The genius at school is usually a disappointing figure, for, as a rule, one must be commonplace to be a successful boy.  In that preposterous world, to be remarkable is to be overlooked; and nothing less vivid than the white-hot blaze of a Shelley will bring with it even a distinguished martyrdom.  But Beddoes was an exception, though he was not a martyr.  On the contrary, he dominated his fellows as absolutely as if he had been a dullard and a dunce.  He was at Charterhouse; and an entertaining account of his existence there has been preserved to us in a paper of school reminiscences, written by Mr. C.D.  Bevan, who had been his fag.  Though his place in the school was high, Beddoes’ interests were devoted not so much to classical scholarship as to the literature of his own tongue.  Cowley, he afterwards told a friend, had been the first poet he had understood; but no doubt he had begun to understand poetry many years before he went to Charterhouse; and, while he was there, the reading which he chiefly delighted in was the Elizabethan drama.  ’He liked acting,’ says Mr. Bevan, ’and was a good judge of it, and used to give apt though burlesque imitations of the popular actors, particularly Kean and Macready.  Though his voice was harsh and his enunciation offensively conceited, he read with so much propriety of expression and manner, that I was always glad to listen:  even when I was pressed into the service as his accomplice, his enemy, or his love, with a due accompaniment of curses, caresses, or kicks, as the course of his declamation required.  One play in particular, Marlowe’s Tragedy of Dr. Faustus, excited my admiration in this way; and a liking for the old English drama, which I still retain, was created and strengthened by such recitations.’  But Beddoes’ dramatic performances were not limited to the works of others; when the occasion arose he was able to supply the necessary material himself.  A locksmith had incurred his displeasure by putting a bad lock on his bookcase; Beddoes vowed vengeance; and when next the man appeared he was received by a dramatic interlude, representing his last moments, his horror and remorse, his death, and the funeral procession, which was interrupted by fiends, who carried off body and soul to eternal torments.  Such was the realistic vigour of the performance that the locksmith, according to Mr. Bevan, ’departed in a storm of wrath and execrations, and could not be persuaded, for some time, to resume his work.’

Besides the interlude of the wicked locksmith, Beddoes’ school compositions included a novel in the style of Fielding (which has unfortunately disappeared), the beginnings of an Elizabethan tragedy, and much miscellaneous verse.  In 1820 he left Charterhouse, and went to Pembroke College, Oxford, where, in the following year, while still a freshman, he published his first volume, The Improvisatore, a series of short narratives in verse.  The book had been written in part while he was at school; and its immaturity