his lyrics which have crept into some of the current anthologies.  But Beddoes’ highest claim to distinction does not rest upon his lyrical achievements, consummate as those achievements are; it rests upon his extraordinary eminence as a master of dramatic blank verse.  Perhaps his greatest misfortune was that he was born at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and not at the end of the sixteenth.  His proper place was among that noble band of Elizabethans, whose strong and splendid spirit gave to England, in one miraculous generation, the most glorious heritage of drama that the world has known.  If Charles Lamb had discovered his tragedies among the folios of the British Museum, and had given extracts from them in the Specimens of Dramatic Poets, Beddoes’ name would doubtless be as familiar to us now as those of Marlowe and Webster, Fletcher and Ford.  As it happened, however, he came as a strange and isolated phenomenon, a star which had wandered from its constellation, and was lost among alien lights.  It is to very little purpose that Mr. Ramsay Colles, his latest editor, assures us that ’Beddoes is interesting as marking the transition from Shelley to Browning’; it is to still less purpose that he points out to us a passage in Death’s Jest Book which anticipates the doctrines of The Descent of Man. For Beddoes cannot be hoisted into line with his contemporaries by such methods as these; nor is it in the light of such after-considerations that the value of his work must be judged.  We must take him on his own merits, ‘unmixed with seconds’; we must discover and appraise his peculiar quality for its own sake.

          He hath skill in language;
    And knowledge is in him, root, flower, and fruit,
    A palm with winged imagination in it,
    Whose roots stretch even underneath the grave;
    And on them hangs a lamp of magic science
    In his soul’s deepest mine, where folded thoughts
    Lie sleeping on the tombs of magi dead.

If the neglect suffered by Beddoes’ poetry may be accounted for in more ways than one, it is not so easy to understand why more curiosity has never been aroused by the circumstances of his life.  For one reader who cares to concern himself with the intrinsic merit of a piece of writing there are a thousand who are ready to explore with eager sympathy the history of the writer; and all that we know both of the life and the character of Beddoes possesses those very qualities of peculiarity, mystery, and adventure, which are so dear to the hearts of subscribers to circulating libraries.  Yet only one account of his career has ever been given to the public; and that account, fragmentary and incorrect as it is, has long been out of print.  It was supplemented some years ago by Mr. Gosse, who was able to throw additional light upon one important circumstance, and who has also published a small collection of Beddoes’ letters.  The main biographical facts, gathered