e blood to the novelist.
Beddoes, left fatherless at six years old, was educated at the
Charterhouse and at Pembroke College, Oxford, and when he was barely of
age went to Germany to study medicine, living thenceforth almost
entirely on the Continent. Before this he had published two volumes,
_The Improvisatore_ and _The Bride's Tragedy_; but his principal work is
a wild Elizabethan play called _Death's Jest-Book_ or _The Fool's
Tragedy_, which he never absolutely finished. He died in 1848 at Basle
by a complicated and ghastly kind of suicide. Three years later his
Poems appeared, and they have been recently republished, with additions
and a curious collection of letters.

Beddoes has sometimes been treated as a mainly bookish poet deriving
from the Elizabethans and Shelley. I cannot agree with this. His very
earliest work, written when he could not know much either of Shelley or
Keats, shows as they do technique perhaps caught from Leigh Hunt. But
this is quite dropped later; and his Elizabethanism is not imitation but
inspiration. In this inspiration he does not follow, but shares with,
his greater contemporaries. He is a younger and tragic counterpart to
Charles Lamb in the intensity with which he has imbibed the Elizabethan
spirit, rather from the nightshade of Webster and Tourneur than from the
vine of Shakespeare. As wholes, his works are naught, or naught but
nightmares; though _Death's Jest-Book_, despite its infinite
disadvantages from constant rewriting and uncertainty of final form, has
a strong grasp. But they contain passages, especially lyrics, of the
most exquisite fancy and music, such as since the seventeenth century
none but Blake and Coleridge had given. Beddoes does not seem to have
been at all a pleasant person, and in his later days at any rate he
would appear to have been a good deal less than sane. But the author of
such things as the "Dirge for Wolfram" ("If thou wilt ease thine heart")
in _Death's Jest-Book_, and the stanza beginning "Dream-Pedlary," "If
there were dreams to sell," with not a few others of the same kind,
attains to that small and disputed--but not to those who have thought
out the nature of poetry disputable--class of poets who, including
Sappho, Catullus, some mediaeval hymn-writers, and a few moderns,
especially Coleridge, have, by virtue of fragments only, attained a
higher position than many authors of large, substantive, and important
poems. They may be shockingly lacking