ime for Kirke White considered purely as a literary man. His verses are
grotesquely stilted, the obvious conjunction of biliousness and
overstudy, and adapted to the taste of an era when the word female was
still used as a substantive. But they are highly entertaining to read
because they so faithfully mirror the backwash of romanticism. They are
so thoroughly unhealthy, so morbid, so pallid with moonlight, so
indentured by the ayenbite of inwit, that it is hard to believe that
Henry's father was a butcher and should presumably have reared him on
plenty of sound beefsteak and blood gravy. If only Miss Julia Lathrop or
Dr. Anna Howard Shaw could have been Henry's mother, he might have lived
to write poems on the abolition of slavery in America. But as a matter
of fact, he was done to death by the brutal tutors of St. John's
College, Cambridge, and perished at the age of twenty-one, in 1806. As a
poet, let him pass; but the story of his life breathes a sweet and
honourable fragrance, and is comely to ponder in the midnight hours. As
Southey said, there is nothing to be recorded but what is honourable to
him; nothing to be regretted but that one so ripe for heaven should so
soon have been removed from the world.

He was born in Nottingham, March 21, 1785, of honest tradesman parents;
his origin reminds one inevitably of that of Keats. From his earliest
years he was studious in temper, and could with difficulty be drawn from
his books, even at mealtimes. At the age of seven he wrote a story of a
Swiss emigrant and gave it to the servant, being too bashful to show it
to his mother. Southey's comment on this is "The consciousness of genius
is always accompanied with this diffidence; it is a sacred, solitary
feeling."

His schooling was not long; and while it lasted part of Henry's time was
employed in carrying his father's deliveries of chops and rumps to the
prosperous of Nottingham. At fourteen his parents made an effort to
start him in line for business by placing him in a stocking factory. The
work was wholly uncongenial, and shortly afterward he was employed in
the office of a busy firm of lawyers. He spent twelve hours a day in the
office and then an hour more in the evening was put upon Latin and
Greek. Even such recreation hours as the miserable youth found were
dismally employed in declining nouns and conjugating verbs. In a little
garret at the top of the house he began to collect his books; even his
supper of brea