from these sources, have been put together by Mr. Ramsay Colles, in his introduction to the new edition; but he has added nothing fresh; and we are still in almost complete ignorance as to the details of the last twenty years of Beddoes’ existence—­full as those years certainly were of interest and even excitement.  Nor has the veil been altogether withdrawn from that strange tragedy which, for the strange tragedian, was the last of all.

Readers of Miss Edgeworth’s letters may remember that her younger sister Anne, married a distinguished Clifton physician, Dr. Thomas Beddoes.  Their eldest son, born in 1803, was named Thomas Lovell, after his father and grandfather, and grew up to be the author of The Brides’ Tragedy and Death’s Jest Book.  Dr. Beddoes was a remarkable man, endowed with high and varied intellectual capacities and a rare independence of character.  His scientific attainments were recognised by the University of Oxford, where he held the post of Lecturer in Chemistry, until the time of the French Revolution, when he was obliged to resign it, owing to the scandal caused by the unconcealed intensity of his liberal opinions.  He then settled at Clifton as a physician, established a flourishing practice, and devoted his leisure to politics and scientific research.  Sir Humphry Davy, who was his pupil, and whose merit he was the first to bring to light, declared that ’he had talents which would have exalted him to the pinnacle of philosophical eminence, if they had been applied with discretion.’  The words are curiously suggestive of the history of his son; and indeed the poet affords a striking instance of the hereditary transmission of mental qualities.  Not only did Beddoes inherit his father’s talents and his father’s inability to make the best use of them; he possessed in a no less remarkable degree his father’s independence of mind.  In both cases, this quality was coupled with a corresponding eccentricity of conduct, which occasionally, to puzzled onlookers, wore the appearance of something very near insanity.  Many stories are related of the queer behaviour of Dr. Beddoes.  One day he astonished the ladies of Clifton by appearing at a tea-party with a packet of sugar in his hand; he explained that it was East Indian sugar, and that nothing would induce him to eat the usual kind, which came from Jamaica and was made by slaves.  More extraordinary were his medical prescriptions; for he was in the habit of ordering cows to be conveyed into his patients’ bedrooms, in order, as he said, that they might ‘inhale the animals’ breath.’  It is easy to imagine the delight which the singular spectacle of a cow climbing upstairs into an invalid’s bedroom must have given to the future author of Harpagus and The Oviparous Tailor.  But ‘little Tom,’ as Miss Edgeworth calls him, was not destined to enjoy for long the benefit of parental example; for Dr. Beddoes died in the prime of life, when the child was not yet six years old.