many of them, and for some a permanent place in any judicious thesaurus-such as we may some day hope to see drawn off, and carefully filtered, from the enormous mass of poetry produced since the awakening era of the French Revolution. This aspect is founded on the relation which they bear to the real events and the unexaggerated afflictions of his own life. The feelings which he attempts to express were not assumed for effect, nor drawn by suggestion from others, and then transplanted into some ideal experience of his own. They do not belong to the mimetic poetry so extensively cultivated; but they were true solitary sighs, wrung from his own meditative heart by excess of suffering, and by the yearning after old scenes and household faces of an impassioned memory, brooding over vanished happiness, and cleaving to those early times when life wore even for his eyes the golden light of Paradise. But he had other and higher accomplishments of intellect than he showed in his verses, as I shall presently explain; and of a nature which make it difficult to bring them adequately within the reader's apprehension.

Meantime, I will sketch an outline of poor Lloyd's history, so far as I can pretend to know it. He was the son, and probably his calamitous life originally dated from his being the son, of Quaker parents. It was said, indeed, by himself as well as others, that the mysterious malady which haunted him had been derived from an ancestress in the maternal line; and this may have been true; and, for all that, it may also be true that Quaker habits were originally answerable for this legacy of woe. It is sufficiently well known that, in the training of their young people, the Society of Friends make it a point of conscience to apply severe checks to all open manifestations of natural feeling, or of exuberant spirits. Not the passions-they are beyond their control-but the expression of those passions by any natural language; this they lay under the heaviest restraint; and, in many cases, it is possible that such a system of thwarting nature may do no great mischief; just as we see the American Indians, in moulding the plastic skulls of their infants into capricious shapes, do not, after all, much disturb the ordinary course

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