John Byrom (1692–1763) was a Manchester man, who became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and fell in love with the daughter of the great Bentley. A melodious Pastoral, celebrating that lady under the name of Phebe, was printed in the 605th “Spectator,” and is the best known of Byrom’s writings. He became a physician, and then a professional stenographer, liking to describe himself as “Inventor of the Universal English Short-hand,” and a votary of the “Tachygraphic Goddess.” Late in life he became deeply impressed by the views of the religious mystic, Law, and in 1751 he versified the views of that apostle in an essay in heroic rhyme, entitled “Enthusiasm.” The poems of Byrom were first published after his death, in two volumes, printed at Manchester in 1773; his “Journals” first saw the light in 1854–57. His verse is of a highly miscellaneous character; the bulk of it is religious, and even polemical; the remainder is made up of apologues, epigrams, epistles, pastoral songs, dialogues and Lancashire dialect, tales and descriptions.
Personal
Byrom’s is a figure rather curious than notable, rather amiable than striking. He had many turns and accomplishments, and many holds upon life. He loved learning, for instance, and had scholarship enough to write with point upon scholarly subjects. Again, it is certain that he was a man who could love; for he gave over medicine and the chance of medical honours merely to follow up and win the lady he was wooing to wife. Then, as became Weston’s successful rival, the teacher who had improved upon Weston’s own system, and had Hoadley and Chesterfield for his pupils, he was keenly interested in stenography, and not only lectured on it to his classes (his lectures, by the way, are said to have been full of matter and of wit), but read papers about it before the Royal Society. Also, he was curiously versed in theology and philosophical divinity; he held advanced opinions on the dogmas of predestination and imputed righteousness; he is known for a disciple of William Law, a student of Malebranche and Madame Bourignon, a follower of Jacob Boehmen, for whose sake he learned German, and some of whose discourse he was at the pains of running into English verse. And above all was he addicted to letters and the practice of what he was pleased to think poetry. Add to this, that he was a good and cheerful talker, whose piety was not always pun-proof (“Hic jacet Doctor Byfield, volatilis olim, tandem fixus”), but who was capable on occasion of right and genuine epigram, and the picture is complete. As revealed in it, Byrom is the very type and incarnation of the ingenious amateur.
A Jacobite, a mystic, a shorthand pundit, a physician, and a very interesting person.
He died a few years later (1763). He was not buried as the law directed, in woolen. His executors had to pay £5 as a fine. As Byrom does not appear to have left any verses to justify the failure, we may perhaps assume that the omission was not due to any final whim of his own. He would hardly have missed such a chance for a poem. Few kindlier men have been buried either in woolen or linen.
General
Read Dr. Byrom’s poems. He has all the wit and humour of Dr. Swift, together with much more learning, a deep and strong understanding, and above all a serious vein of piety. A few things in the second volume are taken from Jacob Behmen, to whom I object. But setting these things aside, we have some of the finest sentiments that ever appeared in the English tongue; some of the noblest truths expressed with the utmost energy of language, and the strongest colours of poetry.
He is certainly a man of genius, plunged deep into the rankest fanaticism. His poetical epistles show him both.
Their oddity indeed well entitles them to the room which they fill. This writer has been compared of late to the Spanish Friar, Luys de Escobar, for the manner of which he treated of all subjects in easy verse, pouring forth extempore lines upon any thing which came in his way; his opinion of one sermon, his abstract of another, the Passive Participle’s Petition to the Printer of the Gentleman’s Magazine; remarks on any book or pamphlet of the day; critical remarks on several passages in Horace, in which various readings are proposed in rhyme, versification of collects, and of passages from his favourite divines Law and Jacob Behmen! His head seems to have been a rhyming machine which fell to work upon whatever came into it. One poem entitled “Careless Content” is so perfectly in the manner of Elizabeth’s age, that we can hardly believe it to be an imitation, but are almost disposed to think that Byrom had transcribed it from some old author, and that the transcript being found among his papers, was printed among his works.
And now we come upon a strange little well in the desert. Few flowers indeed shine upon its brink, and it flows with a somewhat unmusical ripple: it is a well of the water of life notwithstanding, for its song tells of the love and truth which are the grand power of God…. Here we have yet again a mystical thread running radiant athwart both warp and woof of our poetic web; the mystical thinker will ever be found the reviver of religious poetry; and although some of the seed had come from afar both in time and space, Byrom’s verse is of indigenous growth. Much of the thought of the present day will be found in his verses.
Possessed of great wit and rich humor, he is the author of some of our best epigrams; and his poems run through all styles and subjects, “from grave to gay, from lively to severe.” He wrote verse carelessly and with great fluency, published next to nothing, and was utterly indifferent to reputation; had he chosen, he might have won high poetic rank. As it is, one or two hymns and several lighter pieces from his pen are still well known: and the fortunate possessor of his somewhat scarce “Poems” will find in them much to amuse, to edify, and to instruct…. One-half his poems are distinctively religious: the thought in these belongs rather to our time than to that in which he lived. Often free, it is always reverent, and generally sound; his pages, besides the wholesome flavor of a genial personality, are informed by an ardent and yet a reasoning faith. Among the English authors who have fallen short of absolute greatness, there is perhaps none who better deserves, or is likely longer to retain, honorable mention and kindly remembrance.
John Byrom had considerable merits, both as a man and an author; but there is a certain absurdity about him in both capacities which rather mars them…. At the early age of twenty-three, Byrom wrote a pastoral entitled “Colin and Phœbe,” or, as he generally terms it, from its first line: “My time, O ye Muses, &c.,” which had the honour of being inserted in the eighth volume of the “Spectator,” with the complimentary remark of the editor, “It is so original, that I do not much doubt it will divert my readers.” It is a diverting little piece, prettily conceived and smoothly written, equal, in fact, to the best pastorals of Shenstone or Philips, and nearly equal to those of Gay…. But, after all, Byrom’s lucid intervals are rare (that is to say in this department; some of his hymns are good); the residuum of true poetry in his metrical essays is nearly drowned amid the grotesque and prosaic doggerel by which it is surrounded. And the admiration in which his verses were held by men of undoubted ability can only be accounted for by the fact that Byrom wrote in an age singularly barren in poetic genius.
One Byrom, born in 1691, has left several hymns, which are more remarkable for their metaphysics than their melody.
After early poverty, he lived a retired blameless literary life on his property by Manchester. One of the many men of strong feeling in whom faith burned like “a hidden flame” through the eighteenth century.
Byrom wrote rhyme with ease and on subjects with which poetry has nothing to do.
His practice of throwing every possible subject into verse, very often of the swinging trisyllabic kind, of which he was a great lover and a very clever practitioner, has not improved the poetical merit of his work; but he had much more diffuse poetry in him than all but one or two of his contemporaries, and his voluminous work, which has had the good fortune to secure two admirable editors, is singularly interesting to read, and furnishes sidelights on the time only inferior to those of the greatest memoir-writers.
