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large, brought in a comfortable little sum. The management of the estate was (from its position) compatible with official duties at St. Petersburg; and, having learnt that the Academy of Sciences there would be pleased to receive him as a member, he determined upon the change. Accordingly he bade good-bye to Königsberg in the autumn of 1834, and entered upon his duties in the Russian capital, where he has since remained.

There his life has been less devoted to original investigations than before: in fact, he himself felt in making the change that his chief work was already done. Part of the subsequent time has been spent in long and extensive travels, for pleasure and health as well as curiosity, to Nova Zembla and to the Caspian Sea; part, in official duties, as Member of the Academy, Librarian of the Academic Library, and Director of Public Education, while part has been given to the completion of his old labours and to the quiet spreading abroad of the wisdom treasured up in his old age. He was one of those who took part some years back in the Congress which met in Germany to discuss the condition of Anthropological Science, a matter in which he has always taken a great interest, and many will remember the visit he paid not long ago to England, a country of which he has always had an exalted, though perhaps too ideal an opinion. Long may he continue to enjoy the consciousness of having done a good life's work, and the pleasure of watching from his high position the progress of science and of seeing men draw nearer and nearer to that complete theory of development, of which he himself has said that the cradle has not yet been made for the man who is to expound it, nor indeed the seed sprouted which grow into the tree of whose wood that cradle shall be made.

shall

ART. IV.-1. The History and Antiquities of the Counties of Westmorland and Cumberland. By J. N. Nicholson, Esq., and Richard Burn, LL.D. 2 vols. 4to. London, 1777. 2. Observations on several Parts of England, particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, made in the year 1772. By William Gilpin, A.M. 3rd edition. 2 vols. London,

1808.

3. The Westmorland Dialect, with the adjacency of Lancashire and Yorkshire, in four familiar Dialogues. By A. Wheeler. 3rd Edition. Kendal, 1821.

4. History of Richmondshire, with the Wapentakes of Lonsdale, Ewecross, and Amunderness. By T. D. Whitaker, LL.D., F.S.A. 2 vols. fol. London, 1823. 2A2

5. The

5. The Worthies of Westmorland. By G. Atkinson, Esq., Barrister-at-Law. London, 1849.

6. The Northmen in Cumberland and Westmoreland. By Robert Ferguson. London and Carlisle, 1856.

7. The Annals of Kendal. By Cornelius Nicholson, F.G.S. 2nd edition. London and Kendal, 1861.

8. The Lake Country. By E. Lynn Linton. London, 1864. 9. Local Chronology; being Notes of the principal Events published in the Kendal Newspapers. London and Kendal.

1865.

10. Handbook for Westmoreland and Cumberland. 1866.

T seems like a divorce to describe Westmorland in separation

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so proverbial that we seldom speak of one without thinking of the other. No other two counties in England are so paired off together, in the popular estimate, from the rest. Norfolk and Suffolk, for instance, which come the nearest in that respect, would separately resent the application of the analogy to themselves. And this conventional combination of Westmorland with Cumberland rests indeed on sufficient reasons. Together they join in forming that characteristic region, which marks the North-West of England. The highest elevations in Great Britain, to the south of the Border, and exclusive of Wales, are in these two counties, though not in equal proportions. They have equal shares in, though they are not by any means the sole possessors of, the famous Lake District. They furnish indifferently the localities and the combatants for the Wrestler's Belt.' And other traditional associations, which bind the two shires together, might easily be enumerated. Thus, books which have been written to illustrate the antiquities and scenery of either, have usually included both. When Dr. Burn, a Westmorland man, described his own county, he included Cumberland too. So Mr. Ferguson, writing at Carlisle, combines, as a matter of course, the southern and smaller county with the larger and northern. Mistakes, too, are sometimes made, where we should have thought it impossible, between one county and the other. One of our most eminent historians, in describing Sir John Lowther's appearance on the field of politics, speaks of him as coming from his seat in Cumberland. The War Office, in recent years, when enrolling the Keswick Volunteers, placed them in the list as the second · Westmorland Rifles.' It appears

Another very obvious combination is sometimes found, viz. of Westmorland with that large outlying part of Lancashire which adjoins it on the west, and which is included in the Diocese of Carlisle,

again as if this wedlock were to be drawn now into closer bonds than ever. This has been the tendency of recent changes, political, social, and ecclesiastical. The two counties have at this moment one lord-lieutenant, one chairman of quartersessions, one troop of yeomanry, one agricultural society, one association of schoolmasters, one bishop, and one lunatic asylum.

Westmorland, however, has its own distinct geographical and historical features, which amply justify an individual treatment. Cumberland rests boldly on the Border, and (to quote the phrase which the oldest translator of Camden uses of Yorkshire) lies sore on the sea.' No such barefaced exposure, in either respect, is a feature of Westmorland. She is safely and timidly removed from all direct contact with Scotland, and retires with singular modesty from the sea, just touching it only in the innermost, warmest, and most sheltered corner of Morecambe Bay. On the opposite side, she has a short contact with Durham. Her other neighbours are Lancashire and Yorkshire. Thus she nestles securely under the shelter of three large counties, the history of each of which is undoubtedly more famous than her own. As to mere natural characteristics, geological structure, botanical products, and the like, it might be difficult to separate Westmorland and Cumberland. And yet there are general and obvious differences. In the county we are beginning to describe there is, for instance, no continuous breadth of corn-land, as in the rich plains of the lower Eden and the Solway; and there are no coal-mines corresponding to those of Whitehaven. And if we advance to history and social condition, there are contrasts between our two North-Western shires quite as apparent. Thus, to mention only two subjects-Westmorland (as we have seen to be implied in its position) has been far less conspicuous in Border warfare, and, though there is a greater tendency than formerly towards the absorption of landed property in few hands, yet still its small holdings are very obviously contrasted with the large farms belonging to the great territorial proprietors in Cumberland. Thus a separate description of the two counties is natural, as certainly to us it is more convenient. And our present modest attempt is further justified by the fact, that very little comparatively has been done as yet for Westmorland by the topographer and archæologist.

The first difficulty (if it is really a difficulty) which presents itself for solution is the question of the derivation of the name. The variations in the spelling are of no value, except so far as they set the only two alternatives before us. The question lies between West-mere-land (the land of the western lakes), or West-moor-land (the land of the western moors); and we have

no

no hesitation whatever in pronouncing for the latter. This county is really the land of the Eastern, not the Western, meres. Its own Hawes Water is the most easterly of all the 'lakes;' and Wastwater, the most westerly, is entirely beyond its limits. It is far more natural to see the origin of the name in those moors, which rise at the head of the Yorkshire dales, and stretch from thence westward, and which are characteristically represented in the first instance by Stainmoor. And when we find, as appears to have been the case, that the name spread historically from those regions, i. e. from the neighbourhood of Appleby and Kirkby Stephen, till it included Ambleside, Kendal and Kirkby Lonsdale, we cannot regard the question as admitting of much doubt.

Our next difficulty (and this is a real one) is in describing the shape of Westmorland, as it lies on the map. The upper part is broad, and the lower is narrowed by the deep and acute indentation made by Yorkshire on the south-east, and the intrusion of a large space of Lancashire on the south-west: so that we might compare the shape to the clumsy head of an axe with a thick short handle. But on the whole (though no English county is less geometrical in its shape), we decide to borrow a recollection from Euclid and our schoolboy days, and to say this, that Westmorland consists of two pentagons (not by any means 'equilateral and equiangular') 'applied' to one another, the line of contact being nearly the line of the familiar North-Western Railway, from the point where it strikes the valley of the Lune near Tebay, and thence across the bleak region of Shap Fells to the Cumberland border at Penrith. We proceed to perambulate these two pentagons, though we can only find space to notice their most salient features.

6

We start from Tebay, where the traveller from London to Glasgow looks down to the deep valley below him and up to the hill-tops above, and observes that he is in a more Alpine country than he has yet seen since he left Euston Square.—(1) The Lune- truly in this part Spenser's stony Lune'- comes in here from the East and turns abruptly; and in tracing our first boundary-line we follow its course southward. Like the Rhine (to compare small things with great) it is, in reference to Westmorland, partly a frontier river, and partly an included river. It would be quite a mistake to regard it as exclusively a Lancashire stream. True it is, as Drayton says, that 'the Destinies assign such honour' to this river, that she christens in her course a county Palatine '

'Yet though she be a flood such glory that doth gain,
In that the British Crown doth to her state pertain,

Yet

Yet Westmorland alone not only gives her birth,
But for her greater good the kind Westmerian earth
Clear Burbeck her bequeaths, and Barrow to attend
Her Grace, till she her name to Lancaster doth lend.'

And it must be remembered that, if the capital of Lancashire is the Castle on the Lune, the Dale of the Lune gives its name to the most powerful noble family of Westmorland, indeed the only noble family that has great and long-continued hereditary possessions in the county. Having followed this river, then, for about half the length of our boundary line, we suddenly leave it, and ascend the steep moors to the south-eastern angle of our pentagon at the Three-Shires Stone, where we look deep down into Yorkshire.-(2) The second line of our first pentagon leads us through one of those narrow limestone ravines so characteristic of Western Yorkshire,-where the water, now tumbling down in waterfalls, now 'loitering in glassy pools,' has made all sorts of fantastic hollows and shapes in the rock,-down again to the Lune. We cross its valley and come to the sea, where Arnside Knot stands boldly on its promontory over the Sands, and Arnside Tower in the hollow beneath shows where danger was apprehended in old times from marauders who came up the bay. The shifting sands of the estuary caused other perils to the traveller on horseback,

"The Kent and the Keer

Have parted mony a good man and his meear.'

6

And the churchyards of the neighbourhood give plain proof of such disasters.-(3) Nothing need detain us till we strike Windermere, in the middle of its eastern bank, at the promontory of Storrs. All the bright beauty of the lake breaks at once upon us here, as it did upon Canning in 1825, on a rather memorable occasion, when Southey, Scott, and Wordsworth met him there, with Professor Wilson. Lockhart gives a lively description of the company, the weather, the scenery, and the regatta; and Christopher North,' whom the Statesman called the Admiral of the Lake,' refers with much feeling to that day, 'when Windermere glittered with all her sails in honour of the Great Northern Minstrel and of him the Eloquent, whose lips are now mute in dust.' Our boundary now between Westmorland and Lancashire is the lake; and we take just one look from Orrest Head, above Elleray, of its whole glorious length, with its islands and rich woods. After passing another Three-Shires Stone, where Lancashire and Cumberland come into contact with our county, as in the former case Lancashire and Yorkshire, we attain our halting-place on the summit of the grand mass

of

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