Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/189

Rh guarantees a permanent place among the poets of England. His brightest passages shine with a reflected light from Rydal's bright particular star—for Wordsworth had been, from his youth upwards, and under circumstances ill adapted to foster any such predilection, the venerated object of his poetical studies and musing sympathies.

Mr. Quillinan was a soldier by profession, but literature was his lifelong pursuit. He was born at Oporto in 1791, of Irish parents, from whom he was parted in his seventh year, in order to receive an English school education. At fourteen he returned to Oporto; but everything was changed—his mother dead—his father married again—and the counting-house to which he was introduced so heartily sickened him ("for my passion," he says, "was for books very unlike ledgers"), that he speedily left for England, settled awhile in London, and in 1808 purchased a cornetcy in the "Heavy Dragoons." With some brother officers he engaged in certain satirical brochure writing, which "brought him in" a dividend of three duels at once. The latter part of the Peninsular campaign he passed with his regiment in Spain. After the peace, he published a poem called "The Sacrifice of Isabel" (1816), which he described as an endeavour to portray with energy and simplicity, natural feelings in trying situations. It was dedicated to Sir Egerton Brydges, whose daughter, Jemima, he married in the following year. In 1821, being quartered at Penrith, he went over to Rydal with a letter of introduction to Wordsworth; but, Mr. Johnston tells us, "singularly enough, as Mr. Quillinan approached Rydal Mount he became ashamed of presenting himself with a letter which he was aware spoke of him in rather flattering terms, and he rode back again to Penrith with the specific object of his journey unaccomplished." He soon, however, retraced his steps, and made a friend for life. About the same time he quitted the army, and took a cottage on the banks of the Rotha—a stream whose name he gave to his second daughter, just as Coleridge gave that of the Derwent to his second son. He lost his wife in the following year, and went abroad in bitter anguish, "endeavouring to dissipate by change of scene the burden of sorrow which it had pleased Heaven to lay upon him." It is, perhaps, to the "shock and passion of grief" by which his spirit was then rent, and afterwards again when bereaved of his second wife (Dora Wordsworth), that we owe the most impressive and affecting