know nothing more of them than can be learnt from a
few scanty references in his rare letters to English
friends; but it is certain that the part he played
was an active, and even a dangerous one. He was
turned out of Wuerzburg by ‘that ingenious Jackanapes,’
the King of Bavaria; he was an intimate friend of
Hegetschweiler, one of the leaders of liberalism in
Switzerland; and he was present in Zurich when a body
of six thousand peasants, ’half unarmed, and
the other half armed with scythes, dungforks and poles,
entered the town and overturned the liberal government.’
In the tumult Hegetschweiler was killed, and Beddoes
was soon afterwards forced to fly the canton.
During the following years we catch glimpses of him,
flitting mysteriously over Germany and Switzerland,
at Berlin, at Baden, at Giessen, a strange solitary
figure, with tangled hair and meerschaum pipe, scribbling
lampoons upon the King of Prussia, translating Grainger’s
Spinal Cord into German, and Schoenlein’s
Diseases of Europeans into English, exploring
Pilatus and the Titlis, evolving now and then some
ghostly lyric or some rabelaisian tale, or brooding
over the scenes of his ‘Gothic-styled tragedy,’
wondering if it were worthless or inspired, and giving
it—as had been his wont for the last twenty
years—just one more touch before he sent
it to the press. He appeared in England once or
twice, and in 1846 made a stay of several months, visiting
the Procters in London, and going down to Southampton
to be with Kelsall once again. Eccentricity had
grown on him; he would shut himself for days in his
bedroom, smoking furiously; he would fall into fits
of long and deep depression. He shocked some
of his relatives by arriving at their country house
astride a donkey; and he amazed the Procters by starting
out one evening to set fire to Drury Lane Theatre with
a lighted five-pound note. After this last visit
to England, his history becomes even more obscure
than before. It is known that in 1847 he was in
Frankfort, where he lived for six months in close companionship
with a young baker called Degen—’a
nice-looking young man, nineteen years of age,’
we are told, ’dressed in a blue blouse, fine
in expression, and of a natural dignity of manner’;
and that, in the spring of the following year, the
two friends went off to Zurich, where Beddoes hired
the theatre for a night in order that Degen might
appear on the stage in the part of Hotspur. At
Basel, however, for some unexplained reason, the friends
parted, and Beddoes fell immediately into the profoundest
gloom. ‘Il a ete miserable,’ said
the waiter at the Cigogne Hotel, where he was staying,
‘il a voulu se tuer.’ It was true.
He inflicted a deep wound in his leg with a razor,
in the hope, apparently, of bleeding to death.
He was taken to the hospital, where he constantly
tore off the bandages, until at last it was necessary
to amputate the leg below the knee. The operation
was successful, Beddoes began to recover, and, in the