English poet, born on the 23rd of October 1844; educated at Eton and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and studied medicine in London at St. Bartholomews hospital. He was afterwards assistant physician at the Childrens hospital, Great Ormond Street, and physician at the Great Northern hospital, retiring in 1882. Two years later he married Mary, daughter of Alfred Waterhouse, R.A. As a poet Robert Bridges stands rather apart from the current of modern English verse, but his work has had great influence in a select circle, by its restraint, purity, precision, and delicacy yet strength of expression; and it embodies a distinct theory of prosody. His chief critical works are Miltons Prosody (1893), a volume made up of two earlier essays (1887 and 1889), and John Keats, a Critical Essay (1895). He maintained that English prosody depended on the number of stresses in a line, not on the number of syllables, and that poetry should follow the rules of natural speech. His poetry was privately printed in the first instance, and was slow in making its way beyond a comparatively small circle of his admirers. His best work is to be found in his Shorter Poems (1890), and a complete edition of his Poetical Works (6 vols.) was published in 18981905. His chief volumes are Prometheus (Oxford, 1883, privately printed), a mask in the Greek Manner; Eros and Psyche (1885), a version of Apuleius; The Growth of Love, a series of sixty-nine sonnets printed for private circulation in 1876 and 1889; Shorter Poems (1890); Nero (1885), a historical tragedy, the second part of which appeared in 1894; Achilles in Scyros (1890), a drama; Palicio (1890), a romantic drama in the Elizabethan manner; The Return of Ulysses (1890), a drama in five acts; The Christian Captives (1890), a tragedy on the same subject as Calderóns El Principe Constante; The Humours of the Court (1893), a comedy founded on the same dramatists El secreto á voces and on Lope de Vegas El Perro del hortelano; The Feast of Bacchus (1889), partly translated from the Heauton-Timoroumenos of Terence; Hymns from the Yattendon Hymnal (Oxford, 1899); and Demeter, a Mask (Oxford, 1905). He was in 1913 appointed Poet Laureate. Among his later publications were Ibant Obscuri (1916) and an ode on the Tercentenary Commemoration of Shakespeare (1916); as well as an Essay on Keats, several addresses on poetical subjects, and occasional poems during the World War. He also edited The Spirit of Man (1916), an anthology in English and French. In the summer of 1920 he originated a letter, subsequently signed by many Oxford tutors, lecturers, professors and some heads of colleges, addressed to the learned world of Germany and intended as an eirenicon, which was published in the autumn. Its advisability was the occasion of much difference of opinion in academic and other circles. See also his edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Growth of Love, etc.