SOURCE: Marsh, George L. Introduction to John Hamilton Reynolds: Poetry and Prose, pp. 9-48. London: Humphrey Milford, 1928.

In the following excerpt, Marsh characterizes Reynolds as a writer whose taste in poetry exceeded his talent.

The rocket-like career of John Hamilton Reynolds has in it much that is puzzling, or at best uncertain; much that is pathetic, verging on the tragic. Here is one who at nineteen attracted Byron's attention as a clever young disciple; who at twenty-two was bracketed with Shelley and Keats as one of the young men destined to carry forward the torch of English poetry, and became thenceforth one of the closest and most intimate friends and correspondents of Keats. Later, though he had become a solicitor, he was associated with Lamb, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Hood, and lesser lights on the staff of the most brilliant magazine of the day, and he continued intermittently to...