vague eminences in
poetry that he judged himself unable to attain. There is something in
his style that recalls Heine when he writes, "Me you may safely regard
as one banished from a service to which he was not adapted, but who has
still a lingering affection for the land of dreams--as yet, at least,
not far enough in the journey of science to have lost sight of the old
two-topped hill." And again: "I am essentially unpoetical in character,
habits and ways of thinking; and nothing but the desperate hanker for
distinction so common to the young gentlemen at the university ever set
me upon rhyming. If I had possessed the conviction that I could by any
means become an important or great dramatic writer, I would have never
swerved from the path to reputation; but seeing that others who had
devoted their lives to literature, such as Coleridge and Wordsworth--men
beyond a question of far higher originality and incomparably superior
poetical feeling and genius--had done so little, you must give me leave
to persevere in my preference of Apollo's pill-box to his lyre, and
should congratulate me on having chosen Goettingen instead of Grub street
for my abode.... It is good to be tolerable or intolerable in any other
line, but Apollo defend us from brewing all our lives at a
quintessential pot of the smallest ale Parnassian!"

There are so many racy bits of anecdote and opinion scattered through
this correspondence, so many things worth keeping for their own sakes or
as throwing new light upon the character of their writer, that it is
hard to choose a single specimen, but with one more extract we must
strive to be content. Beddoes' friend and editor had been trying to get
from him some personal details about his daily life, pursuits and
fancies, which, with his usual horror of the egotistical, he flatly
declined to give. "I will not venture on a psychological
self-portraiture," he writes, "fearing--and I believe with sufficient
reason--to be betrayed into affectation, dissimulation or some other
alluring shape of lying. I believe that all autobiographical sketches
are the result of mere vanity--not excepting those of St. Augustine and
Rousseau--falsehood in the mask and mantle of truth. Half ashamed and
half conscious of his own mendacious self-flattery, the historian of his
own deeds or geographer of his own mind breaks out now and then
indignantly, and revenges himself on his own weakness by telling some
very disagreeable truth