Born (Frederick Locker), at Greenwich Hospital, 1821. Educated at various private schools, 1829–36. Clerk in colonial broker’s in London, Sept. 1837 to Dec. 1838. Visit to Continent, 1840. Clerk at Somerset House, March 1841. Transferred to Admiralty, Nov. 1842. Married (i.) Lady Charlotte Bruce, 4 July 1849. Contrib. to “Cornhill Mag.” from 1860. Wife died, 26 April 1872. Married (ii.) Hannah Jane Lampson, 6 July 1874. Took additional surname of Lampson on death of wife’s father, 1890. Died, at Rowfant, 30 May 1895. Works: “London Lyrics,” 1857; “Lyra Elegantiarum,” 1867 (first edn. suppressed; revised edn. same year). Posthumous: “My Confidences,” ed. by A. Birrell, 1896.

Personal

  In life as in literature he has both humor and good humor. Although satiric by nature, he is thoroughly sympathetic and generous. Well-to-do in the world, he has been able to indulge his liking for the little things in art which make life worth living. His collections of china, of drawings, of engravings, are all excellent; and his literary curiosities, first editions of great books and precious autographs of great men, make a poor American wickedly envious. He is a connoisseur of the best type, never buying trash or bargain-hunting, knowing what he wants, and why he wants it, and what it is worth; and his treasures are freely opened to any literary brother who is seeking after truth.

  As a diplomat, his knowledge of men and of society, his judgment, his finesse, his unerring tact and taste, and his fine presence and charm of personality, would have made him a marked man. But his dislike to everything which tended to disturb the level of things, and his habitual “backwardness,” added, one is bound to confess, to constitutional indolence and love of ease, made him shrink from the excitement and distraction of public life, as he shrank from challenging that serious recognition as a poet—apart from his reputation as a writer of light verse—to which he had it in his power to make good his claim.

  A personality which combined in an extraordinary degree an enchantingly gentle bearing, a kindness of heart that defies description, a keen perception, and (though in undertones) a rare incisiveness of speech. For his friends—and he had friends everywhere and in all ranks of life—there was nothing he would not do.

  Mr. Frederic Locker-Lampson always struck me as a droll figure. He posed as a friend to men of letters, and subscribed, I believe, to the Literary Fund; yet he held up his head as if his sole status had been his ancient descent and his territorial importance, whereas in reality his main title to notice was what he did in vers de société—some very clever and pretty things, but assuredly no poetry.

General

  Mr. Frederick Locker is happily exempted from the possibility of undergoing the post-mortem examination to which we have been able to subject his illustrious predecessors, and at our hands at least he is equally safe from vivisection. In predicating of him that he is no spectator ab extra of the social life which he has depicted in his “London Lyrics,” we affirm nothing that they will not abundantly warrant. We are delighted to welcome this charming volume in an improved edition. In returning afresh to it, after a study of Prior and Praed, we have been forcibly struck by the superior healthiness of the atmosphere pervading it. This impression may be heightened by a natural association of ideas. All three are more or less poets of the city; but whereas with his forerunners we are mewed within walls, Mr. Locker invites us out of doors…. Studies, minute but delicate, drawn from every rank of society and every period of life, appeal to differing tastes. While in the choice of subjects he has nearly as much variety as Prior, and more than Praed, though he has written far less than either, the uniformity of his mode of handling is the test of his sincerity. None of the sharpness of contrast between gravity and gaiety, such as we remark in Prior, no sudden revulsions of sentiment, such as Praed exhibits, will be found in these poems. A subtle intermixture of seriousness and irony, of humour and pathos, is their prevailing characteristic…. Mr. Locker seems most deservedly characterized by two epithets which no one dreams of applying to Prior, and we think must be denied to Praed—earnest and tender…. Mr. Locker has a fine ear for rhythm and rhyme, and his employment of assonance and alliteration is judiciously subdued. With the efforts of Mr. Morris and Mr. Swinburne to obtain variety—the one by means of false accentuations, the other by experiments which vie with the “Peter Piper” of our childhood—he has no sympathy.

  Mr. Locker is not quite so elegant, perhaps, as his forerunner Praed; but he is more sprightly and humourous. Liveliness, and what we should call the humour of surprise, are two of his distinguishing features…. Mr. Locker’s talent is in harmony with the spirit of the time. He lives so in the age and belongs so much to what is best in its society that he may fairly be remembered and quoted hereafter as a representative of the period. His earnestness and sincerity are very marked characteristics, and the genuineness of his song will provide against its extinction. His fancy is chaste and selective, his wit delicate, his style polished and graceful, and it is possible that some of his light fabrics may outlive more stately and solid edifices.

  Mr. Locker is the du Maurier of song, and his “London Lyrics” are as entertaining and as instructive to the student of Victorian manners as Mr. du Maurier’s “Pictures of English Society.” Mr. Locker has succeeded Praed as the laureate of the world, and he ignores the flesh, and is ignorant of the devil, just like Praed, and just like society itself. But it seems to me that Mr. Locker’s range is wider than Praed’s, whose success lay almost altogether in his songs of society; Praed was out of place when he ventured far from Mayfair and beyond the sound of St. George’s in Hanover Square; while Mr. Locker’s Pegasus pauses at the mouth of Cite Fadette as gracefully as it treads the gravel of Rotten Row. The later poet has wider sympathies than the elder, who, indeed, may be said to have but one note.

  As you turn his pages you feel as freshly as ever the sweet, old-world elegance, the courtly amiability, the mannerly restraint, the measured and accomplished ease. True, they are colourless, and in these days we are deboshed with colour; but then they are so luminously limpid and serene, they are so sprightly and graceful and gay! In the gallantry they affect there is a something at once exquisite and paternal.

  In Mr. Locker’s work, the graceful nothings of the drawing-room are so dexterously set to music, that we are hardly aware that conversation has passed into song, while remaining conversation. And whenever he essays to sing, he seems to me to have the true lyrical note…. Though Mr. Locker had his literary limitations—though his work was not marked by dramatic or creative power, any more than by originality of thought—the grace of “style” dignifies everything to which he put his hand. It is apparent even in the books which he edited, as well as in the books which he wrote…. Humour—keen, kindly, and playful—was of the very framework of his being. It was humour which made his sight so clear, his judgments so generous; and humour was the secret alike of his light-heartedness and of his occasional tender melancholy…. That the excellence of technique and of taste, and the ease, grace, and restraint which are never absent from Mr. Locker’s work, entitle him to rank among the best writers of Occasional Verse, few will deny. As compared with his contemporaries, it will generally be conceded that he shares with Mr. Austin Dobson the highest place. Mr. Lang, Mr. Gosse, and Mr. Henley have written occasional poems which may challenge comparison with the best; but when the—it is to be hoped, far distant—time comes to draw the final line under the list of their works, and to add up the column, they will be judged by another standard than as writers of vers de société. Between Mr. Dobson and Mr. Locker, then, the honours may be equally divided, and between these brothers in friendship, as in song, no comparison of merits need be instituted.

  “My Confidences” is, indeed, a book wherein an affluent humour, now sportive, now gravely tender, blends with a shrewd, kindly wisdom, and a keen though unenvenomed wit, to form a style of unique idiosyncratic charm. Its pages brim and run over with delicious laughter—a laughter none the less sweet because of its occasional neighbourhood to tears. In his “Lyrics” Frederick Locker had revealed himself as the poet of society, singing the hearts of London folk out to their face; here, as in “Patchwork,” he shows at once as the humorist who, with a stroke of his wizard’s rod, turns to favour and to prettiness the dull follies and ugly foibles of his fellow-men, and as the steadfast lover and bold, persuasive advocate of all that is true, honest, pure, lovely, and of good report…. Locker’s faculty of observation was keen; he had a devouring eye. Moreover—and the like is true of all humorists—its activity does not seem to have been checked by any tenderness which he might happen to feel for the object of his study. Flaws, foibles and frailties, in one and all alike, were scrutinised by him with strictness and registered with fidelity. Not a little in these “Confidences” reminds us of the uncompromising touches in Charles Lamb’s portrayal of his brother John, or of Edward Fitzgerald’s speculations as to what feature in his “mother’s fine face betrayed what was not so good in her character.”

  He would not do anything bad, and apparently he did not feel inclined to do anything good. And as this is a century when almost everybody must still be doing, and taking the chance of goodness and badness, such an exception to the rule should meet with honour.

  He was a great student of verse. There was hardly a stanza of any English poet, unless, indeed, it was Spenser, for whom he had no great affection, which he had not pondered over and duly considered as does a lawyer his cases. He delighted in a successful verse, and grieved over any lapse from the path of metrical virtue, over any ill-sounding rhyme or unhappy expression.

  The verse of Frederick Locker-Lampson is of the kind which the French call vers de société, and which may be seen in all its English varieties in his “Lyra Elegantiarum.” He belongs to the seventeenth-century school of light and airy singers, of which Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, Herrick, and Sedley were masters, and which in the days of Queen Anne was conducted by such modish, jaunty ushers as Pope and Prior. But he belongs to it in its nineteenth-century conditions, which, in common with Hood, Praed, and Thackeray, he has bettered and enlarged with his finer taste, purer sentiment, and more genuine feeling. His “London Lyrics” are the perfection of humorous-pathetic poetry.

  As a poet he belonged to the school of Prior, Praed, and Hood, and he greatly admired the metrical dexterity of Barham. His chief endeavour, he said, was to avoid flatness and tedium, to cultivate directness and simplicity both in language and idea, and to preserve individuality without oddity or affectation. In this he achieved success. His work is always neat and clear; restrained in its art, and refined in its tone; while to a wit which rivals Praed’s, and a lightness worthy of Prior, he not unfrequently joins a touch of pathos which recalls the voice of Hood. His work mellowed as he grew older, and departed further from his first models—those rhymes galamment composées which had been his youthful ambition; but the majority of his pieces, at all times, by their distinctive character and personal note, rise far above the level of the mere vers d’occasion or vers de société with which it was once the practice to class them.