I

In a letter written to Kelsall in 1824, Beddoes makes the following remarks on the poetical situation of the moment:—

The disappearance of Shelley from the world seems, like the tropical setting of that luminary to which his poetical genius can alone be compared, with reference to the companions of his day, to have been followed by instant darkness and owl-season: whether the vociferous Darley is to be the comet, or tender full-faced L. E. L. the milk-and-watery moon of our darkness, are questions for the astrologers; if I were the literary weather-guesser for 1825 I would safely prognosticate fog, rain, blight in due succession for its dullard months.

When these words were written, the death of Byron four months previously had closed, for English readers, a romantic phase of our national verse. If Keats, Shelley, and Byron, however, were gone, it may be objected that all the other great poets of the age survived. This is true in a physical sense, but how many of them were still composing verse of any brilliant merit? Not Coleridge, long ago stricken dumb to verse; not Wordsworth, prosing on without the stimulus of inspiration; even Moore or Southey were vocal no longer; Campbell and Scott had practically taken farewell of the Muse. English poetry had been in blossom from 1795 to 1820, but the marvellous bloom was over, and the petals were scattered on the grass.

The subject of this memoir began to write at the very moment of complete exhaustion, when the age was dazzled with excess of genius, and when the nation was taking breath for a fresh burst of song. He had the misfortune to be a young man when Keats and Shelley were just dead, and when Tennyson and Browning were schoolboys. In the words which have just been quoted he has given a humorous view of the time, which shows that, at the age of twenty-one, he had grasped its characteristics. Among his exact contemporaries there was no one, except Praed, who was some months his senior, who inherited anything like genius. Beddoes was four years younger than Hood, two years older than Elizabeth Barrett. No other name has survived worthy of being even named beside his as a poet, except Macaulay, with whom he has nothing in common. He was early dissuaded from the practice of verse, and all that he has left, which is of any sterling value, was composed between 1821, when he published The Improvisatore, and 1826, when he practically finished Death's Jest Book. He belongs to those five years of exhaustion and mediocrity, and the effect of having to write at such a period, there can be no doubt, dwarfed, restrained, and finally quenched his poetical faculty. It is not saying much, yet it is mere justice to insist, that Beddoes was, during those five years, the most interesting talent engaged in writing English verse.

II

Thomas Lovell Beddoes was born in Rodney place, Clifton, on the 20th of July, 1803. He was the eldest son of a celebrated physician, Dr. Thomas Beddoes, who died in 1809, and left his son to the guardianship of Davies Giddy, afterwards known as Sir Davies Gilbert, P.R.S., who lived for thirty years longer. The boy's mother, Anna, was a sister of Maria Edgeworth, the novelist. He was educated at Bath Grammar School and at the Charterhouse, where, as early as 1817, he began to write verses. Of his character at school, where he showed signs at once of that eccentricity and independence of manners which were to distinguish him through life, a schoolfellow, Mr. C. D. Bevan, has preserved a very entertaining account, from which this short extract may be given:—

He knew Shakespeare well when I first saw him, and during his stay at the Charterhouse made himself master of all the best English dramatists, from Shakespeare's time, or before it, to the plays of the day. He liked acting, and was a good judge of it, and used to give apt though burlesque imitations of the popular actors, particularly of Kean and Macready. Though his voice was harsh and his enunciation offensively conceited, he read with so much propriety of expression and manner that I was always glad to listen: even when I was pressed into the service as his accomplice, or his enemy, or his love, with a due accompaniment of curses, caresses, or kicks, as the course of his declamation required. One play in particular, Marlow's tragedy of Dr. Faustus, excited my admiration, and was fixed on my memory in this way.

At school he came under the influence of Fielding, and wrote a novel, entitled Cynthio and Bugboo, the loss of which we need scarcely deplore, as, according to the same authority, it was marked by “all the coarseness, little of the wit, and none of the truth of his original.” The fragments of his schoolboy verse, in particular the rhapsody of “Alfarabi,” display a very singular adroitness in the manufacture of easy blank verse, and precocious tendency to a species of mocking metaphysics, both equally unlike a child. In July, 1819, while still at Charterhouse, a sonnet of his was printed in the Morning Post. On the 1st of May, 1820, Beddoes proceeded to Oxford, and was entered a commoner at Pembroke, which had been his father's college.

Although he had been a forward boy at school, Beddoes passed through Oxford without any academic distinction. He was a freshman of eighteen when, in 1821, he published his first volume, The Improvisatore, of which he afterwards carefully tried to destroy every copy. In 1822 he published, as another thin pamphlet, The Brides' Tragedy, which has also become extremely rare. These two little books, the work of an undergraduate less than twenty years of age, are the only ones which Beddoes ever published. The remainder of his writings, whether lyrical or dramatic, were issued posthumously, not less than thirty years later. The Brides' Tragedy attracted some notice in literary circles; it secured for the young Oxford poet the friendship of a man much older than himself, but of kindred tastes, Bryan Waller Procter. The dramatic poems of “Barry Cornwall,” of which “Mirandola” was then the latest, had been appearing in rapid succession, and their amiable author was a person of considerable influence. It was Procter who, in 1823, introduced Beddoes to Thomas Forbes Kelsall, a young lawyer practising at Southampton. It had been thought well that Beddoes, who was sadly behind-hand with his studies, should go down to this quiet town to read for his bachelor's degree, and he remained at Southampton for some months, in great intimacy with Kelsall, and forming no other acquaintance.

While he was at Southampton, Beddoes wrote a great deal of desultory verse, almost all of a dramatic order; to this period belong The Second Brother and Torrismond, among other fragments. Already he was seized with that inability to finish, that lack of an organic principle of poetical composition, which were to prevent him from mounting to those heights of which his facility and brilliancy seem to promise him an easy ascent. The death of Shelley appears to have drawn his attention to the genius of that writer, by which he was instantly fascinated, and, as it were, absorbed. Outside the small circle of Shelley's personal friends, Beddoes was perhaps the first to appreciate the magnitude of his merit, as he was certainly the earliest to imitate Shelley's lyrical work. His letters to Procter and Kelsall are full of evidence of his over-mastering passion for Shelley, and it was to Beddoes, in the first instance, that the publication of that writer's Posthumous Poems was due. In the winter of 1823 Beddoes started a subscription with his two friends, and corresponded with John Hunt on the subject. They promised to take 250 copies, but Hunt said that Mrs. Shelley ought to have some profit. This seemed hardly fair to Beddoes; “for the twinkling of this very distant chance we, three poor honest admirers of Shelley's poetry, are certainly to pay.” At this time Beddoes was writing two romantic dramas, Love's Arrow Poisoned and The Last Man, both founded on the tragic model of Webster, Cyril Tourneur, and Middleton. Of these plays not very much was ever written, and still less is now in existence. Of The Last Man he writes, in February 1824: “There are now three first acts in my drawer. When I have got two more, I shall stitch them together, and stick the sign of a fellow tweedling a mask in his fingers, with ‘good entertainment for man and ass’ understood.”

The year 1824 he spent in London, Oxford, and Bristol. Already his eccentric shyness had grown upon him. He writes to Kelsall from his lodgings in Devereux Court, Temple, March 29, 1824:—

Being a little shy and not a little proud perhaps, I have held back and never made the first step towards discovering my residence or existence to any of my family friends [in London]. In consequence I have lived in a deserted state, which I could hardly bear much longer without sinking into that despondency on the brink of which I have sate so long. Your cheerful presence at times (could we not mess together occasionally?) would set me up a good deal, but perhaps you had better not draw my heavy company on your head. … I met an intelligent man who had lived at Hampstead, seen Keats, and was read in his and the poems of Shelley. On my mentioning the former by accident to him, he complimented me on my similarity of countenance; he did not think much of K.'s genius, and therefore did not say it insincerely or sycophantically. The same was said by Procter and Taylor before.

Mrs. Procter, who had known both poets, made the same remark about Beddoes to myself; but she added that she never saw in the latter the extraordinary look of inspiration which was ocasionally to be detected in the great eyes of Keats.

In the summer of 1824 Beddoes was hastily called to Florence by the illness of his mother, who was living there. She died before he could reach her, but he spent some weeks there, saw Walter Savage Landor, and then returned to Clifton in charge of his sisters. In October of the same year he began to study German, a language then but little known in this country. He attacked it languidly at first, then with ever-increasing eagerness and zest. But the Elizabethan drama was still his principal delight, and he studied it, even in its least illustrious forms, with extraordinary closeness and delight. Writing to Kelsall from Clifton (January 11, 1825), he remarks, apropos of revival of “The Fatal Dowry” of Massinger:—

Say what you will, I am convinced the man who is to awaken the drama must be a bold trampling fellow—no creeper into worm-holes—no reviver even, however good. These reanimations are vampire-cold. Such ghosts as Marloe, Webster, etc., are better dramatists, better poets, I dare say, than any contempoary of ours, but they are ghosts—the worm is in their pages,—and we want to see something that our great-grandsires did not know. With the greatest reverence for all the antiquities of the drama, I still think that we had better beget than revive, attempt to give the literature of this age an idiosyncracy and spirit of its own, and only raise a ghost to gaze on, not to live with. Just now the drama is a haunted ruin. I am glad that you are awakening to a sense of Darley. He must have no little perseverance to have gone through so much of that play; it will perchance be the first star of a new day.

The result of so much meditation on the drama was the composition of more fragments. The Second Brother, Torrismond, and The Last Man occupied Beddoes during the winter and spring of 1824-5. But none of these approached completion. He then planned the publication of a volume of lyrics, to be entitled “Outidana, or Effusions, amorous, pathetic, and fantastical,” which was to include most of the miscellaneous verses reprinted in this edition, and others which are now lost. On the 25th of May, 1825, he took an ordinary bachelor's degree at Oxford. He writes to Kelsall from Pembroke College, on the 8th of June, announcing for the first time the most celebrated of his writings:—

Oxford is the most indolent place on earth. I have fairly done nothing in the world but read a play or two of Schiller, Æschylus and Euripides,—you I suppose read German now as fast as English. I do not finish that 2nd Brother you saw but am thinking of a very Gothic-styled tragedy for which I have a jewel of a name:—

Death's Jestbook—

of course no one will ever read it. Mr. Milman (our poetry professor) has made me quite unfashionable here by denouncing me as one of a ‘villainous school.’ I wish him another son.

He now suddenly determined to abandon literature, which had suggested itself to him as a profession, and take up the study of medicine. We find him, therefore, on the 19th of July, 1825, at Hamsburg, “sitting on a horse-hair sofa, looking over the Elbe, with his meerschaum at his side, full of Grave, and abundantly prosaic. Tomorrow, according to the prophecies of the diligence, he will set out for Hanover, and by the end of this week mein Herr Thomas will probably be a Doctor of the university of Göttingen.” This, however, was rather premature. He did not become a doctor until much later. It is important to observe that the exodus to Germany thus casually and nonchalantly taken involved nothing less, as it proved, than a complete alteration in all his habits. Except for very few and brief visits, he did not return to England for the rest of his life, and he so completely adopted the language and thoughts of a German student as almost to cease to be an Englishman.

At Göttingen the celebrated man of science, Prof. Blumenbach, became the most intimate friend of Beddoes. The latter threw himself with the utmost ardour into the study of physiology and medicine. He did not, however, at first abandon his design of becoming an English dramatic poet. He writes to Kelsall (Dec. 4, 1825):—

I am perhaps somewhat independent, and have a competence adequate to my philosophical desires. There are reasons why I should reject too much practice if it did intrude; really I am much more likely to remain a patientless physician. And now I will end this unnecessary subject, by telling you that Death's Jestbook goes on like the tortoise, slow and sure; I think it will be entertaining, very unamiable, and utterly unpopular. Very likely it may be finished in the spring or autumn.

His misanthropy, for it almost deserves so harsh a name, grew upon him. “I feel myself,” he wrote, “in a measure alone in the world and likely to remain so, for, from the experiments I have made, I fear I am a non-conductor of friendship, a not-very-likeable person, so that I must make sure of my own respect, and occupy that part of the brain which should be employed in imaginative attachments in the pursuit of immaterial and unchanging good.” In April, 1826, Death's Jest Book is still lying “like a snow-ball, and I give it a kick every now and then, out of mere scorn and ill-humour; the 4th act, and I may say the 5th are more than half done, so that at last it will be a perfect mouse, but such doggerell!” None the less did he anticipate that the poem would come “like an electric shock among the small critics.” In October, 1826, it is “done and done for, its limbs being as scattered and unconnected as those of the old gentleman whom Medea minced and boiled young. I have tried 20 times at least to copy it fair.” He intended at this time to send the MS. to Kelsall and Procter to be seen through the press, but he delayed until he could bring the poem himself to London.

His monotonous existence in Göttingen was broken in the spring of 1828 by a visit of a few days to England, where he took his degree of M.A. at Oxford, and hurried back to Germany. Meanwhile he had left Death's Jest Book with Procter and Kelsall for publication, but they decided that it must be “revised and improved.” In his fifth year in Germany, “having already been at Göttingen the time which it is allowed for any student to remain there,” he transferred his residence to Würzburg, in Bavaria; “a very clever professor of medicine and capital midwife brought me here, and a princely hospital.” In 1831 there was again some abortive talk of publishing Death's Jest Book. About this time Beddoes became more and more affected by opinions of the extreme radical order; he subscribed towards “the support of candidates who were professed supporters of the Reform Bill,” and he began to affect a warm personal interest in certain revolutionary Poles who had taken up their abode in Würzburg. He continued his medical studies with great thoroughness, and in the summer of 1832 he took his degree of doctor of medicine in the university, being now in his thirtieth year. He was more and more mixed up in political intrigue, and on the 25th of September, 1832, he somewhat obscurely says:—

The absurdity of the King of Bavaria has cost me a good deal, as I was obliged to oppose every possible measure to the arbitrary illegality of his conduct, more for the sake of future objects of his petty royal malice than my own, of course in vain.

He was soon after obliged to fly, “banished by that ingenious Jackanapes of Bavaria,” in common with several of his distinguished Würzburg friends. He took refuge, first in Strassburg, then in Zurich. He brought with him to Switzerland a considerable reputation as a physiologist, for Blumenbach, in a testimonial which exists, calls him the best pupil he ever had. It appears that he now assumed, what he afterwards dropped, the degree of M.D., and had some practice as a physician in the town of Zurich. In 1835 the surgeon Schoenlien proposed Beddoes to the medical faculty of the University as professor of Comparative Anatomy, and the latter unanimously seconded him. His election, however, was not ratified, according to one of his letters, for political reasons, according to another because he was found to be ineligible, from his having published nothing of a medical character. He spent several healthy and tolerably happy years in Zurich, “what,” he says in March, 1837, “with a careless temper and the pleasant translunary moods I walk and row myself into upon the lakes and over the Alps of Switzerland”; and once more, as he quaintly put it, he began “to brew small ale out with the water of the fountain of the horse's foot,” working again on the revision of Death's Jest Book. He also began to prepare for the press a collection of his narrative and lyrical poems, to be called The Ivory Gate. In 1838 he was engaged in translating Grainger's work on the Spinal Cord into German.

He had spent six years at Zurich, and was beginning to feel that city to have become his settled home, when, on the 8th of September, 1839, a political catastrophe destroyed his peace of mind. A mob of six thousand peasants, “half of them unarmed, and the other half armed with scythes, dung-forks and poles, led on by a mad fanatic and aided by some traitors in the cabinet, and many in the town,” stormed Zurich, and upset the liberal government of the canton. Beddoes observed the riot from a window, and witnessed the murder of the minister Hegetochweiber, who was one of his best friends. He wrote: “In consequence of this state of things, in which neither property nor person is secure, I shall find it necessary to give up my present residence entirely. Indeed, the dispersion of my friends and acquaintance, all of whom belonged to the liberal party, renders it nearly impossible for me to remain longer here.” He loitered on, however, until March, 1840, when his life was threatened by the insurgents, and he was helped to fly from Zurich in secret by a former leader of the liberal party, whom he had befriended, a man of the name of Jasper.

It is probable that the seven years Beddoes spent at Zurich formed the happiest portion of his life. He was never to experience tranquillity again. The next few years were spent in what seems an aimless wandering through the length and breadth of Central Europe. Little is known of his histry from this time forward. In 1841 he was in Berlin, where he formed an acquaintanceship with a young Dr. Frey, who remained his intimate friend to the last. In 1842 he made a brief visit to England. In 1843 he went to Baden in Aargau, where he seems to have stored his library, and, so far as Beddoes henceforth could be said to have a home, that home was in this little town of Northern Switzerland, not far from Zurich. He spent the winter of 1844 at Giessen, attracted thither by Liebig and his famous school of chemistry, after having lodged through the summer and autumn at Basel, Strassburg, Mannheim, Mainz, and Frankfurt in succession. At Giessen a little of the poetic fervour returned to him, and it was here that he wrote “The Swallow leaves her Nest” and “In Lover's Ear a wild Voice cried.” But most of his verse now was written in German. He says (Nov. 13, 1844): “Sometimes to amuse myself I write a German lyric or epigram, right scurrilous, many of which have appeared in the Swiss and German papers, and some day or other I shall have them collected and printed for fun.” It is needless to say that he never issued this collection, and the German poems, doubtless signed with a pseudonym or else anonymous, have never been traced.

In August, 1846, he came to England for a considerable stay. Intending to remain six weeks, he loitered on for ten months. His friends, few of whom had seen him for more than twenty years, found him altered beyond all recognition. He had become extremely rough and cynical in speech, and eccentric in manners. I am informed by a member of his family that he arrived at the residence of one of his relations, Cheney Longville, near Ludlow, astride the back of a donkey. He complained of neuralgia, and for six out of the ten months which he spent in England, he was shut up in a bedroom, reading and smoking, and admitting no visitor. In April, 1847, he went down to Fareham, to stay with Mr. Kelsall, and this greatly brightened him up. From Fareham he proceeded in May to London, and there he met with his old friends the Procters. From Mrs. Procter the present writer received a graphic account of his manners and appearance. She told me that his eccentricities were so marked that they almost gave the impression of insanity, but that closer observation showed them to be merely the result of a peculiar fancy, entirely unaccustomed to restraint, and of the occasional rebound of spirits after a period of depression. The Procters found Beddoes a most illusive companion. He would come to them uninvited, but never if he had been asked, or if he feared to meet a stranger. On one occasion, Mrs. Procter told me, they had asked Beddoes to dine with them, and proceed afterwards to Drury Lane Theatre. He did not come, and they dined alone. On approaching the theatre, they saw Beddoes in charge of the police, and on inquiry found that he had just been arrested for trying to put Drury Lane on fire. The incendiary, however, had used no more dangerous torch than a five-pound note, and Mr. Procter had little difficulty in persuading the police that this was much more likely to hurt the pocket of Mr. Beddoes than the rafters of the theatre.

In June, 1847, Beddoes returned to Frankfurt, where he lived until the spring of 1848 with a baker named Degen, who was then about nineteen years of age,—“a nice-looking young man dressed in a blue blouse, fine in expression, and of a natural dignity of manner,” Miss Zoë King describes him. While Beddoes was in Frankfurt his blood became poisoned from the virus of a dead body entering a slight wound in his hand. This was overcome, but it greatly weakened and depressed him. For six months he would see no one but Degen. He complained of disgust of life, and declared that his republican friends in Germany had deserted him. He persuaded Degen to become an actor, and he occupied himself in teaching him English and other accomplishments, cutting himself off from all other company. At this time “he had let his beard grow, and looked like Shakespeare.” In May, 1848, he left Frankfurt, inducing Degen to accompany him, and the two companions wandered together through Germany and Switzerland. In Zurich Beddoes chartered the theatre for one night, to give his friend an opportunity of appearing in the part of Hotspur. For about six weeks, so far as it is possible to discover, Beddoes was tolerably happy. But he was separated from Degen at Basel, where Beddoes took a room, in a condition of dejected apathy that was pitiful to witness, at the Cicogne Hôtel. Here very early nextmorning he inflicted a deep wound on his right leg, with a razor. “Il etait miserable,—il a voula se tuer,” as the waiter who attended upon him said afterwards to Miss Zoë King. He was, however, removed with success to the Town Hospital, where his friends Dr. Frey and Dr. Ecklin waited upon him. He had a pleasant private room, looking into a large garden. He communicated with his English friends, being very anxious to allay all suspicion. He wrote to his sister: “In July I fell with a horse in a precipitous part of the neighbouring hills, and broke my left leg all to pieces.” He begged no one in England to be anxious, and his version of the catastrophe was accepted without question. The leg, however, was obstinate in recovery, for the patient stealthily tore off the bandages, and eventually gangrene of the foot set in. On the 9th of September it became necessary to amputate the leg below the knee-joint; this operation was very successfully performed by Dr. Ecklin. Beddoes seems to have been cheerful during the autumn months, and Degen came back to Basel, lodging near him in the town. The poet gave up all suicidal attempts, and it was considered that his mind on this matter was completely cured. His bed was covered with books, and he conversed and wrote freely about literature and science. He talked of going to Italy when he was convalescent, and in December he walked out of his room twice. The first time he went out into the town, however, on the 26th of January, 1849, he seems to have used his authority as a physician to procure the deadly poison called Kurara; in the course of the evening Dr. Ecklin was suddenly called to his bedside, and found the poet lying on his back insensible, with the following extraordinary note, written in pencil, folded on his bosom. It was addressed to one of the oldest of his English friends, Mr. R. Phillips:—

My dear Phillips,

I am food for what I am good for—worms. I have made a will here, which I desire to be respected; and add the donation of £20 to Dr. Ecklin my physician. Thanks for all kindnesses. Borrow the £200. You are a good and noble man, and your children must look sharp to be like you.

Yours, if my own, ever

T. L. B.

Love to Anna, Henry,—the Beddoes of Longvile and Zoë and Emmeline King. Also to Kelsall, whom I beg to look at my MSS. and print or not as he thinks fit. I ought to have been, [among a] variety of other things, a good poet. Life was too great a bore on one peg, and that a bad one. W. Beddoes must have a case (50 bottles) of Champagne Moet 1847 growth. Buy for Dr. Ecklin above mentioned Reade's best stomach-pump.

He died at 10 p.m. the same night, and was buried under a cypress in the cemetery of the hospital. The circumstances of his death, now for the first time published, were ascertained by Miss Zoë King, who visited Basel in 1857, and saw Degen, Frey, Ecklin, and the people at the Cicogne Hôtel. After some delay, the various MSS. of Beddoes were placed in Kelsall's hands, and that faithful and admirable friend published the version of Death's Jest Book, which seemed to him the most attractive, in 1850; and this he followed, in 1851, by the Miscellaneous Poems, with an unsigned Memoir. These two volumes form the only monument hitherto raised to the memory of the unfortunate poet. The reception which was given to them was respectful, and even sympathetic. It may be sufficient here to give one instance of it, which has never been made public. Miss Zoë King, in a letter to Kelsall, says: “I was at the Lakes with my uncle Edgeworth just after receiving the Death's Jest Book, and was very much pleased to lend it to Mr. Tennyson. He was just arrived (and at a distance from us) on his wedding tour, so that I merely saw him. He returned the book with a few lines … rating it highly.”

III

It is not in the fragments that Beddoes has left behind him that we can look for the work of a full-orbed and serene poetical genius. It would be a narrow definition indeed of the word “poet” which should exclude him, but he belongs to the secondary order of makers. He is not one of those whose song flows unbidden from their lips, those born warblers whom neither poverty, nor want of training, nor ignorance, can restrain from tuneful utterance. He belongs to the tribe of scholar-poets, to the educated artists in verse. In every line that he wrote we can trace the influence of existing verse upon his mind. He is intellectualrather than spontaneous. Nor, even within this lower range, does his work extend far on either hand. He cultivates a narrow field, and his impressions of life and feeling are curiously limited and monotonous. At the feast of the Muses he appears bearing little except one small savoury dish, some cold preparation, we may say, of olives and anchovies, the strangeness of which has to make up for its lack of importance. Not every palate enjoys this hors d'œuvre, and when that is the case, Beddoes retires; he has nothing else to give. He appeals to a few literary epicures, who, however, would deplore the absence of this oddly flavoured dish as much as that of any more important pièce de resistance.

As a poet, the great defect of Beddoes has already been alluded to,—his want of sustained invention, his powerlessness in evolution. He was poor just where, two hundred years earlier, almost every playwright in the street had been strong, namely, in the ability to conduct an interesting story to a thrilling and appropriate close. From this point of view his boyish play, The Brides' Tragedy, is his only success. In this case a story was developed with tolerable skill to a dramatic ending. But, with one exception, he never again could contrive to drag a play beyond a certain point; in the second or third act its wings would droop, and it would expire, do what its master would. These unfinished tragedies were like those children of Polynesian dynasties, anxiously trained, one after another, in the warm Pacific air, yet ever doomed to fall, on the borders of manhood, by the breath of the same mysterious disease. Death's Jest Book is but an apparent exception. This does indeed appear in the guise of a finished five-act play; but its completion was due to the violent determination of its author, and not to legitimate inspiration. For many years, in and out of season, Beddoes, who had pledged his whole soul to the finishing of this book, assailed it with all the instruments of his art, and at last produced a huge dramatic Frankenstein, which, by adroit editing, could be forced into the likeness of a tragedy. But no play in literature was less of a spontaneous creation, or was further from achieving the ideal of growing like a tree.

From what Beddoes was not, however, it is time to pass to what he was. In several respects, then, he was a poetical artist of consummate ability. Of all the myriad poets and poeticules who have tried to recover the lost magic of the tragic blank verse of the Elizabethans, Beddoes has come nearest to success. If it were less indifferent to human interests of every ordinary kind, the beauty of his dramatic verse would not fail to fascinate. To see how strong it is, how picturesque, how admirably fashioned, we have only to compare it with what others have done in the same style, with the tragic verse, for instance, of Barry Cornwall, of Talfourd, of Horne. But Beddoes is what he himself has called “a creeper into worm-holes.” He attempts nothing personal; he follows the very tricks of Marston and Cyril Tourneur like a devoted disciple. The passions with which he invariably deals are remote and unfamiliar; we may go further, and say that they are positively obsolete. In another place I have compared Beddoes in poetry with the Helsche Breughel in painting. He dedicates himself to the service of Death, not with a brooding sense of the terror and shame of mortality, but from a love of the picturesque pageantry of it, the majesty and sombre beauty, the swift, theatrical transitions, the combined elegance and horror that wait upon the sudden decease of monarchs. His medical taste and training encouraged this tendency to dwell on the physical aspects of death, and gave him a sort of ghastly familiarity with images drawn from the bier and the charnel-house. His attitude, however, though cold and cynical, was always distinguished, and in his wildest flights of humour he escapes vulgarity. In this he shows himself a true poet. As we read his singular pages, we instinctively expect to encounter the touch of prose which, in Landor's phrase, will precipitate the whole, yet it never comes. Beddoes often lacks inspiration, but distinction he can never be said to lack.

As a lyrist he appears, on the whole, to rank higher than as a dramatist. Several of his songs, artificial as they are, must always live, and take a high place in the literature of artifice. As a writer of this class of poem his experience of the Elizabethans was further kindled and largely modified by the example of Shelley. Nevertheless his finest songs could never be taken for the work of Shelley, or, indeed, attributed to any hand but his own. Among them, the song in Torrismond is perhaps the sweetest and the most ingenious; “Dream-Pedlary” the most exquisite. The “Song of the Stygian Naiades” and “Old Adam, the Carrion Crow” are instances of fancy combined with grisly humour, of a class in which Beddoes has no English competitor. The Harpagus ballad in the fourth act of Death's Jest Book, and “Lord Alcohol,” which is here for the first time printed, are less known, but no less vivid and extraordinary. Beddoes possesses great sense of verbal melody, a fastidious ear, and considerable, though far from faultless, skill in metrical architecture. His boyish volume, called The Improvisatore, which is here presented to the readers of Beddoes practically for the first time, shows, despite its crudity, that these gifts were early developed. To say more in this place is needless. Those readers who are able to take pleasure in poetry so grim, austere, and abnormal, may safely be left to discover its specific charms for themselves.