child, petted and kept out of the way of both sport and study by a
partial mother. Bred an attorney, he had (like both his brothers)
changed his way of life, and was called to the bar when past
thirty. A Commission of Enquiry into the state of the poor in
Dorsetshire gave him an opportunity of proving his true talents;
and he was appointed a Poor Law Inspector, first at Worcester, next
at Manchester, where he had to deal with the potato famine and the
Irish immigration of the 'forties, and finally in London, where he
again distinguished himself during an epidemic of cholera. He was
then advanced to the Permanent Secretaryship of Her Majesty's
Office of Works and Public Buildings; a position which he filled
with perfect competence, but with an extreme of modesty; and on his
retirement, in 1868, he was made a Companion of the Bath. While
apprentice to a Norwich attorney, Alfred Austin was a frequent
visitor in the house of Mr. Barron, a rallying place in those days
of intellectual society. Edward Barron, the son of a rich saddler
or leather merchant in the Borough, was a man typical of the time.
When he was a child, he had once been patted on the head in his
father's shop by no less a man than Samuel Johnson, as the Doctor
went round the Borough canvassing for Mr. Thrale; and the child was
true to this early consecration. 'A life of lettered ease spent in
provincial retirement,' it is thus that the biographer of that
remarkable man, William Taylor, announces his subject; and the
phrase is equally descriptive of the life of Edward Barron. The
pair were close friends, 'W. T. and a pipe render everything
agreeable,' writes Barron in his diary in 1823; and in 1833, after
Barron had moved to London and Taylor had tasted the first public
failure of his powers, the latter wrote: 'To my ever dearest Mr.
Barron say, if you please, that I miss him more than I regret him -
that I acquiesce in his retirement from Norwich, because I could