ABSTRACT
They went to visit Wordsworth and Southey. The former, with his wife and Sisters, liv’d for some years on £80 pr annm in a Cottage such as the peasants inhabit on the side of Grasmere. His poverty was occasion’d by the late Ld. Lonsdale’s purchasing (without the necessary ceremony of paying) his Paternal estate. On the present Ld. L.’s succeeding to it, he justly (or, as it is thought for a Lowther, generously) paid him, and he has now 300 a year, of which he sees no end; but will perhaps soon find one, as on the strength of it he has taken a larger house. His Sister, who is full of Romance, is quite in despair, Ld. Holland says, at leaving her cottage. Their notions of the picturesque, by Ld. H.’s account, are rather extravagant; the comforts of life, such as a warm house with doors and windows, &c., are monstrous and unpoetical – and a dry walk, monotonous and disgusting in the extreme.
