Richard Henry Horne entered the world in London on the last day of 1802 (though he himself, with characteristic contrariness, sometimes gave the date as New Year's Day 1803), the son of James Horne, a quarter-master in the 61st Regiment of Foot. His father's military postings took the family to Guernsey, where they lived until James Horne's death in 1810 left the boy fatherless at the age of seven or eight. The young…
“If you find him at times very dull, wrong, or perhaps nonsensical, do not seek to make him right, lively, or inspired; let us have what he said, as he said it.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Romantic Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Sorrow, Irony
Francis Hastings Doyle, born on 21 August 1810 and dead on 8 June 1888, belonged to that characteristic Victorian class of cultivated public men for whom poetry was not an isolated vocation but one element in a life shaped by education, law, inherited social position, public duty, and moral reflection. He was a barrister, a baronet, an Oxford professor, and a poet whose best-known verses entered the popular bloodstre…
“Most of these conversations, as is the case with all the finest and wittiest talk, have effervesced away for ever.”
Neighbourhood:
Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow
