Thomas Poole and his friends

Front matter

CT

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE

SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND

Chapter I

' Long years have flown since last I lay On seaward Quantock's heathy hills, Where quiet sounds from hidden rills Float here and there like things astray, And high o'erhead the sky-lark shrills. '

Adapted from S. T. Coleridge.

The paper that I hold in my hand is yellow with age ; the ink has faded, and, at the place where the sheet was originally folded, it has worn into tatters. No wonder ! for the date of the letter is December the 31st, 1799, and it was written, on the last New Year's Eve in the century, from S. T. Coleridge in London, to his friend, Thomas Poole, at Nether Stowey. Coleridge was, at that time, writing regularly for the Morning Post, and describes himself as extremely busy : —

'I work,' he says, 'from I-rise to I-set (that is, from 9 A.M. to 1 2 at night), almost without intermission. . . . I hope you receive the papers regularly. They are regularly sent, as I commonly put them in myself. . . .

VOL. I B

' Being so hurried for time I should have delayed writing till to-morrow ; but to-day is the last day of the year, and a sort of superstitious feeling oppressed me that the year should not end without my writing, if it were only to subscribe myself with the old words of an old affection. . . .

' God bless you, and him who is ever, ever yours — who, among all his friends, has ever called and ever felt you the Friend. S. T. Coleridge.'

These words have been chosen by me as a kind of introductory motto, because they present to us, in a vivid, yet perfectly natural manner, the principal claim which the memory of Thomas Poole has upon all who care for literature — I mean his intimate friendship with some of the most distinguished of those men of note and genius who illuminated the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, and more particularly with Coleridge ; and they also suggest the thought, which I think a closer study of his character will but develop and confirm, that there must have been found in him an unusually high degree of the gift or faculty of friendship, — a much rarer endowment than those persons suppose who are apt to use the word in a loose, miscellaneous way, making it cover all the various grades of social acquaintance, and extending it to the most transient intimacies, in which not the slightest particle of real affection is either felt or

1765-89 BORN AT NETHER STOWEY 3

pretended. Yet it is hardly possible to imagine any set of circumstances, not wholly outside the bounds of probability, less apparently favourable to the cultivation of friendships of the closest and most intimate description, with some of the foremost men of his day, than those which seem to have surrounded the early life, and determined the prospects, of the subject of this memoir.

He was born on November 14, 1765, at the little country town of Nether Stowey, a town so tiny it might easily have been mistaken for a village, even in those days, but for the market cross in the centre of the principal open space. It nestles at the foot of the little-known, but very beautiful Quantock Hills, whose near neighbourhood to the grander scenery of Porlock and Linton, which will always be preferred by the ordinary tourist, together with their comparative inaccessibility by rail from any of the great manufacturing centres of population,^ have so far preserved them, even till now, from the foot of the explorer, that, if not quite so wild, they are, in many places, almost as solitary as when, a hundred years ago,

' Far be it from the present writer not to rejoice, as in a great and signal benefit, that railways have thrown open so much of the beauty of hill and moor and sea to the foot of the cheap excursionist, thus enriching the lives of thousands with new possibilities of enjoyment. Nevertheless there is, and ever must be, a special charm in untroddenness, which we cannot but lose with some regret.

Tom Poole and his brother Richard used to scramble up and down their steep coombs in the days of their boyhood. A coomb {cwni), in Somersetshire parlance, means a deep little valley with wooded sides, and a stream at the bottom ; and, if it be true that the very name of Quantock ^ signifies in Celtic ' many openings^ this is a very good instance of the happy gift in the naming of natural features, which seems to have distinguished the ancient inhabitants of these islands, for it is a chief characteristic of these delightful hills that they are thus broken up into the loveliest glens and dells, each the special home of some brook or brooklet, green nests where nothing is to be heard but woodland murmurs, and nothing to be seen but branches against the sky. Coleridge's Fears in Solitude was evidently written in the bottom of a coomb — Cockercoomb, perhaps, or Seven Wells — whence ascending, ' by the green sheep-track, up the heathy hill' (for 'the hills are lieathy', except that here and there the eye is caught by the sunny splendour of some

'. . . swelling slope, Which hath a gay and gorgeous covering on. All golden with the never-bloo?nless furze,') any one may see, as Coleridge saw long since, the wonderful ' burst of prospect ' —

' Paper on Topographical Etymology by Rev. W. A. Jones, M. A. Proceedings of the Somersetshire Archaeological Society, 1854.

1765-89 A 'BURST OF PROSPECT' 5

'. . . here the shadowy main Dim-tinted^ there the mighty majesty Of that huge amphitheatre of rich And el my fields. . . .' and, beyond them, the far expanse of marsh country, stretching away on the right to the furthest horizon, above which Glastonbury Tor is just visible, rising like a bluish-gray island against the sky ; whilst on the left, and opposite, the view is limited by the pale outline of the Welsh mountains, or by the nearer purples of the Mendip Hills, between which and the Quantocks, the level land spreads inward many a mile from the mouths of the Parrett and the Brue,^ sometimes in rich dairy farms, sometimes in long tracks of moorland, brown and spongy, to the very foot of the famous Tor, guiding both the eye and the imagination to that ancient isle of Avalon where King Arthur lies buried, and where the ruins of the sanctuary which Briton and Saxon alike held sacred are still to be seen. The marsh is simply the well-drained bed

1 ' The shadowy main, dim-tinted,' is an entirely perfect wordpicture of the effect of the dun waters of the Severn Sea beheld from that distance.

^ It was down the River Brue, of course, that the mystic barge came from Glastonbury to receive the dying king. Tennyson's picture of the 'coast of ever-shifting sand,' and 'far away the phantom circle of a moaning sea,' with the 'death-like mist,' in the midst of which the ' last dim weird battle of the west' was fought, exactly recalls the scenery. But there were certainly no ' zig-zag paths and juts of pointed rock.' How could there be, on such a coast ?

of what was once the estuary of the river Parrett, that river which long formed the boundary between the two races,^ and, on the north-eastern side, the very names of the villages — Chedzoy, Middlezoy, Westonzoyland — reveal the homes of these early settlers by the sea-meres with whom the name of Somerset originated, and who were the pioneers of the West Saxon folk in this direction. So that ' seaward Quantock ' looks, as it were, along the actual line of contact, an interesting landmark always, but especially so to the lover of English literature ; for, as if to remind us of our national descent from both, and of the share that Celt as well as Teuton has had in the moulding of the English mind and character, it is here, along this line of contact, just where the latest struggles for the mastery were fought out, and conquerors and conquered at last settled down peaceably side by side and began to mingle and to become one people, that English poetry has ever had her surest abiding-place,^ and discovered her freshest springs.

^ i.e. between Dyvnaint and Wessex zoy is pronounced zee, and I stands for s in the West Saxon dialect.

^ Do not forget that Stratford-on-Avon lies along this line ; and Langland was born in Shropshire ; and Spenser came originally from that North Countree where Northumbria ran parallel to Strathclyde ; so did Burns ; and if we are to speak of those poets who, each in his degree, were the instruments of that reawakening of the national imagination, that extraordinary revival of English poetry, which has in this nineteenth century given another great age to our national literature, Wordsworth was a Cumbrian ; and Devonshire gave us

176589 'SEAWARD QUANTOCK' 7

I know of no other point of view from which this line is so distinctly traceable, and so enriched and illuminated with historical and legendary associations.

Twelve hundred feet is the highest elevation to which ' smooth Quantock's airy ridge ' ever attains ; but although the scenery never rises into grandeur, these hills have a character and a beauty of their own, and once thoroughly known and loved in youth, they will always retain their hold on the affections. One special charm consists in the loveliness of the foliage. The sloping sides of the coombs are clothed, not, as a general rule, with fir, but sometimes with forest trees, or more commonly with oak underwood ; and perhaps it may have been to the near neighbourhood of these oak woods, once more abundant than now, that the large and thriving tanning business owed its origin in which our Tom Poole's father, who was also named Thomas Poole, and his uncle John Poole ^ were both engaged. At any rate, this

Coleridge ; and Southey, a sharer, though vpith inferior powers, in the same impulse, \yas born at Bristol.

1 There were two other brothers also, I believe, engaged in the tanning trade, but not in the same business. I have been told that old Mr. Kinglake of Taunton, the father of the author of Eoihen, used to say that these four brothers were all amongst the cleverest men he had ever known. They were the sons of a Mr. William Poole of Marshmill, who died in 1750. There was one sister, an Alice Poole (died 1773), who was not clever, but like other maiden aunts, a great cherisher of old family traditions. She it was who constituted an important part of the family property, and it was natural enough that Thomas Poole, the elder, should decide that his first-born son must, as a matter of course, take to the tanyard, nor is there anything to show that, the younger Thomas disliked the prospect, or in any way revolted against it. But there was another part of his father's arrangements against which he did revolt, and that in the most determined manner. Whether it be that his father thought that bare reading, writing, and arithmetic, represented all the book learning that a man of business required, or whether it be that he detected in his son a love of literature that he feared might lead to a distaste for trade, must remain a matter of conjecture ; what seems certain is, that Tom was never sent to a good school, his bookish tastes

remembered how, when a child, she saw her aunt ' weep ' at the death of Queen Anne. Another of her favourite sayings, ' My uncle, Sir Richard, was knighted for valour,' carries us much farther back, for it refers to a Sir Richard Elsworth, who raised a troop of horse for the king, and was knighted during the Civil Wars. His grandson, another Richard Elsworth, besides founding various schools, founded two small exhibitions at Balliol College, Oxford, for the benefit of natives of the county of Somerset, with a preference to certain parishes, and to founder's kin, one of which was actually held by the eldest son of the John Poole mentioned above — another John Poole, of whom much will be said in these memoirs. This Richard Elsworth died in 1 7 14. The present generation of founder's kin has been pretty numerously represented at the University, but, of course, all special claims upon such endowments have, with Spartan impartiality, been long ago disallowed..

1765-89 BUSINESS VERSUS BOOKS 9

were discouraged and sneered at, and he was apprenticed to the tanning trade at as early an age as possible. This may have seemed all the harder to him because his uncle's sons were educated at Tiverton Grammar School, then considered the best public school in the West of England, and the eldest, who showed talent, went thence to Oxford, where he did not fail to distinguish himself, and to become, in due time, a fellow of Oriel. Even Tom's own younger brother, being intended for the medical profession, was fitted for his future work by a suitable education. Happily, Tom was of too sweet and wholesome a nature for envy and jealousy ; he loved his cousin John, and took affectionate pride in his successes, whilst between him and his brother Richard there was always the strongest possible bond of fraternal love and sympathy ; but he got on very badly with his father, and showed his resentment of the whim that condemned him to ignorance by ostentatious inattention to his work in the tanyard, whilst, in such fragments of spare time as he could command, and always oppressed with a disheartening sense of the difficulty of making progress without better advantages, he seems to have continued his studies with steady persistency, year after year, getting on very slowly, no doubt, but never losing sight of the determination to become a welleducated man. Family traditions represent the elder Thomas as venting his disappointment in taunts and sarcasms. He chose to consider Tom simply in the light of an idle apprentice, and as long as he lived he never ceased to ' twit ' his son with ignorance of his business, though, as time went on, inefficiency was the last thing of which he could justly be accused, whatever may have been his inattention to detail at the outset.

His mother was a woman of great sensibility, and of so much sweetness of nature that her tender tolerance, and ' overflowing good-will ' to any one whom Tom wanted her to like, made her, in after years, very dear to his friends, and especially to Coleridge, who sends her his love, sometimes his ' filial love,' in almost every letter. Thus in i 799, at a time when Mrs. Poole was recovering from an illness, he wrote : —

'In this hurly burly of unlucky things, I cannot describe to you how pure and deep joy I have experienced from thinking of your dear mother ! O may God Almighty give her after all her agonies, now at last a long, rich, yellow sunset, in this her evening of Life ! — So good, and so virtuous, and with such an untameable sensibility to enjoy the blessings of the Almighty — surely God in heaven never made a Being more capable of enjoying with a deeper Thankfulness of Earth, Life, and its Relations ! '

Of his one sister, Sarah, Tom Poole was both

1765-89 HIS UNCLE JOHN 11

fond and proud, but the chief happiness and compensation, both of his boyhood and early manhood, must have been the perfect affection, and thoroughness of understanding, that existed between himself and his brother ; whilst, outside their own household, the main resource of both, and probably of their sister also, was found in the society of their cousins, the John Pooles, whose home was at Marshmill, a plain but pleasant country-house in the neighbouring village of Over Stowey, and in the sympathy and counsel of their Uncle John, a man described by Tom Poole as one whose

' natural sense was incomparable, his information extensive, and his desire to use those blessings for the good of his family, his friends, and the neighbourhood, greater than that of any man he ever knew.'

He was younger than Tom's father, and yet ' generally considered and treated as the head of the family ; ' and, whilst the desire and the determination to achieve usefulness, that noblest of all the various forms of young ambition, was working in Tom's mind from boyhood, in his uncle he saw a living example of the very kind of life upon which his imagination was dwelling, the life that he one day hoped and intended to lead himself Besides this, at Marshmill was to be found the soothing atmosphere of a home, in which the jarring notes of discord were never heard. ' The tender affection which the seven children bore their father, and the mother her husband,' was 'beyond anything Tom ever saw elsewhere, and realised as much happiness in that united family as can ever be enjoyed here below.' There were four sisters and three brothers, of whom the eldest, John Poole the young Oxonian, was the special pride of the entire clan. The sisters were brought up to be perfect housewives, complete mistresses of the art of domestic comfort as it was understood by our great -grandmothers ; but they were also, what in those days was much less a matter of course, very cultivated women. The third sister, Charlotte, kept a journal, from which we gather that Tom must have been almost as much at Marshmill as at his own home, and that nothing of importance ever happened to him that he did not at once proceed to share with his cousins.

Of course he had his special favourite amongst them. The youngest sister, Penelope, was a beautiful, dark-eyed girl, with a voice of unusual power and sweetness, and a fine taste for the best music which made Handel her favourite composer. But Tom's attachment to this attractive cousin was never returned. The family tradition goes that she told him she had been too long accustomed to think of him as almost a brother, to be ever able to regard him in the light of a lover. In due

1765-89 PENELOPE

"3 time she married some one else ; and, if he had been like the majority of human beings he would, after a while, have taught himself to like some other woman. But natures gifted with very strong affections are apt to be also very slow to change, and it seems probable that the family impression that it was this unrequited feeling for his cousin which kept Tom Poole single to the end of his life, was a correct one. Much as he loved poetry, it may be because he loved poetry so much, he was little given to verse-making on his own account, but a few stanzas still remain in which he expresses his delight in her singing, or, perhaps, merely seeks to lay the homage of an extravagant compliment at Penelope's feet, by the image of ' sweet Philomel, at Marshmill gate,' listening in a passion of jealousy to strains that outdid her own —

' Come unto me all ye who toil,' Was echoing to the zephyr's round —

She heard, she owned herself surpast, And vanquished, sunk upon the ground !

It is not poetry ; it is merely the restless feeling after some vehicle of expression for that which is not to be said in direct words, that is common to all young lovers. Often such verses are the merest effervescence of youth, the outcome of passions as short-lived as the froth upon the wave. With Tom the case was different ; and therefore it seemed rather sad to be told, when collecting reminiscences of these early days from the daughter of this very Penelope, that though, in later life, there was no one that her mother ' respected ' more than her cousin Tom, yet there actually had been a time, when she was a dainty, gentle little girl, and he a ' great, strong boy,' when she did not even like him, and rather dreaded the frequent occasions when he and Dick came over to spend the day at Marshmill. Tom, indeed, was always kind ; it was Dick who teased, and who even once hung her doll in the cellar ; but they were both so rough and eager, and so vehement in all their ways, that it was quite enough to make a small and rather timid cousin shrink into herself, and incline to the opinion that all boys were rather objectionable, except her own brothers.

Then, as time went on, Dick was more and more habitually absent from home, until he finally settled at Sherborne, and his sister Sarah went to keep house for him, and Tom was more and more thrown upon his Over Stowey cousins for companionship. He seems to have been an affectionate light-hearted young fellow in those days, taking his full share in the jolly, sociable life continually going forward among the lesser gentry of the Stowey and Bridgwater neighbourhood, which his cousin Charlotte's journal records. Beyond their own

1765-89 AMERICAN FRIENDS 15

immediate surroundings tlie cousins' chief intimacywas with an American family of the name of Coulson, who, having taken the Imperial side in the Struggle for Independence, had been prudent enough to leave their home in Massachusetts at the opening of the American War, and had settled in Bristol. It is not improbable that their first introduction to the Pooles may have been through the medium of a business connection, and, afterwards, assistance may have been given in the transfer of themselves and their property, of which they seem to have been able to save some considerable portion, to the mother country. What is certain is that the friendship between the two families was very close and intimate, and that the younger Pooles were constant visitors at the Coulsons' hospitable house. It was there that Sarah — more commonly known as Sally Poole — ■ met her husband,^ and the first mention of Tom Poole in his cousin Charlotte's journal, dated December 15, 1789, records his return, with her sisters, from a visit to these very friends. They found their little parlour at Marshmill as comfortable as ever, sat down to sup on a turkey, and talked of all that had happened during their absence, ' particularly of the dangers Tom Poole had encountered on his voyage to Ireland.' He ' She married Mr. King, a Bristol merchant.

i6 THOMAS POOLE AND HIS FRIENDS chap. I

had apparently merely rested in Bristol, on his way home from a longer journey.

The Coulsons seem to have delighted in society, and to have entertained a great deal. Tom Poole always spoke of their daughter, Mrs. Marchant, and of her niece, Mrs. Darby, as the two most lovely women he ever saw in his life — whence it would appear that beautiful Americans are not a speciality of the nineteenth century. The former lady was the chosen friend of the Marshmill sisters. She was extremely young when the family first came to Bristol, and already the wife of a husband who was understood to have an appointment in India, and who never appeared upon the scene. After his death, many years later, she became Mrs. Harford, and a small portrait of her, painted at the time of her second marriage, is still in the possession of the Poole family— a dark-eyed woman with an olive complexion, and short, dark, curly hair, clustering round a small and shapely head. It was probably Mrs. Darby who gave Tom Poole the lock of Washington's hair, which he regarded as a sacred treasure, and kept in a special casket, placed within the precious copy of the Barberini Vase,^ presented to him by the Wedgwoods. He used to say that it was given to him by the most beautiful woman ever created, and if we knew for certain

^ Now in the possession of the King family.

1765-89 AMERICAN FRIENDS 17

whether he received it from the aunt or the niece, we should know to which of the fair kinswonaen he gave the palm ; but, whichever it may have been, the incident shows both that Tom Poole was a favourite in the Coulson family, and also that, whatever sacrifices Mr. Coulson may himself have made out of loyalty to the British government, the politics of his home circle were by no means uniformly of the same complexion.

One other American friend must be mentioned — a Mr. Garnett, who, in the last years of the eighteenth century, seems to have been very frequently in Bristol. Charlotte Poole in after years described him as a ' prince among men,' highly gifted both in mind and body, and a thorough gentleman, and used to declare that ' all the girls would have been in love with him,' but that it was well known that he was wasting his life in a ' useless ' attachment to the beautiful Mrs. Marchant, who, on her side, seemed to be wasting hers in solitary lingering under her father's roof, apart from a husband who had almost become a stranger to her. When at last set free by his death it was too late — Mr. Garnett had returned to America, and was on the eve of marriage to another woman. His name finds a place here because he was one of the very first people who took kindly notice of young Tom Poole, and encouraged him in his VOL. I C i8 THOMAS POOLE AND HIS FRIENDS chap, i

endeavours after self-improvement. Whether he was quite the paragon that he seemed in the eyes of the young ladies may be questioned, for John Poole, who kept a diary as well as his sister, notes that he ' was not at all the kind of man he had been led to expect ; ' but perhaps this only means that he expected a man of sentiment, and a cavalier des dames, and was surprised to find instead a person of considerable practical shrewdness and ability. His name occurs again and again in Tom Poole's letters, as the inventor of improvements in the machinery used in the tanning trade. But although the main subject of the correspondence may be the ' new bark mill,' or ' patent anti-friction roller,' which Tom Poole wishes to introduce at Stowey, there is always an undercurrent of mutual understanding upon topics of a very different order ; and there is one letter^ in particular in which, many years afterwards, Tom Poole recalls, ' with sincere affection,' Mr. Garnett's ' kind and friendly attention ' to him ' when he was an ignorant boy.' ' Often have I thought of you with affection and regret,' he writes, ' and, I may truly say, with gratitude. . . .' And he adds, ' Whether I have made a good use of my time or not, I often doubt ; but I have endeavoured to be as useful as I can.'

^ Letter to Mr. Garnett written in 1808, of which a copy has been preserved in Mr. Poole's Copying-book, No. 2.

1765-89 THE KEYNOTE OF HIS LIFE 19

' To be as useful as I can! This was, as almost every page of this book must show, the keynote of Tom Poole's life ; but, indeed, the passion for usefulness was a kind of characteristic of the Poole family, and provided a path in which, as we shall see, not even the very deepest division of opposite political opinions could prevent their working hand in hand through life, with a still deeper sense of united sympathies.

THOMAS POOLE AND HIS FRIENDS chap, n

Chapter II

'You welcomed this stupendous event, Sir, with the spirit of an Englishman ; with a spirit which, even in its excess, was truly English. If you shall ultimately appear to have erred, posterity will add more to your heart on this account, than it will detract from your sagacity. To have hoped too boldly of our common nature is a fault which all good men have an interest in forgiving.' — S. T. Coleridge's Letter to Fox, Morning Post, Nov. 4, 1802.

As Tom Poole entered manhood it soon became apparent that, in spite of his father's sarcasms, books had by no means spoilt him for business. He may, indeed, have been unversed in the practical details of the art of tanning, but with the trade in its wider commercial relations he was so well acquainted that, some time in 1790, he was elected at a great meeting of the tanners of the West of England, held at Bristol, as their delegate to a still more important meeting in London, where he was again chosen for an interview, on behalf of the meeting, with Mr. Pitt, in February 1791, of which the object seems to have been to lay before the Prime Minister the distressed state of the

1790-92 STATE OF THE TANNING TRADE 21

tanning trade, caused partly by the alarming scarcity of oak bark, and partly by the restrictive effect of the different legislative enactments which insisted upon particular methods of manufacture, and almost made it penal to introduce any improvements. A further effort seems to have been made in the winter of 1 792, but without much result; for in 1793 we find Tom Poole drawing up a memorial for the tanners of Bristol, ' to the Right Honourable the Lords of the Committee of Council for trade and foreign plantations,' to point out that the scarcity of oak bark ' continues and encreases,' and to entreat that the exportation of that article may be forbidden, or else bounties granted for the importation of foreign bark. They are aware that ' bounties have not always produced the desired effect,' but believe that ' in the present case it is easy to prove that a moderate bounty would encrease the trade and revenue of the kingdom,' whilst it is hinted, ' with the greatest diffidence,' that the heavy excise duty paid on every ton of bark does furnish some claim to special consideration.