But on the drawing-room tables of our grandmothers' girlhood the plump
volume, edited with a fulsome memoir by Southey, held honourable place
near the conch shell from the Pacific and the souvenirs of the Crystal
Palace. Mr. Southey, in his thirty years' laureateship, made the fame of
several young versifiers, and deemed that in introducing poor White's
remains to the polite world he was laying the first lucifer to a bonfire
that would gloriously crackle for posterity. No less than Chatterton was
the worthy laureate's estimate of his young foundling; but alas!
Chatterton and Kirke White both seem thinnish gruel to us; and even
Southey himself is down among the pinch hitters. Literary prognosis is a
parlous sport.

The generation that gave us Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Lamb, Jane
Austen, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, leaves us little
time for Kirke White considered purely as a literary man. His verses are
grotesquely stilted, the obvious conjunction of biliousness and
overstudy, and adapted to the taste of an era when the word female was
still used as a substantive. But they are highly entertaining to read
because they so faithfully mirror the backwash of romanticism. They are
so thoroughly unhealthy, so morbid, so pallid with moonlight, so
indentured by the ayenbite of inwit, that it is hard to believe that
Henry's father was a butcher and should presumably have reared him on
plenty of sound beefsteak and blood gravy. If only Miss Julia Lathrop or
Dr. Anna Howard Shaw could have been Henry's mother, he might have lived
to write poems on the abolition of slavery in America. But as a matter
of fact, he was done to death by the brutal tutors of St. John's
College, Cambridge, and perished at the age of twenty-one, in 1806. As a
poet, let him pass; but the story of his life breathes a sweet and
honourable fragrance, and is comely to ponder in the midnight hours. As
Southey said, there is nothing to be recorded but what is honourable to