[In the following excerpt, Marsh characterizes Reynolds as a writer whose taste in poetry exceeded his talent.]

The rocket-like career of John Hamilton Reynolds has in it much that is puzzling, or at best uncertain; much that is pathetic, verging on the tragic. Here is one who at nineteen attracted Byron's attention as a clever young disciple; who at twenty-two was bracketed with Shelley and Keats as one of the young men destined to carry forward the torch of English poetry, and became thenceforth one of the closest and most intimate friends and correspondents of Keats. Later, though he had become a solicitor, he was associated with Lamb, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Hood, and lesser lights on the staff of the most brilliant magazine of the day, and he continued intermittently to maintain relations with important literary men in a divided allegiance between law and literature. Yet, for reasons that we only partly know and partly guess, he failed to justify the promise of his youth and gradually dropped from notice, dying at fifty-eight—a disappointed, prematurely old man, after some years of exile in the Isle of Wight—an exile, it is to be feared, painfully resembling that of Burns at Dumfries.

Shrewsbury was his birthplace; September 9, 1794, the date; thus he was a little more than a year older than Keats. The Dictionary of National Biography, without statement of authority, made the year 1796; but the Register of St. Mary's Parish, Shrewsbury, contains a record of the baptism on September 29, 1794, of John Hamilton Reynolds, son of George and Charlotte Reynolds. This earlier date is in harmony, and 1796 is not in harmony, with Leigh Hunt's understanding that Keats was the youngest of the three ‘young poets’—Shelley, Reynolds, and Keats—whom he attempted to introduce to a reluctant public in 1816, and with all other contemporary indications as to Reynolds's age.

George Reynolds, the father, was a schoolmaster, an expert in the then famous Bell, or Madras, system of education—a question-and-answer method devised by the Reverend Andrew Bell, who became Superintendent of the Madras Male Orphan Asylum in 1789. It has long been known that the senior Reynolds was writing master in Christ's Hospital at the time of the intimacy of his family with Keats, but most of the following details are the results of investigations by the editor of this volume.

According to Christ's Hospital records, George Reynolds, ‘only son of Noble Reynolds of St. Michael, Cornhill, who was a freeman of the City of London and of the Barbers' Company,’ was baptized on January 20, 1765, at St. Olave, Hart Street. From March 16, 1774, to October 13, 1779, George Reynolds was a pupil at Christ's Hospital. What further education he may have received, and when or where he began to teach, we do not yet know; but the Shrewsbury Parish Register already cited describes him as ‘writing master’ in a record of the baptism of his daughter Eliza in 1799, and as ‘school master’ in a like record for his daughter Charlotte in 1802.

The entrance of John Hamilton Reynolds in St. Paul's School, London, on March 4, 1806, seems to indicate the removal of the family from Shrewsbury before that date; and during the years up to 1817 George Reynolds apparently held positions in several different institutions. Before his permanent appointment as writing master to Christ's Hospital in May 1817, he served the ‘blue-coat school’ for seven years as usher in its writing school; but the record does not show whether these seven years were before or after, or partly before and partly after, his residence in Shrewsbury. In 1809, however, Christ's Hospital paid him ‘£20 for visiting the Hertford school and introducing there Dr. Bell's system of education;’ and in the same year he published The Simple Rules of Arithmetic, in Questions and Answers … on Dr. Bell's Plan. Three years later, when his Teachers Arithmetic … on the Rev. Dr. Bell's System appeared, he was described on the title-page as ‘Master of the Lambeth Boys’ Parochial School, and Writing Master to the Female Asylum, Lambeth’. And the latter position, at least, he held for some time after his permanent appointment in Christ's Hospital, as a letter written by his son in 1820 shows. In 1813, 1818, 1822, and finally in 1838, he published school books, all on arithmetic except The Madras School Grammar, which was dedicated to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1813. This, by the way, is not an English Grammar, but deals in catechism style with methods of organizing and teaching classes—the Bell system.

George Reynolds continued as writing master in Christ's Hospital from May 1817 till March 1835, when he was retired on a pension at the age of seventy. He did not die, however, till July 29, 1853, outliving his son by several months and passing the age of eighty-eight.

Charlotte Reynolds, the wife of George, whose maiden name was Cox, seems to have been older than he; born in 1761 according to Buxton Forman's information from her daughter Charlotte. She also lived to an advanced age, until May 13, 1848. After passing sixty-five years she fell victim to the family's bent toward authorship, publishing in 1827, under the pseudonym Mrs. Hamerton, a moral tale for children called Mrs. Leslie and her Grandchildren, about which Lamb wrote to Hood as follows: ‘We have all been pleased with Mrs. Leslie: I speak it most sincerely. There is much manly sense with a feminine expression, which is my definition of ladies' writing.’

In the preface to her book the fictitious Mrs. Hamerton declared herself to have ‘bred up nine daughters to womanhood’. Whether or not this is literally true of Mrs. Reynolds, only four of her daughters are known to us, but three of these are of real interest. Of the two who corresponded with Keats, Jane married Thomas Hood and Marianne became mother of Charles and Townley Green, artists of some note. Charlotte, the youngest of the family so far as we know, survived, a spinster, till 1884 and gave considerable information to Buxton Forman. She it is who used to play for Keats by the hour and whose music is supposed to have inspired the song, ‘Hush, hush! tread softly!’

The first known record of the boy John Hamilton Reynolds after that of his baptism is of his entrance at Shrewsbury School in 1803; next, three years later, of his entrance at St. Paul's School, then in St. Paul's Churchyard. In one of the primary sources of information about Reynolds—an article signed ‘T. M. T.’ in Notes and Queries for 1856, and evidently written by some one with personal knowledge—it is said that after completing his education at St. Paul's School he became a clerk in the Amicable Insurance office. This assertion is supported by indications in the records of the ‘Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance Office’, now in possession of the Norwich Union, which absorbed the ‘old Amicable’ in 1866. According to Amicable minutes, three clerks were employed in the office early in 1810, the names of two of whom appear, but not that of the third. ‘For some time prior to July 1810’, however, ‘practically all the declarations … were witnessed by the second clerk, John Griffin, but on 18th July 1810 a declaration was witnessed by J. H. Reynolds. After this date most of the declarations were witnessed by Mr. Reynolds until 1816 when some were witnessed by J. H. Reynolds and some by W. B. Wedlake. The last declaration witnessed by Mr. Reynolds that we can trace is dated 24th April 1816. It appears therefore that Mr. Reynolds entered the service of the Amicable not later than July 1810 and remained with the Society at any rate until April 1816.’¹ A specimen signature is like the writing in the few known manuscripts by Reynolds.

His junior clerkship in the Amicable Society, then, was Reynolds's main employment when he first burst into literature very early in 1814, seven months before he was twenty, as an imitator of the most popular poetic idol of the day, in Safie, an Eastern Tale. Of this poem he evidently sent a copy to Byron, to whom it was dedicated and who wrote of it as follows in his Journal for February 20:

‘Answered—or rather acknowledged—the receipt of young Reynolds's poem, Safie. The lad is clever, but much of his thoughts are borrowed—whence, the Reviewers may find out. I hate discouraging a young one; and I think,—though wild and more oriental than he would be, had he seen the scenes where he has placed his tale,—that he has much talent, and, certainly fire enough.’

Byron's letter to Reynolds of the same date, after thanks and good wishes, comments thus:

‘The poem itself, as the work of a young man, is creditable to your talents, and promises better for future efforts than any which I can now recollect. Whether you intend to pursue your poetical career, I do not know and have no right to inquire—but, in whatever channel your abilities are directed, I think it will be your own fault if they do not eventually lead to distinction.’

Then follows some advice as to the best attitude toward criticism which reads oddly enough from the pen of the author of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. This is a part of it:

‘The best reply to all objections is to write better, and if your enemies will not then do you justice, the world will. On the other hand, you should not be discouraged; to be opposed is not to be vanquished, though a timid mind is apt to mistake every scratch for a mortal wound.’

The kindness of Byron to his young disciple went still farther, for on February 28 he wrote as follows to his friend Francis Hodgson:

‘There is a youngster, and a clever one, named Reynolds, who has just published a poem called Safie, published by Cawthorne. He is in the most natural and fearful apprehension of the Reviewers; and as you and I both know by experience the effect of such things upon a young mind, I wish you would take his production into dissection, and do it gently. I cannot, because it is inscribed to me; but I assure you this is not my motive for wishing him to be tenderly entreated, but because I know the misery, at his time of life, of untoward remarks upon first appearance.’

Within a short time after the appearance of Safie one of its publishers, John Martin of Holles Street, Cavendish Square, started a periodical called The Inquirer, or Literary Miscellany, in the first number of which, dated May 1814, are three contributions signed ‘J. H. R.’, who beyond any reasonable doubt was John Hamilton Reynolds. Two of these are poems; the third is a prose article ‘On the Character of Hamlet’. The last number of the short-lived Inquirer, dated January 1815, contains another poem signed ‘J. H. R.’; and in both this and the other numbers there are unsigned articles on the contemporary stage which, in view of Reynolds's known later employment as a dramatic critic and his evident relations with Martin, the publisher, one is tempted to ascribe to him.

In August 1814 Martin and the other publisher of Safie, James Cawthorn, brought out a second little book for their young poet, The Eden of Imagination, in which the influence of Wordsworth supersedes the influence of Byron.

The Notes and Queries article already mentioned attributes to Reynolds ‘an Ode on the Overthrow of Napoleon’. No such work appears in the British Museum Catalogue in connexion with Reynolds's name, nor has an inquiry for it brought any reply as yet; but in the Anti-Jacobin Review and True Churchman's Magazine for April 1815 there is a review headed and beginning as follows:

‘An Ode.’ 8vo. pp. 18. Martin, Holles-street. 1815.

‘The lines which bear this laconic title are the substance of a soliloquy of the tyrant of Elba, previous to his return to the scene of his crimes.’

Nearly sixty lines of the ‘Ode’ are quoted, the citations making up almost the whole review. From the fact that Martin of Holles Street was one of the two publishers of Reynolds's little books of 1814 and was the sole publisher of The Inquirer, it seems probable that this review is of the poem meant by ‘T. M. T.’

Late in 1815, when our young Amicable clerk was a little past twenty-one, he appears to have made a connexion with the Champion Sunday newspaper which was to be very important for about two years. Keats's letters provide evidence of Reynolds's connexion with The Champion during 1817, and with this as a starting-point it is easy to go back through the files and identify a large amount of material in that newspaper as by Reynolds. The earliest Champion article that can be confidently assigned to him is a prose appreciation of Wordsworth, thoroughly in harmony with The Eden of Imagination, signed ‘R.’ in the issue of December 10, 1815; and from the beginning of 1816 both prose and poetry signed ‘R.’ or ‘J. H. R.’ appear frequently, besides innumerable unsigned theatrical notices of which the vast majority were probably by him as the regular dramatic critic of the journal. A number of the Champion poems signed by initials were later reprinted in one or another of the collections known to be by Reynolds, and there are various other bits of evidence that all contributions signed ‘J. H. R.’ were his, and at least several of those signed ‘R.’

One of the ‘J. H. R.’ articles, in The Champion of April 7, 1816, entitled ‘The Pilgrimage of Living Poets to the Stream of Castaly’, is a decidedly interesting ‘vision of poets’ in which Wordsworth is particularly exalted, and begins with the following sentence which is startlingly prophetic of what came to be Reynolds's attitude toward his own work in poetry:

‘I am one of those unfortunate youths to whom the Muse has glanced a sparkling of her light—one of those who pant for distinction, but have not within them that immortal power which alone can command it.’

Besides all his newspaper work, Reynolds also published, before the autumn of 1816, The Naiad: a Tale, with Other Poems. This collection was issued anonymously; but the last two pieces had appeared in The Champion as by ‘J. H. R.’ and it was The Naiad and its companions that Hunt had in mind when he discussed Reynolds with Shelley and Keats. Moreover, Reynolds sent a copy of the little book to Wordsworth with a request for criticism which the Lake poet took all too seriously to hold his young admirer's personal allegiance. A letter from Wordsworth to Reynolds, dated at Rydal Mount, November 28, 1816, first published by Mr. Henry C. Shelley in The Lamp in 1904 and later in his Literary By-Paths in Old England, contains the following comments:

… ‘Your poem is composed with elegance and in a style that accords with the subject, but my opinion on this point might have been of more value if I had seen the Scottish ballad on which your work is founded. You do me the honour of asking me to find fault in order that you may profit by my remarks. … I will not scruple to say that your poem would have told more upon me, if it had been shorter. … Your fancy is too luxuriant, and riots too much upon its own creations. Can you endure to be told by one whom you are so kind as to say you respect that in his judgment your poem would be better without the first 57 lines (not condemned for their own sakes), and without the last 146, which nevertheless have in themselves much to recommend them? The basis is too narrow for the superstructure, and to me it would have been more striking barely to have hinted at the deserted Fair One and to have left it to the imagination of the reader to dispose of her as he liked. Her fate dwelt upon at such length requires of the reader a sympathy which cannot be furnished without taking the Nymph from the unfathomable abyss of the cerulean waters and beginning afresh upon terra firma. I may be wrong but I speak as I felt, and the most profitable criticism is the record of sensations, provided the person affected be under no partial influence.’

However sound this criticism may be, however studiously polite the letter, it may easily be understood to have had a chilling effect upon the recipient. Reynolds was still very young; he had been for at least two years a great admirer of Wordsworth, whom he obviously imitated in some of the work of this volume; he was brilliant, very ambitious, impetuous and temperamental—no wonder if henceforth he could not look upon Wordsworth with the enthusiasm displayed in The Eden of Imagination; no wonder that in a little over two years he could write the ‘ante-natal Peter Bell’.

Publication of The Naiad by Taylor and Hessey, who are remembered chiefly because they gave the world Keats's volumes of 1818 and 1820, began a relationship of Reynolds with that kindly firm which lasted a good many years; but a more important event of 1816 for Reynolds was his introduction to what we now call the Keats circle, though at the time it bore an evil name to many as the Hunt circle. Besides Leigh Hunt, radical editor of The Examiner, the painter Haydon was at the moment the most conspicuous member of this group. To him on November 20, 1816, Keats sent his sonnet beginning,

‘Great spirits now on earth are sojourning’;

and the next day Reynolds addressed a ‘Sonnet to Haydon’ which appeared in The Champion on November 24. On Sunday, December 1, Hunt published in The Examiner his famous article on Shelley, Reynolds, and Keats as the most promising young poets in the field; and on December 8 Reynolds attempted payment by printing in The Champion a sonnet complimentary to Hunt's Story of Rimini. The Examiner article calls Reynolds ‘John Henry’, but by the remark that ‘his nature seems very true and amiable’ implies personal acquaintance. Safie and The Naiad are the only writings of Reynolds that Hunt mentions. The first twenty-seven lines of the latter poem are quoted and other extracts are promised for the future—but never given. Whatever interest Hunt had in Reynolds seems quickly to have subsided, for after this first winter of their acquaintance they seldom mention each other, and there are in later letters distinctly unflattering remarks of each about the other.

But with Keats the case was very different. He and Reynolds apparently met this autumn or early winter of 1816, probably at Hunt's, soon were fast friends, and remained such to the last. Though there came a time when the Reynolds sisters ceased to please Keats, nothing in his correspondence indicates other than the friendliest feelings toward their brother John, who in his turn remained steadfastly one of the most valued and useful friends of Keats. It should be remembered, too, that a young man of a mean or jealous spirit might have found Reynolds's position no easy one. He was older than Keats and to some extent an accepted poet when Keats began to publish; but he seems immediately to have recognized his friend's superior genius, and, though for more than a year he continued to cherish ardent poetical ambitions for himself, not the slightest indication of envy or jealousy on his part is known. While Reynolds was still on the staff of The Champion, contributing to its columns most of the original poetry they contained, a correspondent wrote to the newspaper as follows:

‘I have seen some lines in your paper, occasionally, signed J. H. R., which have pleased me much. I think that the writer (whoever he is) can furnish something much better than your favourite Mr. Keats, whom my perverseness of taste forbids me to admire.’

Two weeks later The Champion printed Keats's ‘Sonnet on the Sea’, with the comment that the editor considered this sonnet—

‘quite sufficient … to justify all the praise we have given [the author]—and to prove to our correspondent … his superiority over any poetical writer in the Champion.—J. H. R. would be the first to acknowledge this himself.’

It is altogether likely that this comment was made with Reynolds's knowledge and consent; at any rate it had no evident effect on his attitude toward Keats. ‘I set my heart on having you high,’ he once wrote to Keats, ‘as you ought to be. Do you get Fame, and I shall have it in being your affectionate and steady friend.’

The best biographers of Keats have duly stressed the services rendered him by Reynolds: the happy rewriting of the preface to Endymion that was caused by Reynolds's criticism of the first draft; the defence of Keats against the Quarterly which Reynolds printed in an Exeter newspaper and Hunt reprinted in The Examiner; perhaps above all the sympathy of a kindred spirit which Keats's letters indicate he found in Reynolds. A large part of his most significant discussion of his art is to be found in those letters to Reynolds.

More potent than Keats in the life of this friend, however, was a certain dark-eyed girl of Exeter with whom Reynolds seems to have fallen in love not long after his acquaintance with Keats began. Under the spell of her and the beautiful Devon scenes in which she dwelt, and of poetic rivalry with his ardent young friend Keats, the modest and never too steadfast genius of Reynolds made its most notable efflorescence. This is revealed especially in ‘The Romance of Youth’ and such shorter poems as ‘Devon’ in The Garden of Florence collection, as well as in several charming songs and sonnets. This Exeter girl was Miss Eliza Powell Drewe, of whom little is known except that at the time of her marriage she was described as ‘eldest daughter of the late W. Drewe, Esq., of South street’; that she had dark hair and eyes; that she (or her worldly-wise family) persuaded her literary lover to become a solicitor. Reynolds's poems of 1817 indicate a quick and happy courtship. For a considerable part of the summer he was in Devon, evidently near the sea, and about the end of the year he visited at Exeter, as we know from Keats's acting for him as dramatic critic of The Champion.

Evidently Reynolds did not return to The Champion on coming back to London, for there is no indication of work by him in that newspaper in 1818, and in a letter of January 23 Keats mentions Dilke's ‘having taken The Champion theatricals’. During February 1818, according to Keats, Reynolds contributed to The Yellow Dwarf, a short-lived periodical issued by Leigh Hunt's brother John; but anything like his literary activity of the preceding years was prevented by a serious illness which Keats frequently mentions in letters between February 21 and June 10. During, or perhaps just before, this illness, Reynolds evidently made that ‘great renunciation’ of which he several times wrote with a charming mixture of regret, misgiving, and loving if reluctant acceptance of the supposedly prudent decision. The ‘Farewell to the Muses’ that Reynolds inscribed in the volume of Shakespeare he gave to Keats, and in which Keats afterward wrote his ‘Bright star’ sonnet, is dated February 14, 1818; and George Keats's comment of March 18 on Reynolds's illness as ‘deadening his hopes of … advance in business’ seems to imply entrance into ‘business’ before that date. Our most exact information on this matter comes from Dilke, who succeeded Reynolds on The Champion (as has been noted) and many years later was associated with him in proprietorship of The Athenœum. ‘Rice’—says Dilke, as quoted by Forman—‘suggested that he should become a lawyer, and his relation, Mr. Fladgate—himself a literary man in early life and editor of the “Sun” newspaper—consented to receive him as an Articled Pupil, and dear generous noble James Rice—the best, and in his quaint way one of the wittiest and wisest men I ever knew—paid the fee or stamp or whatever it is called—about £110 I believe—and promised if he ever succeeded to his father's business to take him in partner. He not only kept his word, but in a few years gave up the business to him.’

When Keats, then, writes to Reynolds from Scotland in July 1818, he makes jocular remarks about ‘you and Frank Floodgate in the office’ (the Mr. Fladgate mentioned above had a son Frank who also was an ‘articled clerk’) and declares that ‘now one of the first pleasures I look to is your happy Marriage’. But, though Reynolds spent six weeks in Devon during September and October and gave Keats the impression of being ‘almost over-happy’ and ‘going on gloriously’ (letter to Dilke of September 21), his marriage was yet far in the future, and we do not know why unless it was deemed prudent to wait till he became well established in business. It was during his rather long holiday for a would-be solicitor that he contributed to an Exeter newspaper the important defence of Keats against the Quarterly to which Hunt gave the more general publicity afforded by reprinting in his Examiner. Toward the end of the year Reynolds went again to Devonshire because of ‘a great Misfortune in the Drewe Family—old Drewe has been dead some time; and lately George Drewe expired in a fit’. (So Keats wrote in the chronicle letter to his brother and sister-in-law which he finished January 4, 1819.) Presumably George Drewe was a brother of Reynolds's sweetheart.

Whatever good intentions of settling down to business Reynolds may have had when he renounced the Muses on St. Valentine's Day of 1818, he seldom managed for any considerable period of time to refrain from literary indulgence in some form. In October, as already noted, he published his long article in defence of Keats. By the end of the year, according to Keats, he had ‘become an Edinburgh Reviewer’. In April 1819 he dashed off his famous ‘ante-natal Peter Bell’; and in July and at intervals for some months thereafter his One, Two, Three, Four, Five: by Advertisement; a Musical Entertainment in one Act, was played with considerable success. Early in the next summer he published The Fancy (1820); still earlier in 1821 The Garden of Florence; and with the August number for the latter year his prose articles in the London Magazine began. All these lapses from strict attention to solicitorship occurred before his marriage.

Reynolds's brilliant biographical sketch of Peter Corcoran, pretended author of The Fancy, suggests a possible explanation of his own Jacob-like service for his Devon love. Some details as to Peter Corcoran are certainly true of Reynolds himself (e. g. birth at Shrewsbury in September 1794, and study of the law); but some are not true (e. g. attendance at Oxford and early death). Nevertheless, when Mr. John Masefield reprinted The Fancy in 1905, he accepted as substantially autobiographical the whole story of Corcoran's passion for sport, his trouble with his sweetheart because of it, his neglect of his profession and even of poetry. If this view were sound, however, there should be more support for it in the contemporary comments on Reynolds, especially in the letters of Keats and other friends. These show, as we have seen, the most intimate relations with the Drewe family to the end of 1818, and the letters of Keats give no hint of excessive devotion to sport on Reynolds's part. Moreover, he was too busy: throughout 1817—the year in which Peter Corcoran is said to have become a continual visitor at the Fives-Court—Reynolds was an industrious dramatic critic and was in friendly competition with Keats in ardent devotion to poetry; and the literary accomplishments summarized in the preceding paragraph, plus the study necessary to make him a solicitor by 1822 or earlier, seem incompatible with anything like the absorption in sport that is attributed to Peter Corcoran. No doubt Reynolds's long connexion with the stage brought him into contact with the ‘night life’ of the metropolis, and he obviously obtained an expert reporter's knowledge of the activities of ‘the fancy’. He may have felt at times that he enjoyed such frivolities too much—may even, like many another gay young lover, have been reproved and disciplined by his inamorata; but there is no contemporary evidence that as self-portraiture his characterization of Peter Corcoran contains more than a germ of truth.

However, so much literary activity after an alleged ‘Farewell to the Muses’ may well have displeased the young lady and her family as not aiding that progress in business necessary for the support of a wife; and if along with this there was even a little tendency toward over-enjoyment of sports, a period of estrangement may have occurred. In Keats's remarks to and about Reynolds after the letter that was completed January 4, 1819, there is no further mention of matrimonial prospects—a fact which may or may not be significant. But in September 1820 Reynolds wrote to Taylor from Exmouth in gay spirits except for some worry about Keats. And at any rate by the time of the publication of The Garden of Florence the estrangement, if there had been one, was ended, for in the library of the Marquess of Crewe there is a copy of that little volume bearing in Reynolds's hand the following inscription at the top of the fly-leaf: ‘Eliza Powell Drewe from her affectionate J. H. Reynolds 25th June 1821.’

The long-delayed marriage occurred finally August 31, 1822. In a brief notice in the London Magazine for October the bridegroom is described as ‘J. H. Reynolds, Esq., Solicitor, of Great Marlborough-street, London’. James Hessey, of Taylor and Hessey, who were then publishers of the London Magazine, wrote enthusiastically to the peasant poet John Clare as follows:

‘Reynolds is gone off to Exeter to be married, to-morrow is the happy day that is to witness the union of as interesting a couple as I ever met—a fine sensible high-spirited generous warm-hearted young fellow in the prime of youth and health and a pretty, intelligent, modest, interesting young girl, warmly attached to him as he is to her.’

Hood left a ‘humourous account of Reynolds's wedding drawn up in the form of a State procession’, which may be seen in full in Henry C. Shelley's Literary By-Paths in Old England. There is thus every indication that, whatever caused the delay, the final consummation of the wedding was a completely happy event.

Before proceeding with the career of Reynolds as a married man and solicitor, it is desirable to pick up a few scattered threads of biography, mainly literary, from the years of bachelor servitude to his ‘dark lady’. The first has to do with the real ‘hit’ of his career—his ‘runaway ring at Wordsworth's Peter Bell’, which Shelley called the ‘ante-natal Peter’ because published before the real one. Early in April 1819 London newspapers carried an advertisement to the effect that ‘in a few days will be published, Peter Bell, a Tale in Verse, by William Wordsworth, Esq.’ Reynolds heard of this announced poem and, according to Keats's account, ‘took it into his head to write a skit upon it called Peter Bell. He did it as soon as thought on, it is to be published this morning [April 15] and comes out before the real Peter Bell.’ Accordingly the following advertisement appeared April 16: ‘This day is published, in octavo, price 2s. 6d., Peter Bell:—a Lyrical Ballad. “I do affirm that I am the real Simon Pure.” Taylor and Hessey.’ And this anticipatory parody Keats reviewed for Hunt's Examiner of April 25.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, watchful friend of Wordsworth, saw an advertisement of the alleged ‘Simon Pure’ Peter Bell and wrote at once to the publishers, saying that he knew of Peter Bell as a poem of Wordsworth's, but had not heard of its publication. He protested against an attack on a work still in manuscript and asked for an opportunity to see the parody. The publishers at once sent him a copy of the little book and a letter containing the following interesting explanation and comment, which is in essential harmony with the views of Keats and a good many other admirers of Wordsworth at his best. Taylor and Hessey wrote:

‘It was written by a sincere admirer of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, by a person who has been his advocate in every place where he found opportunity of expressing an opinion on the subject, and we really think that when the original poem is published he will feel all the intense regard for the beauties which distinguishes the true lover of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry. The immediate cause of his writing this burlesque imitation of the “Idiot Boy” was the announcement of a new poem with so untimely a title as that of “Peter Bell”. He thought that all Mr. Wordsworth's excellencies might be displayed in some work which should be free from those ridiculous associations which vulgar names give rise to, and as a Friend he felt vexed that unnecessary obstacles were thus again thrown in the way of Mr. Wordsworth's popularity.

‘We are placed in a situation which enables us to see the effect of those peculiarities which this writer wishes Mr. Wordsworth to renounce, and we must say that they grieve his friends, gladden his adversaries, and are the chief, if not only, impediments to the favourable reception of his poems among all classes of readers.’

The whole of Taylor and Hessey's letter, as well as Coleridge's reply, may be seen in Mr. H. C. Shelley's Literary By-Paths in Old England.

The striking success of the anonymous Peter Bell is indicated by the fact that a second edition was advertised within two weeks of the publication of the first. Everybody seems to have enjoyed the jeu d'esprit except ardent admirers of Wordsworth who were unwilling to take a joke; and from this time Reynolds, in verse, was mainly a joker.

His ‘musical entertainment’ of 1819 received its odd name, One, Two, Three, Four, Five: by Advertisement, from the fact that the principal actor, a mimic, answering an advertisement, impersonates and imitates five noted figures on the stage of the day. Trivial as it seems, this effort was played as part of the bill at the English Opera House, London, more than fifty times, beginning July 17, and was the means of launching John Reeve upon a very successful career as a comedian. Keats was encouraged by this and by the periodical writings of Reynolds to think that he might make a living by his pen—Reynolds obviously could if he had not taken up the law, why not Keats?

Reynolds the humourist, the parodist, the burlesquer, is predominant in The Fancy of 1820; but during the summer of 1821 Reynolds, the friend of Keats, put into a little volume all that he cared to preserve of the serious poetry which for the most part he had written three or four years previously in a sort of rivalry with the friend now dead. This is The Garden of Florence and Other Poems by ‘John Hamilton’.

In 1821, also, began the connexion with the London Magazine which ‘T. M. T.’ in Notes and Queries declared to be ‘the only true period of his literary life. He now became associated with Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Allan Cunningham, George Darley, Barry Cornwall, Thomas Hood, and others, who met regularly at the hospitable table of the publishers [Taylor and Hessey], and by whom his wit and brilliancy were appreciated; and he was at that time one of the most brilliant men I have ever known.’ Another acquaintance, writer of the obituary notice of Reynolds in The Athenœum for November 27, 1852, said: ‘In every number of the London the traces of his light and pleasant pen were visible; and at every social meeting of the contributors … his familiar voice was heard, followed by a laugh as by an echo.’

It is not now possible to identify work by Reynolds in ‘every number’; but from the testimony of Hood, assistant editor of the magazine at this time, we know that he wrote the series of prose articles purporting to be by ‘Edward Herbert’. These are letters from a Londoner to a country family, the Powells (note that Reynolds's fiancée was Eliza Powell Drewe), dealing with such topics as the coronation of George IV, Greenwich Hospital, the green-room of a theatre, the inside of a stage-coach, the cockpit royal, etc. Apparently these ‘Edward Herbert’ articles attracted considerable attention, even in a magazine that was running the Essays of Elia and Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; for advertisements indicate a plan to publish them in book form ‘with etchings by George Cruikshank’. The book seems never to have been issued, but two of Cruikshank's etchings for it were said by the late Bertram Dobell to have been in existence as late as 1906. Between August 1821 and February 1824 there were eight of these ‘Edward Herbert’ articles in the London Magazine.

Meanwhile, married man and solicitor though he was, Reynolds had thrust his finger into other literary pies. ‘T. M. T.'s’ often quoted article of 1856 says that he ‘had a hand in preparing more than one of Mathews' monologues’. These were entertainments given year after year, single-handed, by the very popular actor Charles Mathews, who impersonated a whole series of comic characters in an evening, usually calling his entertainment, ‘Mr. Mathews at Home’. According to some unsigned reminiscences in the New Monthly Magazine for 1838 under the title, ‘The Manager's Note-Book’, Mathews's entertainment for 1822, first produced March 11 and called ‘The Youthful Days of Mr. Mathews’, was written by ‘Messrs. Peake and H. Reynolds’ (that is, Hamilton Reynolds, as he came to be called frequently). The next year Mathews was in America, and after his return he gave an entirely new ‘monopolylogue’ entitled ‘A Trip to America’—‘written by Mr. J. Smith, assisted by Mr. J. H. Reynolds.’ And on March 10, 1825, Mathews gave another new ‘at home’ called ‘Memorandum Book’, ‘from the pens of two gentlemen who had before so ably assisted him, Messrs. Peake and Reynolds.’ This last statement finds support in a letter of January 8, 1825, from Mathews to his wife: ‘I am delighted at the coöperation of Peake and Reynolds; but I hope they will work.’ Mrs. Mathews in a foot-note says that the Reynolds meant is ‘author of The Garden of Florence, etc., a charming writer’. She also cites a letter by Peake, who was a minor dramatist of the period, in which he mentions ‘my worthy colleague J. H. Reynolds’. Neither Mrs. Mathews's Memoirs of her husband nor the New Monthly article gives any hint of further participation by Reynolds in the Mathews entertainments, but Hood had a part in some later ones.

Soon after Reynolds's first work for Mathews he seems, according to a tradition in the Hood family, to have had a hand with Hood, and apparently Peake, in ‘the operatic drama of Gil Blas’, which was played at the English Opera House more than thirty times beginning August 15, 1822—a little more than two weeks before Reynolds's wedding. A notice of the piece in The Mirror of the Stage for August 26 includes this comment: ‘This then is the product of two or three, or more authors, and a summer's preparation. We regret that its attainment is so little profitable. The material of the piece is ascribed to Mr. Peake; and this we can easily discover, by the frequent attempts at punning.’ Hood's daughter, however, declared, ‘My father also assisted my uncle Reynolds in the dramatising of Gil Blas’; and though she is wrong as to the date and the place of presentation, she is likely to be right as to the fact of collaboration. Moreover, the contemporary comments indicate several authors; the amount of attention given the piece in the London Magazine suggests a friendly attitude toward it; and certainly ‘attempts at punning’ are no bar to Reynolds and Hood as co-authors, whatever may have been the reputation of Peake in that regard.

Reynolds's most important and successful collaboration with Hood came some years later, in the Odes and Addresses to Great People, published anonymously early in 1825 and reaching a third edition the next year. This book was generally considered the best collection of humourous and satirical verse since the Rejected Addresses of 1812, and Coleridge paid it the high compliment of insisting in letters to Lamb that he could think of no living person but Lamb who could have written it. A considerable majority of the poems have generally been attributed to Hood, and the whole collection has been reprinted in editions of Hood's works. Hood himself, however, in a copy of the book formerly in the possession of Buxton Forman, indicated that Reynolds was the author of the five following poems:

Ode to Mr. M‘Adam,
Address to Mr. Dymoke,
Address to Sylvanus Urban,
Address to R. W. Elliston,
Address to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster;

and that both he and Reynolds participated in the

Address to Maria Darlington.

But a copy given by Reynolds to Richard Monckton Milnes (afterward Lord Houghton), and now in the possession of the Marquess of Crewe, contains very circumstantial indications of authorship in Reynolds's hand, agreeing with Hood as far as the six poems mentioned above are concerned, but claiming for himself a share with Hood in five other poems, namely:

Ode to Mr. Graham,
Ode to Joseph Grimaldi,
Address to the Steam Washing Company,
Ode to Captain Parry,
Ode to W. Kitchener, M.D.

It is possible that the somewhat disgruntled Reynolds of his later years, having failed to live up to the promise of his youth, claimed a larger share than was really his in the most successful book in which he had a hand; yet his attitude in his correspondence with Milnes (as will be seen) was modest in relation to his own attainments, and his statements as to authorship must be considered to carry a certain weight.

The fact seems to be that for a number of years Reynolds, having a supposed gainful occupation as a solicitor, rather freely aided Hood in various ventures and paid little heed to credit for himself. Whims and Oddities, the Comic Annual, Hood's Own, all contain poems identifiable as by Reynolds yet usually printed with Hood's works. The two men seem to have met in 1821, probably through the connexion of both with the London Magazine. In his Literary Reminiscences of 1839, commenting on his editorial duties in the heyday of that magazine, Hood wrote: ‘How I used to look forward to Elia! and backward for Hazlitt, and all around for Edward Herbert!’ The earliest of Hood's longer poems, Lycus the Centaur, appeared in the London Magazine in 1822; and when, five years later, it was put into a book with The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies and other poems, a dedication to Reynolds read as follows:

‘My dear Reynolds: You will remember “Lycus”.—It was written in the pleasant spring-time of our friendship, and I am glad to maintain that association, by connecting your name with the Poem. It will gratify me to find that you regard it with the old partiality for the writings of each other, which prevailed in those days. For my own sake, I must regret that your pen goes now into far other records than those which used to delight me. Your true Friend and Brother, T. Hood.’

And again in 1831, when Hood made an illustrated book of The Dream of Eugene Aram, he honoured his brother-in-law with a dedication.

Hood had married Reynolds's sister Jane in 1825, and his published letters indicate very happy relations with his wife's family. With the somewhat peppery ‘J. H. R.’ indeed there came sometime, according to Hood's daughter, a misunderstanding; but her language is vague, being merely an expression of regret that the friendship of the two men ‘did not survive to the end’. For many years, nevertheless, there were close relations, both personal and literary—relations so intimate, in fact, that the Athenœum obituary notice remarked of Reynolds, ‘With him has probably passed away the person most competent to write the Life now wanted of Thomas Hood.’

The literary activities thus far indicated were by no means all in which Reynolds engaged. According to the friends who wrote about him in The Athenœum and in Notes and Queries within a short time after his death, he contributed to the Edinburgh Review, the Retrospective Review, the Westminster Review. Keats, about the end of 1818 (as has been noted), mentions his becoming ‘an Edinburgh Reviewer’; and a letter by Hazlitt indicates that the opportunity came through Hazlitt's intercession with Jeffrey. Precisely what article or articles he contributed, however, has not yet come to light; and the same is true with regard to the other reviews mentioned. Keats also writes of an offer to Reynolds by ‘Constable, the bookseller’, of ‘ten guineas a sheet to write for his Magazine—it is an Edinburgh one, which Blackwood's started up in opposition to’. The old Scots Magazine is meant; and in its numbers for October 1819 and August 1820 are articles entitled ‘Boswell Redivivus, a Dream’, and ‘Living Authors, a Dream’, which are only slightly different from contributions by ‘J. H. R.’ to The Champion during 1816. Somebody evidently discovered the way in which Reynolds was earning his ‘ten guineas a sheet’, for in the Scots Magazine for October 1820 appeared the following ‘Notice’:

‘A Correspondent has brought a charge of plagiarism against the writer of “Living Authors, a Dream”, which appeared in one of our late numbers. We have too high an opinion of the writer's originality to suppose that any other person ever dreamed his dream; but, like people who are fond of repeating their dreams, he may, for anything we know to the contrary, have related it before. We wish, to put the matter out of doubt, that he would send us his third dream, without delay, and, if it is akin to the former, and has never been seen elsewhere, the accusation will be laid to rest.’

Apparently this ended the relations of Reynolds with Constable.

His most important connexion with a periodical after the days of the London Magazine was with The Athenœum, of which he was one of the original proprietors when it was founded in 1828. He ‘retired from proprietorship’ in 1831, but continued to write for the journal occasionally for most of the rest of his life. The reminiscences of C. W. Dilke, who also was one of the original proprietors, include some letters by Reynolds—one of February 15, 1831, for example, protesting against the lowering of the price of single numbers of The Athenœum from eightpence to fourpence. Poems identifiable as his are to be found in this journal at intervals from 1832 to 1848, and he contributed many reviews. Early in 1832 appeared what was apparently intended for the beginning of a new series of ‘Edward Herbert’ letters; but from the lack of others we must conclude either that the name had lost its potency or that the author failed to provide the letters.

During the latter thirties and the forties Reynolds sustained intermittent relations with other magazines. ‘Hamilton Reynolds’ appears as a contributor to both Bentley's Miscellany and the New Monthly Magazine in 1837 and 1838. Running through four numbers of Ainsworth's Magazine for 1844 is ‘Oriana and Vesperella, or The City of Pearls’, a story of oriental setting, said to be by ‘John Hamilton’—which had been Reynolds's transparent nom-de-plume for The Garden of Florence; and farther on in the same volume of Ainsworth's is ‘An Odelet to Master Izaak Walton’, also by ‘John Hamilton’, which later provided the subject for an etching by the young Whistler. And again in Bentley's Miscellany, as late as 1847, were poems, this time signed by Reynolds's full name, entitled ‘The Two Enthusiasts’.

He continued also to be interested in the stage. On January 6, 1838, a farce called Confounded Foreigners was first acted at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, and was favourably noticed in The Athenœum of January 13 as ‘the joint production of Mr. George Dance and Mr. Hamilton Reynolds’; but a week later a signed letter by Reynolds was printed, saying that Dance suggested ‘the idea of the subject’, but that the ‘construction of the plot and the entire dialogue’ were the writer's own. During the same year this piece was printed as by ‘J. H. Reynolds, Esq.’, in volume three of The Acting National Drama, ‘edited by Benjamin Webster, Comedian’.

Reynolds's name was also considered worth mention on the title-page, along with Hood's, as a contributor to Sporting, a handsomely illustrated volume of 1838, edited by the then famous person who called himself ‘Nimrod’. Reynolds's sole identifiable contribution to the book is a poem in ottava rima stanzas on two fox-hounds belonging to a certain sporting member of Parliament.

Details of Reynolds's legal career are almost wholly lacking. At the time of his marriage in 1822, J. H. Reynolds, Solicitor, was of Great Marlborough Street; later London directories give the following addresses: in 1832, 27, Golden Square; in 1836-8, 10, Great Marlborough Street; in 1841-2, 10, Adam Street, Adelphi; and letters of 1846 from him to Richard Monckton Milnes give his address then as 88, Guildford Street, Russell Square. There seems to be no reason to doubt the statement of Dilke, who from his long acquaintance with Reynolds and their association on The Athenœum must have known the facts, that Reynolds ‘threw away this certain fortune’ offered by the partnership given him by Rice. Presumably he neglected business for the sake of writing and failed to ‘make a go’ of either. Possibly also convivial habits, of which there are at least hints in his palmiest days—and more than hints if he should be identified thoroughly with ‘Peter Corcoran’—became an increasing handicap. The nearly contemporary notices, already so often quoted, in The Athenœum and in Notes and Queries, contain the following significant comments:

Notes and Queries: ‘J. H. Reynolds was a man of genius, who wanted the devoted purpose and the sustaining power which are requisite to its development; and the world, its necessities and its pleasures, led him astray from literature. … Reynolds, though full of literary energy at that time, was always hurried and uncertain. He indeed played the old game of fast and loose between law and literature, pleasure and study.’

The Athenœum: ‘This divided duty, however, is rarely successful:—the law spoiled his literature, and his love of literature and society interfered with the drudging duties of the lawyer. The contest ended only with his life.’

On his personal and family life we have just one tragic flashlight, in a letter from John Taylor to John Clare dated January 9, 1835: ‘Our Friend Reynolds … has lost a Child—but she was his only Child, a Daughter, ten years of age, & I understand he grieves for her Loss.’ …

Probably the most striking characteristic of Reynolds as a writer is the extent to which he was a weathercock. He began with a school-boyish imitation of Byron's Eastern romances, and later (in ‘The Fields of Tothill’ in The Fancy) attempted the style of Beppo and Don Juan. He wrote nature poetry and ballads of humble life (in The Naiad volume) in direct and serious imitation of Wordsworth; then turned and, in the very amusing Peter Bell, parodied Wordsworth's most pedestrian manner. In ‘The Naiad’ he elaborated a Scotch ballad in a style almost equally compounded of Scott and Hunt. He wrote a good many sonnets and versified stories from Boccaccio in friendly competition with Keats; and during the same period he undertook a long Spenserian poem which, though essentially autobiographical, has its points of relationship with Beattie's Minstrel and Shelley's Alastor. After success with Peter Bell and his reputation among his friends had convinced him that he was chiefly a wit, he joined Hood in punning verses on contemporary celebrities.

In prose also he tried nearly all kinds of writing. His earliest known prose article is ‘On the Character of Hamlet’, and during the brief period of his life when he was, as we may assume, exclusively a writer, he was dramatic reporter for a Sunday newspaper. To that paper he contributed also a good deal of literary criticism—on Wordsworth, Chaucer, and others—and some ‘vision papers’ that were largely critical. His sketch of ‘Peter Corcoran’ in The Fancy is good biographical narrative. The ‘Edward Herbert’ papers in the London Magazine are fluent sketches of current events and interesting places about town. For The Athenœum he did journeyman reviewing of new books; and he beguiled the tedium of solicitorship by undertaking magazine fiction. His several dramatic attempts, though containing songs, are mostly prose.

Of all this prose the criticism is most worth resuscitation. What he had to say of Wordsworth, both seriously and in satire, is of distinct interest; and his defence of Keats against the Quarterly is one of the most penetrating and valuable of the early comments on that abused young poet.

The young Reynolds was in some respects amazingly like the young Keats—eager for sense impressions, enthusiastically devoted to poetry, bent upon writing—writing—whether or not he had anything to say. Considering its very simple story, Safie is spun out to surprising length; displays, for the product of a lad of nineteen, remarkable ingenuity in saying a little with all possible variety. Wordsworth's comments (quoted on page 17, above) indicate how ‘The Naiad’, likewise, was padded. The later narratives from Boccaccio have more action, move more directly, are less compounded of ‘words, words’; but the tendency toward over-elaboration is as marked in ‘The Romance of Youth’ as it is in Endymion.

The fault seems to have been primarily a lack of power of selection. Words, images—sometimes even thoughts—crowded in and were heaped up beyond measure. He dashed off what occurred to his fertile mind and had not enough patience in revision or power of self-criticism to prune down and perfect his work. Very often there are striking expressions; phrases, lines, or short passages of genuine beauty or power; but too seldom is the poetic mood sustained. In brief, fixed forms, such as the sonnet, Reynolds frequently did well; but even here he shows deficiency in ability to polish.

In early life, when he spent much time in Devon near the sea, he had a genuine Wordsworthian love of the beautiful nature about him, and expressed that love worthily and well in such poems as ‘Devon’ and ‘The Wood’. There is fanciful charm in his treatment of fairy lore and real lyrical beauty in several songs. Such songs as the one with the refrain, ‘And think of me’, and the one beginning, ‘By the river’ (pages 143 and 153), surprise the reader by their foretaste of Tennyson's early work, as in the handling of double rimes, especially with verb forms in ‘eth’.

Curiously enough, some of Reynolds's best poetry expresses his renunciation of poetry—the sonnets from the preface to The Fancy; the ‘Farewell to the Muses’ inscribed in the copy of Shakespeare which he gave to Keats; the lighter but in some parts charming verses of dedication in The Garden of Florence.

Of his satirical and humorous verses little need be said. Peter Bell speaks eloquently for itself; it is still, as it always was, one of the best parodies of Wordsworth. But the wit of such work as the Odes and Addresses, which deal mostly with persons and events now forgotten or known only to specialists in the period, is sadly dulled. Reynolds wrote, too, in an age when even so great a man as Lamb considered punning to be a large element of wit, and the effect of that view on lesser men is not always pleasant to contemplate.

All in all, however, though the imperfections of Reynolds's work be granted, he scarcely deserves remembrance solely as a friend to whom Keats wrote important letters. He was a real personality in his time, even among men far greater than himself; and he wrote a considerable amount of both prose and verse of decided value to students of literature because of the ways in which it reflected current movements, and of interest, also, to readers—‘few, though fit’—who have learned or are willing to learn that even the minor poetry, the minor prose, of a past epoch has its qualities.

Note

1. From a letter by W. W. Williamson, Assistant Actuary of the Norwich Union, to the editor of this volume, dated March 18, 1927.