Born, at Canterbury, 6 Dec. 1788. Educated at St. Paul’s School, London, 1800–07. Matric. Brasenose Coll., Oxford, 13 June 1807, as a Pauline Exhibitioner; B.A., Nov. 1811. Ordained 1813; Curate of Ashford, 1813–14. Married Caroline Smart, 30 Sept. 1814. Curate of Westwell, 1814–17; Vicar of Snargate, Romney Marsh, 1817–24; Minor Canon, St. Paul’s Cathedral, April 1821. To London, Aug. 1821. Rector of St. Mary Magdalene and St. Gregory, and Priest in Ordinary to Chapels Royal, 1824–42. Rector of St. Faith, 1824. Assisted J. G. Gorton in compilation of “Biographical Dictionary,” 1828. Contrib. to “Blackwood,” “John Bull,” “Globe,” “Literary Gazette,” and “London Chronicle.” Edited latter for a time. “Ingoldsby Legends” appeared in “Bentley’s Miscellany,” 1837–43; in “New Monthly Magazine,” 1843–44. Divinity Lecturer at St. Paul’s, 1842. Vicar of St. Faith, 1842. Died in London, 17 June 1845. Buried in vault of St. Mary Magdalene’s; on its being burnt down his remains were removed to Kensal Green Cemetery, and memorial tablet transferred to crypt of St. Paul’s. Works: “Look at the Clock” [1830?]; “Ingoldsby Legends,” 1st series, 1840; 2nd series, 1842; “Some Account of my Cousin Nicolas” (under pseud. of Thomas Ingoldsby), 1841. Posthumous: 3rd series of “Ingoldsby Legends,” edited by R. H. D. Barham, 1847; “Ingoldsby Lyrics” (miscellaneous poems), 1881. “Life and Letters,” by R. H. D. Barham, 1870.

Personal

  I am perfectly convinced that the same social influence would have followed Mr. Barham into any other line of life that he might have adopted; that the profits of agitating pettifoggers would have materially lessened in a district where he acted as a magistrate; and that duels would have been nipped in the bud at his regimental mess. It is not always an easy task to do as you would be done by; but to think as you would be thought of and thought for, and to feel as you would be felt for, is perhaps still more difficult, as superior powers of tact and intellect are here required in order to second good intentions. These faculties, backed by an uncompromising love of truth and fair dealing, indefatigable good nature, and a nice sense of what was due to every one in the several relations of life, both gentle and simple, rendered our late friend invaluable, either as an adviser or a peace-maker, in matters of delicate and difficult handling. How he managed to get through his more important duties is a marvel. Certain it is that they were well and punctually performed in every point relating to cathedral matters, as well as his engagements as a parochial incumbent and “Priest of the Household” (which I believe was the nature of his office at the Chapel Royal).

  Independently, indeed, of any admiration Mr. Barham’s wit and talent might excite, there was a warmth of heart about him, and an amiability of disposition, which rendered him justly dear to many even beyond the pale of intimacy. His spirits were fresh and buoyant, his constitution vigorous, and his temperament sanguine. His humour never ranged “beyond the limits of becoming mirth,” and was in its essence free from gall. Where irony was employed, it was commonly just, and always gentle. On his writings might, in fairness, be inscribed:—

	Non ego mordaci distrinxi carmine quenquam,
	Nulla venenato est litem mixta joco.

Perhaps his virtues were of a kind especially adapted to win their own reward; certain it is that to him humanity was ever presented under its fairest aspect. He never lost a friend; he never met with coldness or neglect…. Those upon whom he was instrumental in conferring benefits were rarely, if ever, wanting in gratitude; and his own claims to consideration were readily and liberally allowed.

  The life of Barham was in a certain sense typical of the class to which he belonged. He enjoyed life, loved his friends, was fond of a good dinner and a good story, a right-minded, jovial English parson. Literature was as much his amusement as his employment.

  As a man Barham was exemplary, a pattern Englishman of the most distinctively national type. The associate of men of wit and gaiety, making himself no pretension to any extraordinary strictness of conduct, he passed through life with perfect credit as a clergyman and universal respect as a member of society. He mitigated the prejudices of his education by the innate candour of his disposition, and added to other endowments soundness of judgment and solidity of good sense.

Ingoldsby Legends, 1840–47

  All Barham’s care and forethought were employed on mere prosaic matters of business, professional and otherwise, and the “Ingoldsby Legends” were the occasional relief of a suppressed plethora of native fun. The same relaxation which men seek in music, pictures, cards, or newspapers, he sought in, as it were, stripping off his coat to have a hearty romp with the laughing part of the public, in the confidence of a bold unsuspicious nature. Many of these effusions were written while waiting for a cup of tea, a railroad train, or an unpunctual acquaintance, on some stray cover of a letter in his pocket-book: one in particular served to relieve the tedium of a hot walk up Richmond Hill. It was rather a piece of luck if he found time to joint together the disjecti membra poetæ in a fair copy: and before the favoured few had done laughing at some rhyme which had never entered a man’s head before, the zealous Bentley had popped the whole into type.

  The humor of these poems approaches more nearly to that of Hudibras than any other similar poem, and, like that work, they are unsparing in their ridicule of hypocrisy and knavery.

  Barham owes his honourable rank among English humourists to his having done one thing supremely well. He has thoroughly naturalised the French metrical conte with the adaptations necessary to accommodate it to our national genius. French humour is rather finely malicious than genial: Barham carries geniality to the verge of the exuberant. He riots in fancy and frolic, and his inexhaustible faculty of grotesque rhyming is but the counterpart of his intellectual fertility in the domain of farcical humour. There is, indeed, an element of farce in his fun, an excessive reliance on forced contrasts between the ghastly and the ludicrous, and a not unfrequent straining after cheap effects; nor can the most successful work of the professional jester be compared to the recreation of a great poet, such as Browning’s “Pied Piper of Hamelin.” It is nevertheless true that no English author, with the exception of Hood, has produced such a body of excellent rhymed mirth as Barham; and that, if his humour is less refined than Hood’s, and his gaiety not equally purified and ennobled by being dashed with tears, he excels his rival as a narrative poet. He may, indeed, be said to have prescribed the form in our language for humorous narrative in irregular verse, which can now hardly be composed without seeming to imitate him.

  I have been told indeed that “The Ingoldsby Legends” of very late years have shown a certain loss of grip on popular, at least on popular literary estimation. They are not so often quoted; the young man of letters of the day does not appreciate them, but rather disdains and so forth. Even, however, if this were true (and I am rather doubtful of its truth), even if we were to suppose that the very amusing onslaught made upon the “Legends” some ten or a dozen years ago by a person of the æsthetic persuasion, in very nearly the same terms as those which good Roger Ascham applied to the “Morte d’Arthur,” had effect, it would remain certain that for at least an entire generation after their first collected appearance in 1840, and probably for an entire generation after their author’s death in 1845, they enjoyed an almost unexampled and a certainly unexceeded popularity.

  His “Ingoldsby Legends” have enjoyed a popularity wider, probably, than that of any other humorous verse of the century. They are clever, rapid in narrative, and resourceful in phrase and in rhyme. Yet a certain want of delicacy in the wit and of melody in the verse is evident when we compare them with the work of Hood and Praed, or that of such later humorists as Calverley, or J. K. Stephen, or Lewis Carroll.

General

  The intimate friend of Theodore Hook, Mr. Barham had something of Hook’s manner, with a love of punning and pleasantry as irrepressible as that of Hood, though accompanied with less literary power.

  He had a vein of humour both rollicking and grim, and he was an expert in the art of weaving a story into verse. His command of rhyme was almost unsurpassable. The most intractable phrases become plastic and fluent at his touch; words which seem to defy the resources of the language to wed them with rhyme are set dancing down his lines in the most unexpected and comical partnerships. The ingenuity and vigour of the style, the wealth of incident, the gusto with which the best stories are told, the brisk canter and jingle of the verse, the broad drollery of some passages, and the grotesque power of others, account for the immense popularity which “The Legends” at once secured, and which, in a great measure, they retain. And yet, with all their cleverness, have not their merits been somewhat over-rated? When two or three of them are read consecutively, does not the cleverness become a trifle irksome? Does not the dead rattle of the rhyme begin to jar on the ear? Does not one grow weary before long of the gluttonous, bibulous, amorous crew of burlesque monks, and churchmen, and saints, and devils, and frail fair ladies? His transitions from the jocose to the serious are often inartistic, and sometimes even repellent.