On December 18^th, 1818, Richard Lower had toured Westminster Abbey and afterwards put his impressions of England’s greatest shrine to the famous into a poem. He surveyed the many memorials to monarchs, philosophers, statesmen, scientists and

Heroes with brows entwined in glorious laurels –
(those wreaths brought woe, and death, and desolation,
Stained earth and sea with gore – made parents groan –
While houseless widows lead their hapless brood
In dire dejection through a thankless land!)

Until at last he came to Poets’ Corner. Here the tombs and monuments to England’s poets stirred in the Sussex schoolmaster, parish official and versifier an intense desire to possess “some small spark of that celestial fire here buried” so that he, himself, might

Chant the praise of that neglected few
Whose ashes strive to teach, where words have failed
To warn the vicious. Here the wise may learn
In one short lesson more than sculptured brass
In ages can convey. Here all may read
In language mortals dare not misconstrue –
“The world’s a cheat – all things show it;
Once I thought so; now I know it!”

To Richard Lower, God was supreme – to be feared, respected and loved but among mortal men his heroes were the great English poets, the men , such as Milton, who could express great religious truths in poetry grand and beautiful. His ambition, always, must have been to emulate them. In this he did not succeed. Perhaps he simply never possessed that “spark of celestial fire” called poetic genius. Perhaps it was, though, that his very reverence and respect for Literary English, the language of Milton, so restricted the poetic flow of the Sussex village lad, that that spark was never fanned into a flame. His natural flow in verse came in the language of his childhood, the old Sussex dialect; and in that he left us two stories that not only entertain, but illuminate for us the lives of the poor, depressed and now almost forgotten field workers of Sussex. For that he deserves to be remembered, which is why this book closes with………