st Indies_, _The World before the
Flood_, and _The Pelican Island_. Bernard Barton, an amiable Quaker
poet, will probably always be remembered as the friend and correspondent
of Charles Lamb; perhaps also as the father-in-law of Edward FitzGerald.
His verse commended itself both to Southey (who had a kindly but rather
disastrous weakness for minor bards) and to Byron, but has little value.
Barton died in 1849.

The same pair of enemies joined in praising Henry Kirke White, who was
born in 1785 and died when barely twenty-one. Here indeed Southey's
unsurpassed biographical skill enforced the poetaster's merit in a
charming _Memoir_, which assisted White's rather pathetic story. He was
the son of a butcher, a diligent but reluctant lawyer's clerk, an
enthusiastic student, a creditable undergraduate at St. John's,
Cambridge, and a victim of consumption. All this made his verse for a
time popular. But he really deserved the name just affixed to him: he
was a poetaster, and nothing more. The "genius" attributed to him in
Byron's well-known and noble though rather rhetorical lines may be
discovered on an average in about half a dozen poets during any two or
three years of any tolerable poetic period. His best things are
imitations of Cowper in his sacred mood, such as the familiar "Star of
Bethlehem," and even these are generally spoilt by some feebleness or
false note. At his worst he is not far from Della Crusca.[10]

In the same year with Kirke White was born a much better poet, and a
much robuster person in all ways, mental and physical. Allan Cunningham
was a Dumfriesshire man born in the lowest rank, and apprenticed to a
stone-mason, whence in after years he rose to be Chantrey's foreman.
Cunningham began--following a taste very rife at the time--with
imitated, or to speak plainly, forged ballads; but the merit of them
deserved on true grounds the recognition it obtained on false, and he
became a not inconsiderable man of letters of all work. His best known
prose work is the "Lives of the Painters." In verse he is ranked, as a
song writer in Scots, by some next to Burns, and by few lower than Hogg.
Some of his pieces, such as "Fair shines the sun in France," have the
real, the inexplicable, the irresistible song-gift. Cunningham, who was
the friend of many good men and was liked by all of them, died on 29th
October 1842. His elder by eleven years, Robert Tannahill, who was born
in 1774 and died (probably by suicide) in