Gents Mag 1850 part 1 p.668

Gents Mag 1850 part 1 p.668




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	list, 3rd qtr 19th century

	Gentleman's Magazine 1850 part 1 p.668
obituary William Wordsworth
	Obituary, William Wordsworth Obituary WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, ESQ. April 23. At his residence at Rydal Mount, near Ambleside, aged 80, William Wordsworth, Esq. D.C.L. Poet Laureate. William Wordsworth was born on the 7th of April, 1770, at Cockermouth, in Cumberland. His parents were of the middle class, but of ancient descent, in Yorkshire,* and he was educated, together with his brother, afterwards Dr. Wordsworth, at the Hawkshead Grammar School. It is stated that at thirteen years of age he first made an effort at composition, but it was not until ten years had elapsed from the time of his boyish efforts that he ventured to appear in print. In 1787 he entered St. John's College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1791. Shortly after he visited the continent. He was designed by his parents for the Church - but poetry and new prospects turned him into another path. His pursuit through life was poetry, and his profession that of Stamp Distributor for the Government in the counties of Cumberland and Westmerland: to which office he was appointed by the joint interest, as we have heard, of his friend Sir George Beaumont and his patron Lord Lonsdale. Mr. Wordsworth made his first appearance as a poet in the year 1793, by the publication of a thin quarto volume entitles "An Evening Walk: an Epistle in Verse, addressed to a young Lady from the Lakes of the North of England, by W. Wordsworth, B.A. of St. John's College, Cambridge. Printed in London, and published by Johnson in St. Paul's Churchyard;" from whose shop seven years before had appeared The Task of Cowper. In the same year he published "Descriptive Sketches in Verse taken during a Pedestrian Tour in the Italian, Grison, Swiss, and Savoyard Alps." What was thought of these poems by a few youthful admirers may be gathered from the account given by Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria: "During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I became acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication, entitled Descriptive Sketches; and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced." The two poets, then personally unknown to each other, first became acquainted in the summer of 1796, at Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire. Coleridge was then in his twenty-fourth year and Wordsworth in
	* "From the branch of this family of Wordsworth, which was planted at Falthwaite, near Stainborough, spring the two brothers whose names are so highly distinguished in the literature of the present times, Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, Master of Trinity college, Cambridge, and William Wordsworth the poet." (Hunter's South Yorkshire, vol.ii. p.492.) We learn from a recent Yorkshire paper that the old press or armoire, made by William Wordesworth, of Peniston, in 1525, the inscription upon which is given by Mr. Hunter in the same volume, p.334, was restored by the late Mr. Beaumont to the Wordsworth family.

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