No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale. (Cf. Goldsmith’s Essay on _ Metaphors_ (_British Magazine_):—‘Armstrong has used the word ‘fluctuate’ with admirable efficacy, in his philosophical poem entitled _The Art of Preserving Health_. Oh! when the growling winds contend, and all The sounding forest ‘fluctuates’ in the storm, To sink in warm repose, and hear the din Howl o’er the steady battlements. The sad historian of the pensive plain. Strean (see note to l. 13) identified the old watercress gatherer as a certain Catherine Giraghty (or Geraghty). Her children (he said) were still living in the neighbourhood of Lissoy in 1807. (Mangin’s _Essay on Light Reading_, 1808, p. 142.) The village preacher’s modest mansion rose. ‘The Rev. Charles Goldsmith is allowed by all that knew him, to have been faithfully represented by his son in the character of the Village Preacher.’ So writes his daughter, Catharine Hodson (_Percy Memoir_, 1801, p. 3). Others, relying perhaps upon the ‘forty pounds a year’ of the Dedication to _The Traveller_, make the poet’s brother Henry the original; others, again, incline to kindly Uncle Contarine (_vide Introduction_). But as Prior justly says (_Life_, 1837, ii. 249), ‘the fact perhaps is that he fixed upon no one individual, but borrowing like all good poets and painters a little from each, drew the character by their combination.’ with forty pounds a year. Cf. Dedication to _The Traveller_, p. 3, l. 14. Unpractis’d. ‘Unskilful’ in the first edition. More skilled. ‘More bent’ in the first edition. The long remember’d beggar. ‘The same persons,’ says Prior, commenting upon this passage, ‘are seen for a series of years to traverse the same tract of country at certain intervals, intrude into every house which is not defended by the usual outworks of wealth, a gate and a porter’s lodge, exact their portion of the food of the family, and even find an occasional resting-place for the night, or from severe weather, in the chimney-corner of respectable farmers.’ (_Life_, 1837, ii. 269.) Cf. Scott on the Scottish mendicants in the ‘Advertisement’ to _The Antiquary_, 1816, and Leland’s _Hist. of Ireland_, 1773, i. 35. The broken soldier. The disbanded soldier let loose upon the country at the conclusion of the ‘Seven Years’ War’ was a familiar figure at this period. Bewick, in his _Memoir_ (‘Memorial Edition’), 1887, pp. 44–5, describes some of these ancient campaigners with their battered old uniforms and their endless stories of Minden and Quebec; and a picture of two of them by T. S. Good of Berwick belonged to the late Mr. Locker Lampson. Edie Ochiltree (_Antiquary_)—it may be remembered—had fought at Fontenoy.