"'Dead and gone'a sorry burden of the Ballad of Life," as Thomas Lowell Beddoes has it in his Death's Jest Book.

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.

Readers of Miss Edgeworth's letters may remember that her younger sister Anne, married a distinguished Clifton physician, Dr. Thomas Beddoes.

Dr. Beddoes was a remarkable man, endowed with high and varied intellectual capacities and a rare independence of character.

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.

Beddoes, however, had no reason to be ashamed of his next publication, The Brides' Tragedy, which appeared in 1822.

The play was written on the Elizabethan model, and, as a play, it is disfigured by Beddoes' most characteristic faults: the construction is weak, the interest fluctuates from character to character, and the motives and actions of the characters themselves are for the most part curiously remote from the realities of life.

Yet, though the merit of the tragedy depends almost entirely upon the verse, there are signs in it that, while Beddoes lacked the gift of construction, he nevertheless possessed one important dramatic facultythe power of creating detached scenes of interest and beauty.

The connection had an important result, for it was through Procter that Beddoes became acquainted with the most intimate of all his friendsThomas Forbes Kelsall, then a young lawyer at Southampton.

In the tumult Hegetschweiler was killed, and Beddoes was soon afterwards forced to fly the canton.

The operation was successful, Beddoes began to recover, and, in the autumn, Degen came back to Basel.

In the following year he brought out the two volumes of poetical works, which remained for forty years the only record of the full scope and power of Beddoes' genius.

He has supplied most important materials for the elucidation of the poet's history: and, among the lyrics which he has printed for the first time, are to be found one of the most perfect specimens of Beddoes' command of unearthly pathosThe Old Ghostand one of the most singular examples of his vein of grotesque and ominous

Beddoes had mastered the 'Open, Sesame' at an age when most poets are still mouthing ineffectual wheats and barleys.

It is, however, impossible to do more than touch upon this sidethe technical sideof Beddoes' genius.

The rest of the play affords an instance of Beddoes' inability to trace out a story, clearly and forcibly, to an appointed end.

It is, indeed, clear enough that Beddoes was embarrassed with his riches, that his fertile mind conceived too easily, and that he could never resist the temptation of giving life to his imaginations, even at the cost of killing his play.

But Beddoes could not leave him there; he must have a romantic wife, whom he has deserted; and the wife, once brought into being, must have an interview with her husband.

Perhaps, however, the ordinary reader finds Beddoes' lack of construction a less distasteful quality than his disregard of the common realities of existence.

And his description of his own revels applies no less to the whole atmosphere of Beddoes' tragedies: Voices were heard, most loud, which no man owned: There were more shadows too than there were men; And all the air more dark and thick than night Was heavy, as 'twere made of something more Than living breaths.

If a poet must be a critic of life, Beddoes was certainly no poet.

At any rate, Beddoes is among the roses: it is in his expression that his greatness lies.

But, to find Beddoes in his most characteristic mood, one must watch him weaving his mysterious imagination upon the woof of mortality.

In private intercourse Beddoes was the least morbid of human beings.