remain, have looked upon the light-hearted pair, as they strolled along in that cousinly flirtation, so presumptuous in the eyes of Sir John, who saw nothing but a poor cadet in the future author of St. Cecilia's Day.' It is in an epistle, which the poet himself justly considered one of his happiest works, addressed to another cousin, John Dryden of Chesterton (wherein he praises his wellbreathed beagles with which he hunted the fox in youth, the hare in old age), that those well-worn lines occur that fall so rightly from the lips of a Northamptonshire poet :

'Better to hunt the fields for health unbought

Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.'

Very different, in birth, in style, in life, of course in genius also, from glorious John,' is the only other poet that Northamptonshire can claim.* Son of her soil, in its most literal sense, John Clare was born at Helpstone in 1793, of parents then receiving parish relief. He was never sent to school, but when ten years old, from the earnings of five days in the week, he was able to obtain for himself schooling for the sixth, and learned to read, but not to write, from an old dame who wielded her ashen sceptre in the church belfry. At the age of thirteen 'Thomson's Seasons' fell into his hands, and, determined to possess a copy of his own, with the first shilling he could save in his pocket, he set off to Stamford so eager and so early that the shops were not open when he arrived there; on his way back through Burghley Park, with his prize in hand, he composed his first verses, The Morning Walk.' Nothing can be imagined more uninspiring than his native haunts; but the enclosure at this time of the open field of his parish roused his young blood in behalf of the king-cups, the horse-blobs, the dotterel willows, the foot-bridge, and the winding rippling runnels, the last remains of wild country, about to be swept away; and indignation made the song. His early poems, he truly tells us, are a literal transcript of what he saw around him:

I found the poems in the fields,

And only wrote them down.'

Even this he could not do at first; but his modest and manly bearing gained for him in time a writing-master in a kind exciseman at Helpstone, and after many difficulties, one of which was his inability to write prose enough for a preface, and the

As distinctly local. We do not forget as natives Beaumont's better half, John Fletcher; Thomas Randolph, dramatist, born at Newnham, and buried by Sir C. Hatton at Blatherwick; William Lisle Bowles, of King's Sutton; and other minor stars, whom it were long now to write at large.

usual

usual discouragements of peasant authorship, he published his first volume of poems on 'Rural Life.' It is six-and-thirty

*

years ago since a review of this volume, and a notice of his life, appeared in these pages.' Other reviewers took up his book, and poor Clare obtained all the fame and the notice that awaits an uneducated genius duly recognised by the established craft. Patronizing was then in vogue, and to catch a real unsophisticated peasant poet fresh from the country, and transplant him all-a-growing into the hotbed of London life, was truly refreshing to the Lydia Whites and Leo Hunters of the period. How Clare deported himself in his pumps and white waistcoat, under the guidance of Lord Radstock, his chief showman, we are not minutely informed; but we know that he felt ill at ease in his unnatural position, talked but little, and when dinner was over, and he wished to change the scene, to the utter discomfiture of his host and of the ladies waiting in delightful expectation in the drawing-room above, he would rise without ceremony, and, thrusting his hands into his pockets, say, 'Well, I'll goo,' and' goo' he did accordingly. More judicious friends awaited him in his native county. In these early days he was a recognised prophet in his own country, and the timely and wellregulated liberality of Lords Exeter, Fitzwilliam, and Spencer, then, against all the traditions of struggling genius, promptly bestowed, has been continued to the present hour. Meanwhile he far excelled the first efforts reviewed by us. In 1821 succeeded The Village Minstrel,' in 1827 The Shepherd's Calendar,' and in 1835 The Rural Muse.' Though he met in Mr. John Taylor with the kindest of publishers, the profits his books brought him were not large, and good management is seldom the characteristic of a poet's farming. He walked the fields rather to gather themes for his poetry than grain into his garner; and, like Burns, would stay the plough midway in the furrow to moralize on some creature or plant he had disturbed; he persisted in looking upon weeds as wild flowers, and literally loved his mole-hills as mountains. A hallucination on this last subject was one of the first symptoms of a fine mind giving way under too sharp a tension, and perhaps by being daily employed on work too rough for it. The sad result may be told in a few words. Poor Clare, having been several times under private care, is now a patient in the Northampton Lunatic Asylum; forgotten by the gay world that once petted him, and scarcely remembered in his own county except by those few noblemen who still minister to his wants, and whom in his wanderings he

* Q. R., vol. xxiii. p. 166.

delights

delights to call his brothers in blood, as they really are in kindness. Yet his true and loving descriptions of natural objects, his picturesque and nervous language, and the pure vein of poetry and feeling that runs through all he wrote, might claim for him a kindly remembrance even in days which would look upon his themes as antiquated and insipid. There are lines called First Love's Recollections' in his last volume, which, coming from a man of his class, strike us as one of the most remarkable expressions of refined feeling we know; and there is a singularly wild and strange beauty in some verses, still unpublished, written by him while an inmate of the asylum; but we regret that these and further details of his story are beyond our present limits. The cottage at Northborough, which his wife still holds under Lord Fitzwilliam, shows in the neatness of its arrangement and furniture marks of a higher cultivation than the ordinary labourer's home: in its books, many of them the gifts of friends-in the framed engravings, portraits of his benefactors-in flowers more abundant and more choice than in common cottage gardens-just such a holding as one would wish the Village Minstrel to enjoy. The parish of Aldwinkle All Saints, made classical by the birth of Dryden, is almost paralleled by its sister parish Aldwinkle St. Peter's, producing Thomas Fuller, the author of the Worthies of England,' and himself one of the class he drew. The time will assuredly come when his quaint, learned, and witty volumes will again lie in the bay windows as they did of yore, books of universal and untiring interest, unfailing resources in winter evenings and rainy days. He was born in 1608, in the rectory-house, now destroyed, but remembered still for its quaintness and its tapestry; and, though generally spoken of as old' Fuller, died at the age of fifty-three, leaving his account of his native county to be published as a posthumous and unfinished work. We still tread in the footprints of literary men, when we cross the Nene to Stanwick, the birthplace of Archbishop Dolben, whose pulpit should still be there, and of Richard Cumberland, who, becoming private secretary to Lord Halifax at Horton, gives us in his Memoirs a curious view of Northamptonshire society in the last century. But we must go higher up the river to Easton Maudit, if we would see the earlier and more brilliant literary society that Dr. Percy (not yet bishop) gathered round him at his vicarage. It is certain that Dr. Johnson and Shenstone were his frequent guests, and that Goldsmith returned here the vicar's famous visit to his London garret; while Garrick, who was a friend of the Thursbys, must often have joined the party. There yet remains at Abington the mulberry-tree with the inscription, This tree was planted by

David Garrick, Esq., at the request of Ann Thursby, as a growing testimony of their friendship.' It is the clenching link of this great literary catena, that Shakspeare's favourite granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall, who married Sir John Bernard of Abington, lived and lies buried there. The portrait of Bishop Percy, and his yet more valuable correspondence, and the veritable old MS. folio, the existence of which has been so often disputed, the origin and source of the 'Reliques,' are still preserved at Ecton by the descendant of the Bishop's daughter.

The religious amiability of the last century made a far more important shrine of the little neighbouring church of Weston Favell, where James Hervey, the author of the 'Meditations,' a native of Hardingstone, was rector and lies buried. It is difficult now to understand the enthusiasm with which his tawdry flowers of speech, his periphrastic commonplaces and wearisome repetitions, were received in his own day, except from the interlaudatory habit that so eminently characterised the worthy clique to which he belonged; yet, if a feeble writer, he was a most sterling and pious man, and the innumerable editions of his works, and the throng of pilgrims to the scene which was supposed to have suggested his Contemplations-so great that, according to its historian, Weston Favell was almost as well known as London-show a great power of influence, or at least that he timed his musings with the returning spiritual beatings of the public heart.

6

Other schools of theology are represented by the stern nonjuror Law, author of the Serious Call,' born at Kingscliffe, by the lucid Paley, a native of Peterborough,—and by Alban Butler, compiler of the Lives of the Saints,' born at Apetree. Parkhurst the Hebrew lexicographer, and Carey the Orientalist, claim respectively Catesby and Paulerspury as their birthplaces. The letter-writing of the last century is exemplified in Mrs. Chapone at Twywell, and Mrs. West at Little Bowden. The nonconformists muster a strong array from the time that an antiprelatical press was privately set up at Fawsley, where the Knightleys at that time were great patrons of the Puritan party. In earlier times Lollardism found great favour in the county; and Collier gives Northampton the credit of giving birth to the founder of the Brownists; while The Connection' honours Astwell, as producing Selina Countess of Huntingdon. Doddridge at Northampton, and afterwards at the Dissenting College at Daventry, and Andrew Fuller at Kettering, were examples of a school for which most good men would regret to substitute that which has supplanted it.

To this shire America owes the families of her two greatest

men.

Franklin's grandfather was a blacksmith and small proprietor at Ecton, where his family had lived on a freehold of about thirty acres for full three hundred years, beyond which the records did not extend. Washington's family had an older and more important position in the county. His great-great-grandfather, Lawrence, lies buried in the church of Brington, and on the tombslab are the arms (argent, two bars gules; in chief three mullets of the second) which may have suggested the stars and stripes of the American ensign. Lawrence's son emigrated to America about 1657, and his son settled at Bridge's Creek, where the great George was born in 1732. The grandfather of the Lawrence who lies at Brington was twice mayor of Northampton, in 1532 and 1545, and had granted him by Henry VIII, the lands of Sulgrave, which became the chief family residence, and the manorhouse of which still remains, though now a common farmhouse. A tomb in the church of Sulgrave still retains the arms and names of one of the family; and within a few years the shields of the Washingtons were seen by Washington Irving -where they are to be seen no longer-in the kitchen-window. What would the Americans, who, having at first expunged 'Heraldry' from their cyclopedias, are now the chief clients of the Heralds' College, give to recover those purloined or broken quarries? By a singular coincidence, from the adjoining parish of Warden sprung the family of Lord North, the great antagonist of Washington, and prime-minister during the American war.

But whatever claims the county may have' for the student, its widest fame is that of being the country of the Pytchley;' nor is this a repute and achievement only of the days of St. James'sstreet clubs and 'Bell's Life.' It seems almost like an archæological fable that we read in Domesday of William of Pightesley, who succeeded to the estates of Alwyne the Hunter, the said William holding his lands of Pightesley by serjeantry of hunting wolves, foxes, and other vermin. Can any other Hunt produce as venerable a founder? Nor is even this the limit of its sporting antiquity. In some repairs made in the church of Pytchley a few years ago, Mr. Abner Brown, the then vicar, discovered below the foundations of the present church and below the course of graves of the present churchyard, an ancient burial-place in which the kist-vaens, or rough stone coffins, lay north and south, and in one of these by side of the skeleton was found a spearhead and a boar's tusk, thus showing the tomb of some earlier and pre-Christian Alwyne of Pytchley. The abbot of Peterborough had royal licence given him to hunt the hare, the fox, and the wild cat (catum silvestrem); the last is yet to be found in the woods of Burghley and Rockingham, where it is known

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