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 Dixon. But earlier, as in the following, there is nothing beyond oddity. Of this there may seem to be a good share, but a few notes will make it intelligible. It clearly heralds, though the thing is first definitely indicated in a later letter, Beddoes' marvellous tragedy Death's Jest-book, which he wrote and re-wrote till it became like the picture in Balzac's story an "Unknown [and Unknowable] Masterpiece." The letter is further remarkable as combining intense admiration for the old masterpieces with a quite "modern" insistence on "begetting" rather than "reviving"—on "giving the literature of the age a spirit of its own," etc. For details: "Sulky" (compare the French dÉsobligeante, celebrated by Sterne)—an obsolete form of chaise. "Breaking Priscian's head" is familiar enough for "using bad grammar," which the book-keeper very likely did; but the explanation may be more remote. "Like a ghost from the tomb" though not "quoted" is, of course, his beloved Shelley's ("The Cloud"). "Biped knock" = merely "double"—the peculiar rat-tat which postmen have mostly forgotten or not learnt—perhaps regarding it as a badge of slavery like "tips." The Fatal Dowry—attributed to (Field and) Massinger, and spoilt by Rowe into his nevertheless popular Fair Penitent,—is one of the finest examples of the second stage of Elizabethan drama. Ultracrepidarian—a term derived from the Latin proverb ne sutor supra (or ultra) crepidam and specially applied to the unpopular critic Gifford who had been a shoemaker—meaning generally "some one who does go beyond his last and meddles with things he does not understand." "McCready's" (Macready, the famous actor and manager) friend Walker was probably Sidney Walker the Shakespearian critic.