Those who have homes, when home they do repair,

To a last lodging call their wandering friends:

Their short uneasy sleeps are broke with care,

To look how near their own destruction tends.

Those who have none, sit round where once it was,

And with full eyes each wonted room require;

Haunting the yet warm ashes of the place,

As murder’d men walk where they did expire.

— John Dryden, from “Annus Mirabilis”

“Poor Dryden! what with his wife—consort one can not call her, and helpmeet she was not—and with a tribe of tobacconist brothers on one hand, and proud Howards on the other; and a host of titled associates, and his bread to dig with his pen, one pities him from one's heart. Well might he, when his wife once said it would be much better for her to be a book than a woman, for then she should have more of his company, reply, ‘I wish you were, my dear, an almanac, and then I could change you once a year.’ It is not well to look much into such a home, except for a warning.”

— William Howitt

The collected work Views of the Haunts and Homes of the British Poets, Oct. 19 1850., found by Christopher Ricks in the little bookshop in Nailsworth just a few miles from his home in Gloucestershire, contains the original mixed media/watercolour illustrations for the Howitt Haunts and Homes, presumably made by either one or both of the Measom brothers, George Samuel and William, (The London edition credits “The Illustrations by W. and G. Measom”) and bound for preservation in 1850, after the publication of the two Howitt volumes.

Published as a limited edition of 100 Views of the Haunts and Homes of the British Poets is available in the Un-Gyve bookstore.