150 



you everlastingly happy. He died of consumption [in 1743] 

 before he had completed his thirty-second year. 



Many of Relph's pieces are pastorals and translations into the 

 dialect from Horace, Virgil, and Theocritus.* And in some of his 

 pieces he has very faithfully pourtrayed the chief characters of the 

 village in which he lived. 



Ewan Clark holds the place immediately succeeding Relph. He 

 was a writer of pastorals in the dialect. His occupation was that of 

 a teacher. He was born in 1734, near the market-town of Wigton, 

 and he died at the age of seventy-seven, at the same place. His 

 writings are of more value as representing the dialect, than for any 

 original or poetic excellence they contain. 



Coming in point of time soon after Relph, we have in Stagg a 

 poet who differed from Relph almost as widely as possible. Born 

 about 1770, at Burgh-by-Sands, near Carlisle, he was by an accident 

 deprived of his sight very early in life. He kept a circulating 

 library at Wigton, and eked out his existence partly by acting as 

 fiddler at dances, hakes, fairs, and merry-nights. Rough, ready, 

 and outspoken, fancying there was no place on earth like Cumber- 

 land, his writings and his outspoken rebuke of what he conceived 

 to be wrong, frequently brought him into collision with other 

 parties who were equally outspoken and equally quarrelsome ; this 

 is marked in some of his poetical pieces where in his opening lines 

 he expresses his willingness to make and sing songs for them, 

 provided, as he earnestly entreats them, they will not thrash him for 

 any disagreeable home truths that his songs may happen to contain. 

 He seems also to have been made the butt of some of the wags at 

 the gatherings he attended, for Anderson, another Cumbrian poet, 

 of whom I shall speak presently, says of him when he is describing 

 the doings of a wedding at Worton — 



* Theocritus, the creator of Pastoral Poetry, wrote in a dialect (the Doric), 

 and from his time to the present the pastoral poets seem to have very closely 

 imitated each other. In metre, in names, in subjects, Virgil has very closely 

 imitated' — and almost at times translated — Theocritus ; and Virgil is the model 

 from which all our modern pastoral poets have drawn. 



