was
changed to Stratfield. During the War of Independence it was a centre of
privateering. In 1800 the borough of Bridgeport was chartered, and in 1821
the township was incorporated. The city was not chartered until 1836.

See S. Orcutt's _History of the Township of Stratford and the City of
Bridgeport_ (New Haven, 1886).

BRIDGES, ROBERT (1844- ), English poet, born on the 23rd of October 1844,
was educated at Eton and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and studied
medicine in London at St Bartholomew's hospital. He was afterwards
assistant physician at the Children's hospital, Great Ormond Street, and
physician at the Great Northern hospital, retiring in 1882. Two years later
he married Mary, daughter of Alfred Waterhouse, R.A. As a poet Robert
Bridges stands rather apart from the current of modern English verse, but
his work has had great influence in a select circle, by its restraint,
purity, precision, and delicacy yet strength of expression; and it embodies
a distinct theory of prosody. His chief critical works are _Milton's
Prosody_ (1893), a volume made up of two earlier essays (1887 and 1889),
and _John Keats, a Critical Essay_ (1895). He maintained that English
prosody depended on the number of "stresses" in a line, not on the number
of syllables, and that poetry should follow the rules of natural speech.
His poetry was privately printed in the first instance, and was slow in
making its way beyond a comparatively small circle of his admirers. His
best work is to be found in his _Shorter Poems_ (1890), and a complete
edition of his _Poetical Works_ (6 vols.) was published in 1898-1905. His
chief volumes are _Prometheus_ (Oxford, 1883, privately printed), a "mask
in the Greek Manner"; _Eros and Psyche_ (1885), a version of Apuleius; _The
Growth of Love_, a series of sixty-nine sonnets printed for private
circulation in 1876 and 1889; _Shorter Poems_ (1890); _Nero_ (1885), a
historical tragedy, the second part of which appeared in 1894; _Achilles in
Scyros_ (1890), a drama; _Palicio_ (1890), a romantic drama in the
Elizabethan manner; _The Return of Ulysses_ (1890), a drama in five acts;
_The Christian Captives_ (1890), a tragedy on the same subject as
Calderon's _El Principe Constante_; _The Humours of the Court_ (1893), a
comedy founded on the same dramatist's _El secreto a voces_ and on Lope de
Vega's _El Perro del hortelano_; _The Feast of Bacchus_ (1889), partly
translated from the _Heauton-Timoroumenos_ of