412. River Eden, [XXXVIII.]

    ‘Yet fetched from Paradise.’

It is to be feared that there is more of the poet than the sound etymologist in this derivation of the name Eden.  On the western coast of Cumberland is a rivulet which enters the sea at Moresby, known also in the neighbourhood by the name of Eden.  May not the latter syllable come from the word Dean, a valley?  Langdale, near Ambleside, is by the inhabitants called Langden.  The former syllable occurs in the name Emont, a principal feeder of the Eden; and the stream which flows, when the tide is out, over Cartmel Sands, is called the Ea—­eau, French—­aqua, Latin.

413. Ibid.

    ‘Nature gives thee flowers that have no rival amidst British bowers.’

This can scarcely be true to the letter; but without stretching the point at all, I can say that the soil and air appear more congenial with many upon the bank of this river than I have observed in any other parts of Great Britain.

414. *_Monument of Mrs. Howard_. [XXXIX.]

Before this monument was put up in the chapel at Wetheral, I saw it in the sculptor’s studio.  Nollekens, who, by the bye, was a strange and grotesque figure that interfered much with one’s admiration of his works, showed me at the same time the various models in clay which he had made one after another of the mother and her infant.  The improvement on each was surprising, and how so much grace, beauty, and tenderness had come out of such a head I was sadly puzzled to conceive.  Upon a window-seat in his parlour lay two casts of faces; one of the Duchess of Devonshire, so noted in her day, and the other of Mr. Pitt, taken after his death—­a ghastly resemblance, as these things always are, even when taken from the living subject, and more ghastly in this instance (of Mr. Pitt) from the peculiarity of the features.  The heedless and apparently neglectful manner in which the faces of these two persons were left—­the one so distinguished in London society, and the other upon whose counsels and public conduct during a most momentous period depended the fate of this great empire, and, perhaps, of all Europe—­afforded a lesson to which the dullest of casual visitors could scarcely be insensible.  It touched me the more because I had so often seen Mr. Pitt upon his own ground at Cambridge and upon the floor of the House of Commons.

415. Nunnery. [XLI.]

I became acquainted with the walks of Nunnery when a boy.  They are within easy reach of a day’s pleasant excursion from the town of Penrith, where I used to pass my summer holidays under the roof of my maternal grandfather.  The place is well worth visiting, tho’ within these few years its privacy, and therefore the pleasure which the scene is so well fitted to give, has been injuriously affected by walks cut in the rocks on that side the stream which had been left in its natural state.

416. Scene at Corby. [XLII.]