tchet) have at different
times paid very high compliments to the _Joseph and his Brethren_ (1823,
revised later) of Charles Jeremiah Wells (1800-1879), a friend of Keats,
and a person who seems to have lived much as he pleased; to the
_Solitary_ of Charles Whitehead (1804-1862), a Bohemian ne'er-do-weel,
who also showed talent as a novelist and miscellanist; and to the _Mundi
et Cordis Carmina_ (1835) of Thomas Wade (1805-1875), a playwright and
journalist. Of the three, Wade appears to me to have had the greatest
poetical talent. But I do not think that any one who on the one hand
uses epithets in poetical criticism with caution, and on the other has
read a great deal of minor poetry as it appears, could put any one of
them very high. All were born late enough to breathe the atmosphere of
the new poetry young; all had poetical velleities, and a certain amount,
if not of originality, of capacity to write poetry. But they were not
poets; they were only poetical curiosities.

Darley, Beddoes, and Horne belong in the main to the same class, but
rise high, in one case immeasurably, above them. George Darley
(1795-1846) is perhaps our chief English example of "the poet who dies
in youth while the man survives," and who becomes a critic. In him,
however, the generation of the critic did not wait for the corruption of
the poet. An Irishman, and of Trinity College, Dublin, he was one of the
staff of the _London Magazine_, and wrote much verse bad and good,
including the once famous "I've been Roaming," of which it is safe to
say that not one in ten of those who have sung it could tell the author.
His best work is contained in the charming pastoral drama of _Sylvia_
(1827) and the poem entitled _Nepenthe_ (1839). He was a good but rather
a savage critic, and edited Beaumont and Fletcher. His work has never
been collected, nor, it is believed, ever fully published; and it has
the marks of a talent that never did what was in it to do, and came at
an unfortunate time. Some not bad judges in the forties ranked Darley
with Tennyson in poetic possibilities, and thought the former the more
promising of the two.

Except Donne, there is perhaps no English poet more difficult to write
about, so as to preserve the due pitch of enthusiasm on the one hand and
criticism on the other, than Thomas Lovell Beddoes, born at Clifton on
20th July 1803. He was the son of a very famous physician, and of Anna
Edgeworth, the youngest sister of the whol