Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/516

474 474 PROVINCIAL BOOKSELLERS. composition; and in his last work "A Trip to Coatham " he tells us, " I took up my pen, and that with fear and trembling, at the advanced age of fifty- six, a period when most would lay it down. I drove the quill thirty years, during which time I wrote and published thirty books." His first work, the " History of Birmingham," appeared, and these thirty tomes of verse and prose followed in quick succession. In 1802 he published his best-known work, the " History of the Roman Wall." Antiquarians had, before this, described the famous line of defence, but hitherto no one had attempted a personal inspection. Seventy-five years old, still hale and hearty, with an enthusiasm akin to that of youth, he started on foot for Northumberland, accompanied by his daughter on horse-back. Intent upon reaching the scene of his antiquarian desires, "he turned," writes his daughter, "neither to the right nor the left, except to gratify me with a sight of Liverpool. Windermere he saw, and Ullswater he saw, because they lay under his feet, but nothing could detain him from his grand object." On his return journey, after every hollow of the ground, every stone of the Wall, between Carlisle and New- castle, had been examined, he was bitten in the leg by a dog, but even this did not restrain him. Within four days of home " he made forced journeys, and if we had had a little further to go the foot would have knocked up the horse ! The pace he went did not even fatigue his shoes. He walked the whole 600 miles in one pair, and scarcely made a hole in his stockings." Almost to the last he preserved his physical powers comparatively intact. When he was eighty-eight, he