147 



master leaving his pupils at the close of a hard day's teaching, to 

 go and muse in his church or on the banks of a quiet streamlet, 

 and then committing his musings to writing, to be found, and 

 published, long after his early death. Then we have the blind 

 fiddler, fiddling away life to a merry tune, and writing down in 

 verse his experience as the musician of the party at the dances, 

 hakes, and merry-nights which he had himself enlivened. Then 

 we have two ladies — Miss Blamire and Miss Gilpin — occupying a 

 high position in the county, and, like Beaumont and Fletcher, 

 cementing their friendship by pieces of poetry which, in some 

 instances, seem to have been their joint composition. Then the 

 keen huntsman dashing off " D'ye ken John Peel 1 " with as much 

 facility as he dashed off one of the notices of a hunting appoint- 

 ment. Then, in Mark Lonsdale, one who was at times a play 

 writer, a play actor, and a teacher, and who in this varied capacity 

 wandered about over great part of England and Ireland, but one 

 who shows by his terse sketches in the dialect, how well, amid all 

 changes, and how closely, he clung to home words and home 

 scenes. 



In Sanderson, whose memory Wordsworth has embalmed in one 

 of his terse and enduring sketches, we have the history of a recluse 

 who, after contributing poetry for almost half a century to Cum- 

 berland papers and periodicals, was, together with most of his 

 writings, burned in a fire that consumed his cottage. 



In Anderson, the Cumberland contemporary of Burns, we have 

 what may be called the Burns of Cumberland. Like Burns, giving, 

 in his songs and ballads, truthful sketches of the every-day life of 

 the peasantry of his native county. Like Burns, living at times, 

 despite his poetic powers, in a state of extreme penury ; and the 

 parallel between them is still more strongly marked in their 

 departing moments — for they both died in a state of fear and 

 apprehension, the one of the workhouse, the other of a gaol. 



We have schoolmasters of almost every class — Lonsdale, Rayson, 

 Clark, and Richardson — giving expression in the poetry of the 

 dialect to their intimate acquaintance with the scenes and doings 

 of their native county. 



