300 THE COOKERY OF VENISON 



mediaeval miracle. Wordsworth assures us that his 

 ' White Doe ' made her way, sabbath after sabbath, 

 from Rylstone Fell to the church of the Priory. As 

 she had a dozen miles to travel, going and returning, 

 it may be presumed that the fair creature steered 

 a bee-line course, through swamp, morass and 

 treacherous quaking bog. Till she was placed under 

 the safeguard of superstition, we cannot conceive, 

 remembering the regularity of her church attendance, 

 how she escaped the bows or hackbuts of the West 

 Riding poachers, who always held their own in these 

 dales, in spite of the watchers of Cliffords or Nortons. 

 Wordsworth celebrates that deer poetically and pla- 

 tonically ; but, by the way, we were agreeably surprised 

 to find in his friend Southey a sensibility of which 

 we had not suspected him. We knew him for a 

 poet, a historian and a scholar, but we believed he 

 cared as little for anything beyond his books as the 

 worthy minister of Saint Ronan. Respect was changed 

 to regard when we came on this imprecation, in a 

 letter to his friend Bedford, who had urged the 

 Laureate to alter some stanzas in a mortuary ode. 

 ' If I do,' wrote Southey, with pious emphasis, ' may 

 I boil my next haunch of venison.' It is sidelights 

 in biography such as these which endear a poet to 

 posterity ; there we have the touch of the noble 



