Born in London in 1841, George Augustus Simcox received a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1858 and began his classical studies in earnest. In addition to his poetry and classical studies, Simcox contributed essays on such contemporary literary figures as Renan, Shelley, Charles Kingsley, and Harriet Martineau to several critical journals, including North British Review, Fortnightly, Nineteenth Century , and Academy. His massive edition of the orations of Demosthenes and Aeschines was a joint production with his brother, the Reverend William Henry Simcox.

Alfred H. Miles selected Simcox's long narrative poem "The Soldan's Daughter" and a wistful sonnet, "A Chill in Summer," for inclusion in The Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century (1906) and detected the influence of A. C. Swinburne and William Morris on Simcox's verse.

"The Soldan's Daughter" (in twenty-five stanzas) appeared in Simcox's most original volume of verse, Poems and Romances (1869). A narrative of the abduction...