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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NETHER STOWEY IN these days of many biographies auto and other bristling with personalities and private gossip, to say of any fresh addition to their number that it is eminently " racy " might easily convey a wrong impression, and encourage false hopes. And yet that much-abused epithet is precisely applicable to the memoir of Tom Poole Coleridge's, Wordsworth's, Lamb's, and everybody's Tom Poole which has just been given us by Mrs. Henry Sandford, herself one of that remarkable Somersetshire family.1 She has to tell of many persons, such as those just mentioned, " familiar in our mouths as household words," because of their literary importance; and yet it is not too much to say that the peculiar charm of her narrative is due even more to the bit of unfamiliar English scenery among which her characters move, and which did so much to direct their genius and even to mould their characters. The book is racy because it is " racy of the soil." Mrs.Sandford here and there betrays a slight nervousness lest by letting in the light of day upon her beloved Somersetshire hills and coombs she should be inviting the irrepressible tourist, and endangering for all time the quiet and loneliness which now add to the charm of the Quantock country. Not that she is selfish, like the literary gentleman who objected to Chaucer being modernised because he wished to keep the poet " for himself and a few friends," only she confesses, with much reason, that the solitude and the untroddenness of the Quantocks have a fascination all their own. Mrs. Sandford clearly knows and loves the country she describes, and she has the art of making her readers know and love it too. And though some among these readers may have heard for the first time through this very book of the noble and public-spirited tanner of ...