THE AUTHOR OF ^' DARTMOOR/' 55 



f and befriended Carrington, but neither their patronage 

 nor that of the pubhc was at any period such as en- 

 abled him to forego other occupations and devote his 

 attention exclusively to poetry; one consequence of 

 this was, that he has written comparatively little and 

 at long intervals ; however, his compositions (as he 

 stated to the writer,) were elaborated with great care 

 and underwent all the scrutiny and critical examination 

 that he himself was capable of exercising upon them 

 before they were submitted to the public. 



Carrington^s life consisted of a series of scenes most 

 uncongenial to the fostering of the gentle spirit of 

 poesy, he had many disadvantages to struggle with : 

 his livelihood depended upon his exerting himself ardu- 

 ously in the unremitting and harrassing duties of a 

 school master, which necessarily consumed a great 

 deal of his daily time and energy — he had a family to 

 maintain, educate and establish in the world — he arose 

 from the humble walks of society and never experien- 

 ced the good fortune of some of his less gifted contem- 

 poraries in being taken by the hand and patronized by 

 a patrician Macsenas — he lived at a great distance from 

 the grand emporium of literature, and never knew the 

 advantage of being backed by a thorough-paced puff- 

 ing bookseller — he was unconnected with any knot of 

 savans, and had no private interest capable of enlist- 

 ing in his cause the impartiality of a leading review — 

 he wrote at a period when competitors in the arena of 

 letters were unexampled in number — and lastly he 

 wrote in the locally descriptive style, a species of 

 . writing which interests but few poetical readers com- 

 pared with the numbers that eagerly peruse composi- 

 tions involving a delineation of the actions and passions 

 of man. 



The " Banks of the Tamar,'' '' Dartmoor,'^ &c. 

 were favorably spoken of by many newspapers, and by 

 some of the metropolitan periodicals, particularly the 

 Eclectic Review, the Oriental Herald, the Monthly Re- 

 view, the Gentleman's Magazine, the Monthly Maga- 

 zine, and the St. James's Royal Magazine. ^^ Dartmoor" 



