Bryan Waller Procter

He was educated at Harrow, where he had for contemporaries Lord Byron and Sir Robert Peel. On leaving school he was placed in the office of a solicitor at Calne, Wiltshire, remaining there until about 1807, when he returned to London to study law. By the death of his father in 1816 he became possessed of a small property, and soon after entered into partnership with a solicitor; but in 1820 the partnership was dissolved, and he began to write under the pseudonym of "Barry Cornwall."

After his marriage in 1824 to Miss Skepper, a daughter of Mrs Basil Montague, he eturned to his professional work as conveyancer, and was called to the bar in 1831. In the following year he was appointed, metropolitan commissioner of lunacy--an appointment annually renewed until his election to the permanent commission constituted by the act of 1842. He resigned office in 1861. Most of his verse was composed between 1815, when he began to contribute to the Literary Gazette, and 1823, or at latest 1832. His daughter, Adelaide Anne, was also a poet.

His principal poetical works were: Dramatic Scenes and other Poems (1819), A Sicilian Story (1820), Mirandola, a tragedy performed at Covent Garden with Macready[?], Charles Kemble[?] and Miss Foote in the leading parts (1821), The Flood of Thessaly (1823). and English Songs (1832). He was also the author of Effigies poetica (1824), Life of Edmund Kean (1835), Essays and Tales in Prose (1851), Charles Lamb; a Memoir (1866), and of memoirs of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare for editions of their works. A posthumous autobiographical fragment with notes of his literary friends, of whom he had a wide range from Bowles[?] to Browning, was published in 1877, with some additions by Coventry Patmore.

Charles Lamb gave the highest possible praise to his friend’s Dramatic Sketches when he said that had he found them as anonymous manuscript in the Garrick collection he would have had no hesitation about including them in his Dramatic Specimens. He was perhaps not an impartial critic. "Barry Cornwall's" genius cannot be said to have been entirely mimetic, but his works are full of subdued echoes. His songs have caught some notes from the Elizabethan and Cavalier lyrics, and blended them with others from the leading poets of his own time; and his dramatic fragments show a similar infusion of the early Victorian spirit into pre-Restoration forms and cadences. The results are somewhat heterogeneous, and lack the impress of a pervading and dominant personality to give them unity, but they abound in pleasant touches, with here and there the flash of a higher, though casual, inspiration.

This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.