This seems somewhat priggish, but it was the real and earnest William Pearson who spoke. Sociable as he was, fond of seeing a good play, his chief delight, if he was not out in the fields, was a book that would set him thinking or a poem that would touch his imagination, and Pearson was old beyond his years. He joined the Didactical Society, the Mosley Street Library, subscribed to the News Room and made one or two friends for life. There in most uncongenial surroundings for seventeen years he stuck to 'the drudgery at the desk's dead wood' with one thought, that a time would arrive when he could come back to his native vale, and live a student's and a naturalist's life in simple competence. As a matter of fact his health broke down after five years of Manchester smoke, and he had to come back in 1808 to the Yews in his native vale for country air and restoration. He was at this time nothing if not a keen sportsman, and he was, if one may judge from a letter he sent at this time to a Kendal paper, vexed at heart by the vigorous application of the game laws as enforced by the worthies of the local bench. Three young men, who, with nothing but a knob-stick, could run down {125} a hare, had been caught hunting on Cartmel Fell. 'We must pity the Robinsons,' he says, 'young men who can run down a hare, an animal that often escapes the fleetest greyhound, who pursued their sport without fear in the open day, and so generously, that they left a hare with the farmer on whose ground they happened to take it. These fine young men have been made to pay £3 13s. 6d. for their sport. The age of chivalry is indeed gone. The ancient Greeks would have crowned them with laurel, but this is the age of taxation and little men. We are fallen on evil days; we only wish the surveyor and commissioner had heard them at their joyous sport, and had heard their shouts, as we did, which made the old mountains ring again even to Gummershow, to be echoed back from the far-off Coniston Fells.' It was during his Manchester residence that he became a student of William Wordsworth. It was not fashionable then to care for Wordsworth's poetry, but William Pearson was never without the Lyrical Ballads of 1805, or his copy of _Poems by William Wordsworth_, of 1807. The young bank clerk, who was often heard muttering, 'I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh aid,' felt in these {126} poems 'all the beauty of a common dawn.' He knew that Wordsworth walked on the shining uplands of a noble aspiration, and was the apostle, in a time 'that touched monied worldlings with dismay,' of the simpler life of honest poverty and high endeavour. He felt that in Wordsworth he could find that sympathy with all things, that 'Look to the Uncreated with a countenance Of admiration and an eye of love.' He knew that Wordsworth had realised the power of Nature to chasten and subdue