r,
with a view to preparing himself for holy orders. About this time he
fell in love, as related in the poem, and every thing followed as there
described, except that I do not know exactly when and where he died. The
number of youths that came to Hawkshead school from the families of the
humble yeomanry, to be educated to a certain degree of scholarship, as a
preparation for the church, was considerable; and the fortunes of those
persons in after life various of course, and some not a little
remarkable. I have now one of this class in my eye who became an usher
in a preparatory school, and ended in making a large fortune. His
manners, when he came to Hawkshead, were as uncouth as well could be;
but he had good abilities, with skill to turn them to account, and when
the master of the school to which he was usher died, he stept into his
place, and became proprietor of the establishment. He continued to
manage it with such address, and so much to the taste of what is called
high society and the fashionable world, that no school of the kind, even
till he retired, was in such high request. Ministers of State, the
wealthiest gentry, and nobility of the first rank, vied with each other
in bespeaking a place for their sons in the seminary of this fortunate
teacher. [In pencil on opposite page--Mr. Pearson.] In the solitude of
Grasmere, while living as a married man in a cottage of 8_l._ per annum
rent, I often used to smile at the tales which reached me of the
brilliant career of this quondam clown--for such in reality he was, in
manners and appearance, before he was polished a little by attrition
with gentlemen's sons trained at Hawkshead, rough and rude as many of
our families were. Not 200 yards from the cottage in Grasmere just
mentioned, to which I retired, this gentleman, who many years afterwards
purchased a small estate in the neighbourhood, is now erecting a
boat-house, with an upper story to be resorted to as an entertaining
room when he and his associates may feel inclined to take their pastime
on the Lake. Every passenger will be disgusted with the sight of this
edifice, not merely as a tasteless thing in itself, but as utterly out
of place, and peculiarly fitted, as far as it is observed (and it
obtrudes itself on notice at every point of view), to mar the beauty
and destroy the pastoral simplicity of the Vale. For my own part, and
that of my household, it is our utter detestation, standing by a shore
to which, befo