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Nor has the veil been altogether withdrawn from that strange tragedy which, for the strange tragedian, was the last of all. Readers of Miss Edgeworth's letters may remember that her younger sister Anne, married a distinguished Clifton physician, Dr. Thomas Beddoes. Dr. Beddoes was a remarkable man, endowed with high and varied intellectual capacities and a rare independence of character.
Colonel Pride's name is on the package, but may not that be a subterfuge? Why else did he say he was called Blount?" Hogan's brows were of a sudden knit. "Faith, Beddoes, you are right. Remove his sword and search him." Calmly Kenneth suffered them to carry out this order. Inwardly he boiled at the delay, and cursed himself for having so needlessly given the name of Blount.
Beddoes' power of creating scenes of intense dramatic force, which had already begun to show itself in The Brides' Tragedy, reached its full development in his subsequent work.
It contains no trace of the nervous vigour of his later style; the verse is weak, and the sentiment, to use his own expression, 'Moorish. Indeed, the only interest of the little work lies in the evidence which it affords that the singular pre-occupation which eventually dominated Beddoes' mind had, even in these early days, made its appearance. The book is full of death.
Beddoes now expressed a wish to record my testimony also, and presented me his green bag; but being satisfied with the effects produced on others, I begged to decline the honour.
He strode past him to the door, and flung it wide. "Beddoes!" he called. A step sounded in the passage, and the sergeant appeared. "Have you a trooper there?" "There is Peter, who rode with me." "Let him look to this fellow. Tell him to set him under lock and bolt here in the inn until I shall want him, and tell him that he shall answer for him with his neck." Kenneth drew back in alarm.
"That was the narrative which I read that night to young Trevor, and I think, Watson, that under the circumstances it was a dramatic one. The good fellow was heart-broken at it, and went out to the Terai tea planting, where I hear that he is doing well. As to the sailor and Beddoes, neither of them was ever heard of again after that day on which the letter of warning was written.
To ask which is the better of the two styles is like asking whether a peach is better than a rose, because, both being beautiful, you can eat the one and not the other. At any rate, Beddoes is among the roses: it is in his expression that his greatness lies. His verse is an instrument of many modulations, of exquisite delicacy, of strange suggestiveness, of amazing power.
Great expectations in respect to the cure of consumptions, as well as of many other diseases, are produced by the very ingenious exertions of DR. BEDDOES; who has established an apparatus for breathing various mixtures of airs or gasses, at the hot-wells near Bristol, which well deserves the attention of the public.
And yet he is much the greatest poet of the period. Its effect was more disastrous still upon the second Lord Lytton, who was content to employ an excellent lyrical vein, and a gift of verse satire of the fantastic kind so distinct and fascinating, that it approaches the merit of fantasists in other kinds of the former group, like Beddoes and Darley, to far too great an extent on echoes.
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