ent to Sandhurst and was expelled
for insubordination; joined the Mexican navy in the war of liberation;
travelled widely; but seemed at about five and twenty to be settling
down to literature and journalism in England. After writing various
things, he produced in 1837 the fine but not quite "live" plays of
_Cosmo de Medici_ and _The Death of Marlowe_, and in 1843 the famous
farthing epic, _Orion_, which was literally published at a farthing.
This was the smallest part of a great literary baggage of very unequal
value. In 1852 Horne, resuming the life of adventure, went to Australia,
served in the gold police, and stayed at the Antipodes till 1869. Then
he came home again and lived for fifteen years longer, still writing
almost to his very death on 13th March 1884.

It is not true that _Orion_ is Horne's only work of value; but it is so
much better than anything else of his, and so characteristic of him,
that by all but students the rest may be neglected. And it is an example
of the melancholy but frequently exemplified truth, that few things are
so dangerous, nay, so fatal to enduring literary fame, as the production
of some very good work among a mass of, if not exactly rubbish, yet
inferior stuff. I do not think it extravagant to say that if Horne had
written nothing but _Orion_ and had died comparatively young after
writing it, he would have enjoyed very high rank among English poets.
For, though doubtless a little weighted with "purpose," it is a very
fine poem indeed, couched in a strain of stately and not second-hand
blank verse, abounding in finished and effective passages, by no means
destitute of force and meaning as a whole, and mixing some passion with
more than some real satire. But the rather childish freak of its first
publication probably did it no good, and it is quite certain that the
author's long life and unflagging production did it much harm.

Of the other persons in the list above, Macaulay, Hartley Coleridge, and
Lord Lytton are mainly something else than poets, and Talfourd, as a
dramatist, will also be noticed elsewhere. Barnes and Hawker were both
clergymen of the West of England: the former very highly ranked by some
for his studies in Dorset dialect; the latter the author of the famous
"Song of the Western Men" (long thought a genuine antique), of the
exquisite "Queen Gwennyvar's Round," of the fine "Silent Tower of
Bottreaux," of some beautiful sonnets, and of the stately "Quest of the
San