Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/411

Rh side, is good. The ancestry of the former settled in Yorkshire before the Norman Conquest, and the latter was descended from the Crackenthorpes, who, from the time of Edward III. had been the proprietors of Newbiggen Hall, in Westmoreland. William's childhood was spent partly at Cockermouth, and partly with his mother's family at Penrith. Of his early days he has left some brief account, and made especial mention of his mother, who died of a decline when he was at the age of fourteen, and had just returned from school, at Hawkeshead. He tells us: "I remember my mother only in some few situations, one of which was her pinning a nosegay to my breast, when I was going to say the Catechism in the church, as was customary before Easter. I remember also telling her on one week-day that I had been at church, for our school stood in the churchyard, and we had frequent opportunities of seeing what was going on there. The occasion was a woman doing penance in the church in a white sheet. My mother commended my having been present, expressing a hope that I should remember the circumstance for the rest of my life. 'But,' said I, 'mamma, they did not give me a penny, as I had been told they would.' 'Oh!' said she, recanting her praises, 'if that was your motive, you were very properly disappointed.

It is strange that she once said to a friend that William was the only one of her five children about whom she felt any anxiety; and that she had a strong presentiment that he would be remarkable either for good or evil. Her fears were occasioned by the child's strange and impetuous temper. He tells us that while staying at the house of his grandfather, at Penrith, he retired to the attic to commit suicide, because he fancied that he had suffered some indignity. "I took the foil in hand," he says, "but my heart failed."

The days of his boyhood he always looked back upon as