Tales of the Ridings

Tales of the Ridings

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tales of the Ridings, by F. W.
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Title: Tales of the Ridings
Author: F. W. Moorman
Commentator: C. Vaughan
Release Date: April 14, 2006 [EBook #18173]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALES OF
THE RIDINGS ***

Produced by David Fawthrop and Alison Bush

TALES OF THE RIDINGS BY F. W. MOORMAN 1872 - 1919
LATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEEDS
UNIVERSITY

Editor of "Yorkshire Dialect Poems"
WITH A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR By Professor C. VAUGHAN
LONDON ELKIN MATHEWS, CORK STREET 1921

Contents: MEMOIR A LAOCOON OF THE ROCKS THROP'S WIFE
THE INNER VOICE B.A. CORN-FEVER

MEMOIR
Frederic Moorman came of a stock which, on both sides, had struck
deep roots in the soil of Devon. His father's family, which is believed to
have sprung ultimately from "either Cornwall or Scotland"--a
sufficiently wide choice, it may be thought--had for many generations
been settled in the county.(1) His mother's--her maiden name was Mary
Honywill--had for centuries held land at Widdicombe and the
neighbourhood, in the heart of Dartmoor. He was born on 8th
September 1872, at Ashburton, where his father, the Rev. A. C.
Moorman, was Congregational minister; and for the first ten years of
his life he was brought up on the skirts of the moor to which his
mother's family belonged: drinking in from the very first that love of
country sights and sounds which clove to him through life, and laying
the foundation of that close knowledge of birds and flowers which was
an endless source of delight to him in after years, and which made him
so welcome a companion in a country walk with any friend who shared
his love of such things but who, ten to one, could make no pretence
whatever to his knowledge.
In 1882, his father was appointed to the ministry of the Congregational
Church at Stonehouse, in Gloucestershire; and Frederic began his
formal schooling at the Wyclif Preparatory School in that place. The
country round Stonehouse--a country of barish slopes and richly
wooded valleys--is perhaps hardly so beautiful as that which he had left
and whose memory he never ceased to cherish. But it has a charm all its

own, and the child of Dartmoor had no great reason to lament his
removal to the grey uplands and "golden valleys" of the Cotswolds.
His next change must have seemed one greatly for the worse. In 1884
he was sent to the school for the sons of Congregational ministers at
Caterham; and the Cotswolds, with their wide outlook over the Severn
estuary to May Hill and the wooded heights beyond, were exchanged
for the bald sweep and the white chalk-pits of the North Downs. These
too have their unique beauty; but I never remember to have heard
Moorman say anything which showed that he felt it as those who have
known such scenery from boyhood might have expected him to do.
After some five years at Caterham, he began his academical studies at
University College, London; but, on the strength of a scholarship, soon
removed to University College, Aberystwyth (1890), where the
scenery--sea, heron-haunted estuaries, wooded down to the very shore,
and hills here and there rising almost into mountains--offered
surroundings far more congenial to him than the streets and squares of
Bloomsbury.
In these new surroundings, he seems to have been exceptionally happy,
throwing himself into all the interests of the place, athletic as well as
intellectual, and endearing himself both to his teachers and his
fellow-students. His friendship with Professor Herford, then Professor
of English at Aberystwyth, was one of the chief pleasures of his student
days as well as of his after life. Following his natural bent, he decided
to study for Honours in English Language and Literature, and at the
end of his course (1893) was placed in the Second Class by the
examiners for the University of London, to which the Aberystwyth
College was at that time affiliated. Those who believe in the virtue of
infant prodigies--and, in the country which invented Triposes and Class
Lists, it is hard to fix any limit to their number--will be distressed to
learn that, in the opinion of those best qualified to judge of such matters,
he was not at that time reckoned to be of "exceptionally scholarly
calibre." Perhaps this was an omen all the better for his future prospects
as a scholar.
It is a wholesome practice that, when the cares of examinations