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Wudsworth. Ho! ho! ho!” and when “The Red Tarn Club,” 
afraid of having their orgies put into blank verse by “the bard 
benighted in the Excursion from Patterdale to Jobson’s Cherry- 
tree,” sailed away in floating fragments beneath the moon and 
stars. 
I say one almost forgives Christopher North for his grim humour, 
and this because of his opening sentence: “There can be no 
doubt that that foolish Quaker who some twenty years ago perished 
at the foot of a crag near Red Tarn was devoured of ravens.” For 
Christopher North was well acquainted with raven land, and raven 
ways, and doubtless had stood many a time on Helvellyn High 
Man and heard, as Budworth, the writer of “A Fortnight’s 
Ramble to the Lakes,” (quoted by Harrison in his Guide of 1802, 
p. 159) had heard, “the ravens croaking” when he gazed down 
upon Red Tarn, “shaped like a Bury pear” in the cove beneath! 
And better far does it seem that the poor traveller should have 
fallen a prey to the fowls of the air, those natural scavengers 
of the mountain side, than that the honour and fidelity of his 
faithful four-footed friend and mourner should be called in 
question. 
Without endorsing De Quincey’s statement that the poor little 
creature “could never have obtained food or shelter through his 
long winter’s imprisonment,” we gladly gives his account of the 
accident, for he is in sympathy with the subject. His information 
was probably gathered during his stay at Grasmere between 1808 
and 1819 :— 
‘©The case of Mr. Gough, who perished in the bosom of Helvellyn, and was 
supposed to have been disabled by a sprain of the ankle, whilst others believed 
him to have received that injury and his death simultaneously in a fall from the 
lower shelf of a precipice, became well known to the public, in all its details, 
through the accident of having been recorded in verse by two writer's nearly at 
the same time, viz., Sir Walter Scott and Wordsworth. But here again, as in 
the case of the Greens, it was not the naked fact of his death amongst the 
solitudes of the mountain that would have won the public attention, or have 
obtained the honour of a metrical commemoration. Indeed, to say the truth, 
the general sympathy with this tragic event was not derived chiefly from the 
unhappy tourist’s melancholy end, for that was too shocking to be even hinted 
