Buffon said, "Show me the style and I'll show you the man" [le style est de l'homme même]. Puttenham (Arte of English Poesie, 1589, p. 161) wrote with equal justice: "his [man's] inward conceits be the metall of his minde, and his manner of utterance the very warp and woofe of his conceits;" or, in other words, "show me the man, and I'll show you his style." Beddoes' Poems and Letters are one more welcome illustration of the truth of Buffon's observation; but, in a far higher sense, of Puttenham's. Here the style is the direct, necessary expression of the writer's inmost nature. Since he was in the highest degree original, the fact has a significance, in matters of English style, far deeper than has been attributed to it.

If we class the characteristic works in English literature with reference to the history of style into three periods, the Anglo-Saxon epic style and Shakspeare represent two of them. The third has no complete representative, but among its most significant writers (style being here assumed to have little more to do with constructive power than in the case of the Anglo-Saxon poets) is Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Beddoes' intimate connection with Shakspeare in point, thought and style, is so marked that he has been called an Elizabethan, "a strayed singer," and the like.-WOOD, HENRY, 1883, T. L. Beddoes, A Survival in Style, American Journal of Philology, vol. 4, pp. 445, 446.

The quality of youth is still more distinctly discernible in some of Thomas Beddoes' dazzling little songs, stolen straight from the heart of the sixteenth century, and lustrous with that golden. light which set so long ago. It is not in spirit only, nor in sentiment, that this resemblance exists; the words, the imagery, the swaying music, the teeming fancies of the younger poet, mark him as one strayed from another age, and wandering companionless under alien skies.-REPPLIER, AGNES, 1891, English Love-Songs, Points of View, p. 60.

Beddoes is always large, impressive; the greatness of his aim gives him a certain claim on respectful consideration. That his talent achieved itself, or ever could have achieved itself, he himself would have been the last to affirm. But he is a monumental failure, more interesting than

many facile triumphs. Beddoes' genius was essentially lyrical: he had imagination, the gift of style, the mastery of rhythm, a strange choiceness and curiosity of phrase. But of really dramatic power he had nothing. He could neither conceive a coherent plot, nor develop a credible situation. He had no grasp on human nature, he had no conception of what character might be in men and women, he had no faculty of expressing emotion convincingly. Constantly you find the most beautiful poetry where it is absolutely inappropriate, but never do you find one of those brief and memorable phrases-words from phrases-words from the heart-for which one would give much beautiful poetry. A beautiful lyrist, a writer of charming, morbid, and magnificent poetry in dramatic form, Beddoes will survive to students not to readers, of English poetry, somewhere in the neighborhood of Ebenezer Jones and Charles Wells.-SYMONS, ARTHUR, 1891, The Poetical Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Academy, vol. 40, p. 129.

No nineteenth century English poet with whom I am acquainted, ever promised more and performed less than Thomas Lovell Beddoes, whose verse, like his life, was a wayward fragment. There were

the makings of a greater poet in Beddoes than he ever became, except at intervals, and in his most inspired moments; and the poet that he might have been, if fully developed, is of a kind that English poetry has long since outgrown. He belonged to the same guild of dramatists as Marlowe, Tourneur, and Webster, but where they were masters, he was an apprentice. There were the same dark elements in his genius as in theirs, but they were more confused and tumultuous, more chaotic than creative, and more horrible than terrible. STODDARD, RICHARD HENRY, 1892, Under the Evening Lamp, pp. 200, 210.

In all strictly poetical endowments he is most affluent, it is only when he of necessity forsakes the realm of pure poetry that he becomes awkward and ineffectual. He had chosen the drama for his special field-unwisely it might have been said, had his overmastering enthusiasm for the Elizabethan stage allowed him any alternative. . . He is, however, much more than a writer of exquisite

.

Perhaps you have known what it is to feel longings

To pat buxom shoulders at routs and such throngings;

Well, think what it was, at a vision like that! A Grace after dinner!-a Venus grown fat! -HUNT, LEIGH, 1838, Feast of the Violets, Monthly Repository.

In her lifetime she was loved and admired for her many graceful writings, her gentle manners, her kind and generous heart.

Men, famous for art and science, in distant lands sought her friendship; and the historians and scholars, the poets and wits, and painters of her own country found an unfailing welcome in her ever-hospitable home. She gave cheerfully, to all who were in need, help and sympathy, and useful counsel; and she died lamented by many friends. Those who loved her best in life, and now lament her most, have reared this tributary marble over the place of her rest. PROCTER, BRYAN WALLER, (BARRY CORNWALL), 1849, Epitaph for the Countess of Blessington.

I have never since beheld so pure and perfect a vision of female loveliness, in what I conceive to be its most perfect phase, that, namely, in which intellect does not predominate over form, feature, complexion, and the other physical attributes of female beauty, but only serves to heighten, purify and irradiate them; and it is this class of beauty which cannot be equalled on canvas. At this time Lady Blessington was about six-and-twenty years of age; but there was about her face, together with that beaming intelligence which rarely shows itself upon the countenance till that period of life, a bloom and freshness which as rarely survive early youth, and a total absence of the undefinable marks which thought and feeling still more rarely fail to leave behind them. Unlike all other beautiful faces that I have seen, hers was, at the time of which I speak, neither a history nor a prophecy; not a book to read and study, a problem to solve, or a mystery to speculate upon, but a star to kneel before and worship. PATMORE, P. G., 1854, My Friends and Acquaintance, vol. 1, pp. 170, 172.

Beauty, the heritage of the family, was, in her early youth, denied to Marguerite: her eldest brother and sister, Michael and Anne, as well as Ellen and Robert, were singularly handsome and healthy children,

while she, pale, weakly and ailing, was for years regarded as little likely ever to grow to womanhood; the precocity of her intellect, the keenness of her perceptions, and her extreme sensitiveness, all of which are so often regarded, more especially among the Irish, as the precursive symptoms of an early death, confirmed this belief, and the poor, pale, reflective child was long looked upon as doomed to a premature grave. The atmosphere in which she lived was but little congenial to such a nature. Her father, a man of violent temper, and little given to study the characters of his children, intimidated and shook the delicate nerves of the sickly child, though there were moments-rare ones, it is true-when the sparkles of her early genius for an instant dazzled and gratified him. Her mother, though she failed not to bestow the tenderest maternal care on the health of the little sufferer, was not capable of appreciating her fine and subtile qualities, and her brothers and sisters, fond as they were of her, were not, in their high health and boisterous gayety, companions suited to such a child.-POWER, MISS, 1854, A Memoir of the Countess of Blessington, Literary Life and Correspondence, ed. Madden, Introduction, vol. 1, pp. 14, 15.

The peculiar character of Lady Blessington's beauty seemed to be the entire, exact, and instantaneous correspondence of every feature, and each separate trait of her countenance, with the emotion of her mind, which any particular subject of conversation or object of attention might excite. The instant a joyous thought took possession of her fancy, you saw it transmitted as if by electrical agency to her glowing features: you read it in her sparkling eyes, her laughing lips, her cheerful looks; you heard it expressed in her ringing laugh, clear and sweet as the gay, joybell sounds of childhood's merriest tones. There was a geniality in the warmth of her Irish feelings, an abandonment of all care, of all apparent consciousness of her powers of attraction, a glowing sunshine of goodhumor and of good-nature in the smiles and laughter, and the sallies of wit of this lovely woman in her early and happy days (those of her Italian life, especially from 1823 to 1826), such as have been seldom surpassed. . Her voice was sweetly modulated and low. Its tones were always

in harmonious concord with the traits of

her expressive features. All the beauty of Lady Blessington, without the exquisite sweetness of her voice, and the witchery of its tones in pleasing or expressing pleasure, would have been only a secondary attraction.― MADDEN, R. R., 1854, Literary Life and Correspondence of the Countess of Blessington, vol. 1, pp.51,52. Virtuous ladies! instead of censuring her faults, attempt to imitate her virtues. Believe that, if any excess may be run into, the excess of tenderness is quite as pardonable as that of malignity and rancour.-LANDOR, WALTER SAVAGE, 1855, The Landor-Blessington Papers, Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, eds. Nicoll and Wise, p. 233.

Lady Blessington made a very pleasant impression upon me; and in the great circles, when the noble ladies asked me where I had been, I could not abstain from naming Lady Blessington. Then there always was a pause; I asked the reason why I was not to go there, or what was the matter with her, but I always got a short answer that she was not a good woman. One day I spoke of her personal amiability, and of her humour, and related how she was affected when talking of Jenny Lind's representation of La Somnambula and the womanly nobility she manifested; I had seen her shed tears over it! "The crea

ture!" exclaimed an old lady indignantly; "Lady Blessington weeping at the innocence of Jenny Lind!" A few years after I read of Lady Blessington's death at Paris. Count d'Orsay sat at her deathbed.

ANDERSEN, HANS CHRISTIAN, 1871, The Story of My Life, p. 302.

A thoughtful little poem written during the past summer for Lady Blessington has been quoted on a previous page: and it may remind me to say here what warmth of regard he [Dickens] had for her, and for all the inmates of Gore-house; how uninterruptedly joyous and pleasurable were his associations with them.-FORSTER, JOHN, 1872, The Life of Charles Dickens, vol. II, ch. iv.

She said a few kind words in that winning and gracious manner which no woman's welcome can have ever surpassed; and from that moment till the day of her death in Paris, I experienced only a long course of kind constructions and good offices. She was a steady friend, through good report and evil report, for those to

whom she professed friendship. Such faults as she had belonged to her position, to her past history, and to the disloyalty of many who paid court to her by paying court to her faults, and who then carried into the outer world depreciating reports of the wit, the banter, the sarcasm, and the epigram, which but for their urgings and incitements would have been always kindly, however mirthful. She must have had originally the most sunny of sunny natures. As it was, I have never seen anything like her vivacity and sweet cheerfulness during the early years when I knew her. She had a singular power of entertaining herself by her own stories; the keenness of an Irishwoman in relishing fun and repartee, strange turns of language, and bright touches of character. A fairer, kinder, more universal recipient of everything that came within the possibilities of her mind, I have never known.-CHORLEY, HENRY FOTHERGILL, 1873, Autobiography, Memoirs and Letters, vol. 1, p. 174.

*Of Lady Blessington's tact, kindness, and remarkable beauty Procter always spoke with ardor, and abated nothing from the popular idea of that fascinating person. He thought she had done more in her time to institute good feeling and social intercourse among men of letters than any other lady in England, and he gave her eminent credit for bringing forward the rising talent of the metropolis without waiting to be prompted by a public verdict.

FIELDS, JAMES T., 1875, “Barry Cornwall" and Some of His Friends, Harper's Magazine, vol. 51, p. 782.

Lady Blessington, fair, florid-complexioned, with sparkling eyes and white, high forehead, above which her bright brown hair was smoothly braided beneath a light and simple blonde cap, in which were a few touches of sky-blue satin ribbon that singularly well became her, setting off her buxom face and its vivid coloring. -CLARKE, MARY COWDEN, 1878, Recollections of Writers, p. 42.

With the Countess of Blessington lived Count d'Orsay. As he, too, has often been described, I may dismiss him also with a few words. He had, it is well known, been married to the daughter of the Earl, and the step-daughter of the Countess of Blessington. The match, for some reason or other, proved unhappy. The Count, his wife, and the Countess of Blessington