It was a difference that arose on the American question, between Sir James Lowther and his law agent and steward, a certain John Robinson, in the year 1766, that was the prime cause of the fact that Wordsworth, the poet, was born here. For John Robinson resigned his stewardship, and young John Wordsworth, then only 24 years of age, 'a man of great force of character and real human capacity,' was appointed in his place to be 'law agent and steward of the manor of Ennerdale.' To that post, which he occupied for the next 18 years, the young man came from the Penrith neighbourhood, bringing with him as his girl wife a certain Ann Cookson, a mercer's daughter, who could boast, through her descent on her mother's side from the Crackanthorpes, of Newbiggin {219} Hall, an ancestry that flowed from as far back as the time of Edward III. She was thus well suited to marry the son of the land agent of Sockbridge, near Penistone, who traced his descent through a long unbroken line of sturdy Yorkshire yeomen away in the Penistone neighbourhood, as far as to the time of the Norman Conqueror. They took up their abode in the substantial house now occupied by Mr. Robinson Mitchell, then lately builded by one Sheriff Luckock. It bears date 1745-46, and is to-day unmarred and unmodernised, remaining much as it was when John Wordsworth became its tenant. We know little of this young John Wordsworth, but he must have been a man 'tender and deep in his excess of love,' for when, after twelve years of happy married life here in the old manor house beside the Derwent, his wife died from consumption, caught, as we are told, by being put into a damp bed in the 'best room' when on a visit to friends in London, he never seemed to recover his spirits, and he himself died six years after her, in the year 1783, on the 30th December, and lies buried at the east end of the All Saints' Church. He lost his way on the fells when {220} returning from some business engagement at Broughton-in-Furness, and was obliged to stay out all night; the chill from exposure brought on inflammation of the lungs, and his strength, sapped by deep domestic sorrow, could not bear up against it. The orphans whom he left, Richard, William, Dorothy, John, and Christopher, four of whom were remarkable in after life, were then removed to the care of their uncle Cookson at Penrith, and Cockermouth knew them no more. We have been allowed, from William Wordsworth's autobiographical notes and his poems, to glean something of those early days. The poet tells us: Early died My honoured mother, she who was the heart And hinge of all our learnings and our loves, Nor would I praise her, but in perfect love!