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Updated: May 27, 2025
The joys of Elleray were destined to be fleeting. The fortune of its master was melted away by the mismanagement of others, leaving him but a slender pittance. He bore his loss like a man, sorrowing, but not repining. The estate was given up, and a new home found with his mother, in Edinburgh. This was in 1815.
The former came to Edinburgh in 1815, with the view of practising at the Scottish bar, so that Bell had no opportunities of visiting him at his beautiful residence at Elleray, on the banks of Lake Windermere, where for years previously he had lived in Utopian health and happiness, "surrounded by the finest of scenery, and varying his poem-writing and halcyon peace, with walking excursions and jovial visits from friends that, like himself, entered with zest into the hearty enjoyment of life."
He was born in 1785, his father being a rich manufacturer of Paisley, was educated at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford, came early into a considerable fortune, married at twenty-six, and having established himself at Elleray on Windermere, lived there the life of a country gentleman, with more or less literary tastes.
Elleray was a gloomy place then, and Wilson never surmounted the melancholy which beset him there; and he wisely parted with it some years before his death. The later depression in his case was in proportion to the earlier exhilaration. His love of Nature and of genial human intercourse had been too exuberant; and he became incapable of enjoyment from either, in his last years.
Justice to them compels us to accept and use the exposures he offers us of himself. About the time of De Quincey's settlement at Grasmere, Wilson, the future CHRISTOPHER NORTH, bought the Elleray estate, on the banks of Windermere. He was then just of age, supreme in all manly sports, physically a model man, and intellectually, brimming with philosophy and poetry.
At the latter he not only displayed great intellectual endowments, but distinguished himself as an athlete. Having succeeded to a fortune of £50,000 he purchased the small estate of Elleray in the Lake District, where he enjoyed the friendship of Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and De Quincey. In 1812 he pub.
When Southey lost his idolized boy, Herbert, and had to watch over his insane wife, always his dearest friend, and all the dearer for her helpless and patient suffering under an impenetrable gloom, when Wordsworth was bereaved of the daughter who made the brightness of his life in his old age, and when Wilson was shaken to the centre by the loss of his wife, and mourned alone in the damp shades of Elleray, where he would allow not a twig to be cut from the trees she loved, the sorrow of each moved them all.
Several other authors were more or less closely associated with the Lake Poets by residence or social affiliation. John Wilson, the editor of Blackwood's, lived for some time, when a young man, at Elleray, on the banks of Windermere. He was an athletic man of outdoor habits, an enthusiastic sportsman, and a lover of natural scenery.
The Isle of Palms, followed four years later by The City of the Plague, which gained for him a recognised place in literature, though they did not show his most characteristic gifts, and are now almost unread. About this time he lost a large portion of his fortune, had to give up continuous residence at Elleray, came to Edinburgh, and was called to the Scottish Bar, but never practised.
While speaking of Elleray, we should pay a passing tribute of gratitude to an older worthy of that neighborhood, the well-known Bishop of Llandaff, Richard Watson, who did more for the beauty of Windermere than any other person.
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