ady Holland: "Dear Mr. Macaulay, pray
wrap yourself very warm, and come to us on Wednesday." No, my good Lady.
I am engaged on Wednesday to dine at the Albion Tavern with the
Directors of the East India Company; now my servants; next week, I hope,
to be my masters.

Ever yours,

T. B. M.

FOOTNOTES:

[122] Indeed it exemplifies Defoe's favourite proverb about "What is
bred in the bone," etc.--as for instance when, while admitting
Chesterfield's high position in some ways, he calls the _Letters_ "for
the most part trash." It is scarcely too much to call such criticism
itself "trashy."

THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES (1803-1849)

Beddoes belongs to the small but remarkable company of
authors who, making little mark in their own time and none
at all for some time afterwards, before very long come into
something like their due, though they never can be exactly
popular. He was certainly very eccentric and possibly quite
mad: the circumstances of his suicide do more than justify
the hopes of charity and the convention of coroners' juries,
as to the latter conclusion. But he was an extremely
poetical poet and a letter-writer of remarkable
individuality and zest. Little notice seems to have been
taken, by any save a very few elect, of the first collected
publication of his work just after his death: though a
single piece, _The Bride's Tragedy_, not by any means his
best, had obtained praise in 1822--a time between the great
poetical outburst of the early nineteenth century and the
revival of its middle period. But Mr. Gosse's reissue in
completer form of the _Poems_ in 1890 and the _Letters_ four
years later, lodged him at once in the affection of all
competent critics. With something of the more eccentric
spirit of the seventeenth century in him, and something of
the Romantic revival as shown in Coleridge, Shelley and
Keats, he had much of his own, though he never got it
thoroughly or sustainedly organised and expressed. His
mingled passion and humour (especially the latter)
"escape"--make fitful spurts and explosions--in his
correspondence. Latterly this reflects his mental breakdown,
increasingly in the prose; though only a few years before
the end it contains wonderful verse such as the song, "The
swallow leaves her nest," which is a link between Blake and
Canon Dix