intellect which, having been formed by a long course of legal and official experience, gave weight to all his estimates of men and things; the dainty fancy and refined taste for all that is beautiful in nature, art, and life, that are his chief credentials as a poet; and the oldfashioned grace and courtesy of manner, partly native and partly acquired from his fortunate associations, which are the uniform note of his style whether in verse or prose.

The portrait of Procter does not owe so much as could be desired to the skill of the friend to whom this compilation has been entrusted. He has thought it sufficient to string together the fragments which he found upon a scanty thread of narrative interspersed with a few just but very cursory criticisms, and a provokingly meagre stock of personal memorials. These aids enable us to construct at best but a dim likeness of either the man or the author, and one from which certain features that we know him to have possessed are absent. Without attaching any blame to the biographer for shortcomings in a task which he only undertook by request, it is impossible not to regret that his sketch is curiously defective in the very two points upon which information was most needed, and (it might be presumed from his preliminary avowal of intimacy) most readily obtainable. Of Procter's literary life we have the briefest possible account. His early works are enumerated in the order of their issue, but without any detail of date or of the circumstances attending their production, and the few extracts made from them as specimens of style include none which illustrate his dramatic faculty. His later and most enduring work, the English Songs, receives merely a passing mention, and what the world has agreed to consider his distinctive gift is put aside almost disparagingly as an inadequate 'test' of his poetic character' (p. 49). With the publication of this volume in 1832 his career as a poet is said to have 'closed' (p. 94); no reference being made to the new Dramatic Scenes and Poems which he published in 1857. From the Essays and Tales in Prose, collected for his American admirers in 1853, a single extract is given that indicates the quality of the former alone; and his charming Memoir of Charles Lamb, published in 1866, is only noticed by the insertion of a characteristic letter of acknowledgment from Mr. Carlyle. Some endeavour to trace the evidences of artistic growth or persistence in a series of works extending over more than half a century was surely needed in order to connect the Barry Cornwall of our grandfathers' remembrance with the Bryan Procter of our own. The long term of valuable service to the State which he spent as a Metropolitan Commissioner of Lunacy is also dismissed too hastily, without adequate reference to his strict legal exactitude and capacity for business, which, however alien to preconceived notions of a poetic temperament, were well recognised by his colleagues and all who knew him in official life. It does not come

within the scope of this notice, however, to offer any complete estimate of Procter's literary rank or personal worth, and no more can be attempted than to point out the chief contributions which this volume makes to our knowledge of him and of the leading contemporaries with whom his intimacy has been recorded.

6

The most interesting of his early reminiscences is that which relates to his introduction to the realm of English literature through the medium of its acknowledged sovereign. The first book which struck his imagination and drew forth his emotions was a Shakespeare which, at the age of thirteen, he was stimulated to purchase by an intellectual and cultivated woman, who, by selecting scenes and passagesbest adapted to a boy's apprehension,' had already inspired him with a wondering admiration for the greatest genius that the world has ever produced.' Even at that early age,' says Procter, 'I think I saw (I know that I felt) many of his gentler beauties, the nice distinctions of character; not perhaps his sublimer thoughts, not even his deeper passions.' There can be no doubt that the influence thus exerted upon the boy's mental formation at a critical and impressionable stage determined its future inclination in the direction of drama and song, just as the bias of Heine was determined by Don Quixote, and that of Dickens by the works of Fielding and Smollett. The calmer and more gradual effects of contact with the realities of life and familiarity with the beauties of Nature, at later stages of his growth, he describes with much delicacy. In his sketches of the old French refugee who was his tutor (pp. 12-15), and of the consumptive girl who animated him with a childish passion (pp. 35-6), there are touches of singular tenderness. The first fragment of autobiography ends with a brief reference to the limited but genuine experiences of love, doubt, and change of opinion, which fostered his literary apprenticeship before he appeared as an author in 1815.1

Of the poetic studies and associations by which his maturer mind was chiefly moulded we are told little, but enough to confirm the correctness of Jeffrey's surmise, that they were to be found partly among the dramatists and lyrists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (to whom he was guided by the interpretative criticisms of Lamb and Hunt), and partly among the living masters of the romantic and idyllic schools. A third influence also cannot. be overlooked. He had been sent by his parents to Harrow, where he received an orthodox classical education, the advantages of which he was disposed in later life to depreciate. It is certain, however, that without it his literary career would have taken a different course, and that he was indebted to it for the active interest which, in common with so many young poets of his time, he took in that genuine, but feverish and transient, movement of recurrence to the ancient fountains of literature and art which had set in towards the

close of the last century, and simulated for a while the passionate enthusiasm of the Italian Renaissance. The fascination of the Renaissance itself, particularly the graceful and pathetic side of its history, scholarship, and fiction, which Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson had once found, and Byron, Shelley, Keats, Landor, and Hunt still found, so potent, laid a still stronger spell upon his imagination, and all his writings were more or less inspired by it. His delicate apprehension of the beauty of form and colour, wherein this fascination mainly resides, was doubtless much sharpened by the attention which, as we learn from another fragment of autobiography, he long devoted to pictorial art, especially that of the old Italian masters, whose paintings and drawings he collected. To his regular habit of attending the best dramatic representations at a period when the Kembles, Kean, Young, Macready, and O'Neil were in their prime, he probably owed much of the facility which he displayed in the expression of character by means of dialogue. Among the contemporary influences discernible in Procter's early poems, Byron's is prominent; his contemplative, dreamy moods of thought and sentiment, his boisterous humour, glowing diction, and weak versification being alike reflected in them more or less distinctly. The scholar, however, did not share his master's sceptical and unhealthy bitterness, and it probably repelled him into closer sympathy with the idyllic poets, especially Wordsworth, whose influence is traceable in other poems belonging to the same period of his life.

The four years which Procter steadily devoted to the culture of his art witnessed the rapid production of all the longer and more ambitious works by which he became known as Barry Cornwall; the Dramatic Scenes appearing in 1819, A Sicilian Story and Marcian Colonna, &c. in 1820, Mirandola in 1821, The Flood of Thessaly and The Girl of Provence, &c., in 1823. The subjects, with few exceptions, were drawn from classical mythology and Italian history or romance; drama, narrative, lyric, and song being essayed in turn. Their grace of fancy, scholarly refinement of style, and sweetness of music atoned for their obvious shortcomings in power and originality, and justified the praise bestowed upon them by such competent judges as Lamb and Jeffrey. Notwithstanding the severe ordeal of Tory criticism through which they had to pass as the productions of a Liberal pen, they attained to two or three editions, and the tragedy of Mirandola had a successful run at Covent Garden. No one, however, knew better than the author that all he had yet done was but the promise of higher achievements. Had leisure and fortune served him for enlarging his scope of observation and ripening his thought, it may be that with so much natural aptitude and cultivated taste he would have developed into a dramatic or narrative poet of distinction. Love, however, intervened to lure his ambition into a humbler but more lucrative field of enterprise. After his

marriage in 1824 the study of law was substituted for that of art, and the increasing responsibilities of professional and official life became incompatible with anything beyond an intermittent attention to his congenial pursuits. Henceforth dramatic fragments instead of plays, and snatches of lyric and song instead of idyllic and narrative poems, were all that the world could hope to receive from him. An expression of regret and longing for the sphere thus abandoned, such as he rarely uttered, finds vent in his 'Epistle' to Mr. Browning, whose genius he rejoiced to see associated with a lot more favoured than his own:

Would I could rise with thee on airier wing,
And scale the enchanted regions ere I die,
And hear that true song which the Muses sing
At morning on their mountains near the sky,
And there through starry evening listening lie,
While the deep melodies are born that flow
From heavenly lips teaching the world below!
But idle wishes these,

Although they serve to please

And soothe the humours of a wayward mind.
My life is nearly spent and left behind;

And what remains is brief, and weak, and old.
Therefore I call on thee, a spirit bold,

And able to maintain the poet's gage,

To stamp thy fame in lines of burning gold
Upon the page

Of everlasting adamant where lie

The few great names which Memory

Has rescued from the oblivious deep abyss.

But the mood in which these lines were written was doubtless shortlived. Few men were better fitted to surrender popular renown for domestic serenity, or had more reason to be satisfied with the exchange. The bright, vivacious qualities of the lady whom he married, which supplied what was lacking in his own temperament, were united with a tenderness as wife and mother which was the pride of his manhood and the solace of his old age. One of his most melodious songs, the Petition to Time, which bears the date of 1831, embodies what, it is evident from this volume of memorials, was the prevailing temper of his mind and heart:

Touch us gently, Time!

Let us glide adown thy stream
Gently, as we sometimes glide
Through a quiet dream!

Humble voyagers are we,

Husband, wife, and children three;
(One is lost, an angel fled

To the azure overhead).

Touch us gently, Time!

We've not proud nor soaring wings;

Our ambition, our content

Lies in simple things.

Humble voyagers are we

O'er life's dim unsounded sea,

Seeking only some calm clime :

Touch us gently, gentle Time!

The loss of one or two promising children endeared the others to him more closely, and in the brilliant but too brief career of his eldest daughter Adelaide the poet saw his own yearnings repeated, and more fully, if still only partially, satisfied. With such recognition from the public as his songs brought him he appears to have been amply content. The extent of their claim to be remembered as poetry cannot be adequately measured without more space than is at my disposal, but one special merit which belongs to them cannot be passed over without a word. If the best of those that are strictly 'songs' be subjected to the approved tests of musical adaptation, the function which they were designed to fulfil will be found to be faithfully subserved. Their meaning is clear, their ornamentation simple; open vowels preponderate, and sibilants are few. The popularity which greeted their first appearance was fairly earned, if on this score alone. That it has not endured may be due in part to a change in the public taste, which no longer cares for themes so familiar as his, in part to a lack of vitality in the music to which they have been wedded. But they are still read, and their turn may come again to

be sung.

The Dramatic Scenes, which Procter republished with substantial alterations and additions in 1857, mark the last impulse of his earliest ambition. The lyrics which accompanied them were the efforts of his maturer years, and attested a strength of wing for higher flights than he had yet essayed. In thoughtful dignity of tone and compression of style they are superior, I think, to any other of his poetical writings.

Throughout his life, whether immersed in or disengaged from literary occupation, his entire freedom from envy enabled him to find the keenest pleasure in social intercourse and confidential correspondence with men of letters more ambitious and successful than himself. With three contemporaries of his youth, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and William Hazlitt, although their junior by some years, his intimacy was closer than with any others. To the former especially he was indebted for direction to those great models of dramatic art which proved most permanently attractive to his imagi