Wordsworth's friend Sir George came from this old poetic Beaumont stock, and probably it was at Coleorton that the poet first happened on that scarce little volume 'Bosworth Field, with a taste of the variety of other poems, left by Sir John Beaumont, Baronet, deceased,' 1629. These touching lines are at p. 165.
In the first Coleorton Inscription Wordsworth alludes to
'him who sang how spear and shield
In civil conflict met on Bosworth Field,'
and other references to Beaumont occur.
Wordsworth had some thoughts of republishing Sir John Beaumonts Poems, but Chalmers did so instead[1].
Like Beaumont, Doddridge meditates on the life beyond life.
The pathetic lines by Captain Thomas James have an additional interest as connecting Wordsworth with a book that in some particulars may have inspired the author of the Ancient Mariner. The question is a thorny one, and I can only refer the student to Mr. Ivor James's 'The Source of the Ancient Mariner,' and to the later commentators on that poem. It has been conjectured that Coleridge had come across Captain James's 'Strange and Dangerous Voyage' (1633) in the Bristol Library, and here at least we have proof that in 1819 one of the authors of Lyrical Ballads had in his possession a correct transcript of a poem from James's book, and that he valued the poem so highly as to include it in his Parnassian collection.
- ↑ See Knight's W., 1882–4, vol. x. p. 73, and vol. iv. pp. 78, 84.
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