stout, plain-looking farmer, leading a bachelor life, in a rustic, old-fashioned house; the house, however, upon further acquaintance, proving to be amply furnished with modern luxuries, and especially with a good library, superbly mounted in all departments bearing at all upon political philosophy; and the farmer turning out a polished and liberal Englishman, who had travelled extensively, and had so entirely dedicated himself to the service of his humble fellow-countrymen--the hewers of wood and drawers of water in this southern part of Somersetshire--that for many miles round he was the general arbiter of their disputes, the guide and counsellor of their difficulties; besides being appointed executor and guardian to his children by every third man who died in or about the town of Nether Stowey. [40] For a full account of this interesting Mr. Poole see _Thomas Poole and his Friends_, by Mrs. Henry Sandford, 2 vols., 1888. He was born 1765, and died 1837.--M. The first morning of my visit, Mr. Poole was so kind as to propose, knowing my admiration of Wordsworth, that we should ride over to Alfoxton[41]--a place of singular interest to myself, as having been occupied in his unmarried days by that poet, during the minority of Mr. St. Aubyn, its present youthful proprietor. At this delightful spot, the ancient residence of an ancient English family, and surrounded by those ferny Quantock Hills which are so beautifully glanced at in the poem of "Ruth," Wordsworth, accompanied by his sister, had passed a good deal of the interval between leaving the University (Cambridge) and the period of his final settlement amongst his native lakes of Westmoreland: some allowance, however, must be made--but how much I do not accurately know--for a long residence in France, for a short one in North Germany, for an intermitting one in London, and for a regular domestication with his sister at Race Down in Dorsetshire. [41] More properly spelt _Alfoxden_.--M. Returning late from this interesting survey, we found ourselves without company at dinner; and, being thus seated _tête-à-tête_, Mr. Poole propounded the following question to me, which I mention because it furnished me with the first hint of a singular infirmity besetting Coleridge's mind:--"Pray, my young friend, did you ever form any opinion, or, rather, did it ever happen to you to meet with any rational opinion or conjecture of others, upon that most revolting dogma of Pythagoras about beans? You know what I mean: that monstrous doctrine in which he asserts that a man might as well, for the wickedness of the thing, eat his own grandmother as meddle with beans."[42] [42] In the abrupt phrasing of Mr. Poole's question De Quincey must surely have recollected the similar question put by the clown in _Twelfth Night_ to the supposed madman Malvolio to test his sanity--"_Clown_. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?"--M.