Born, at Doxey, near Stafford, 26 Jan. 1795. Educated at a school at Mill Hill, and at Reading Grammar School. To London, to study Law, 1813. On staff of “London Mag.” Contrib. to “Edinburgh Review,” “Quarterly Review,” “New Monthly Mag.,” etc. Called to Bar at Middle Temple, Feb. 1821. Married Miss Rutt, 1821. Sergeant-at-Law, 1835. M.P. for Reading, 1835–41, 1847–49. Play, “Ion,” produced at Covent Garden, 26 May 1836; “The Athenian Captive,” Haymarket, 1838; “Glencoe,” Haymarket, 23 May 1840. Hon. D.C.L., Oxford, 20 June 1844. Recorder of Banbury, Queen’s Sergeant, 1846. Judge of Court of Common Pleas, 1849–54. Knighted, 30 Jan. 1850. Died, suddenly, at Stafford, 13 March 1854. Works: “Poems on Various Subjects” (anon.), 1811; “An Attempt to estimate the Poetical Talent of the Present Age,” 1815; “Ion” (priv. ptd.), 1835; “The Athenian Captive,” 1838; “Observations on the Law of Copyright,” 1838. “Glencoe” (priv. ptd.), 1839; “Three Speeches … in favour of an Extension of Copyright,” 1840; “Speech for the Defendant in the Prosecution, the Queen v. Moxon,” 1841; “Recollections of a first visit to the Alps” (priv. ptd.), 1841; “Dramatic Works,” 1843; “Vacation Rambles and Thoughts” (2 vols.), 1845; “The Castilian” (anon.; priv. ptd.), 1853; “Supplement to ‘Vacation Rambles,’” 1854. Posthumous: “Memoirs of Charles Lamb,” edited (from memoirs by Talfourd in his edns. of Lamb’s “Letters” and “Final Memorials”) by P. Fitzgerald, 1892. He edited: W. D. Dickinson’s “Practical Guide to the Quarter Sessions,” 3rd edn., 1829; Charles Lamb’s “Letters,” 1837; and “Final Memorials,” 1848; W. F. Deacon’s “Annette,” 1852.
Personal
I heard the late Lord Chief-Justice Tindal praise him highly for judgment and skill in the management of business. He said he was altogether a successful advocate. No man got more verdicts, and no man deserved more to get them. Talfourd is a generous and kind-hearted man. To men of letters and artists in distress, such as Leigh Hunt, Haydon, &c., he was always very liberal. He did not forget his early friends, and at the large parties he has hitherto delighted to give, poets, players, authors of every kind were to be seen, together with barristers and now and then judges.
Talfourd I was glad to see but he disappointed me. He is no doubt a poet of genius, within certain limits, and a very hard-working successful lawyer, but he is a little too fat, red-faced, and coarse in his appearance…. He talks strikably rather than soundly, defending “Cato,” for instance as an admirable poetical tragedy; and was a little too artificial and too brilliant, both in the structure and phraseology of his sentences and in the general tone of his thoughts.
Of all the men whom I have known, after long intercourse with the business of the world, the Sergeant is the one whom most preserves, to all outward appearance, the freshness and integrity of his youthful spirits.
He was much more than a merely distinguished leader, an eminent judge, or a great ornament of our literature. He had one ruling purpose of his life,—the doing good to his fellow creatures in his generation. He was eminently courteous and kind, generous, simple-hearted, of great modesty, of the strictest honour, and of spotless integrity.
The career of this eminent and good man, from his onset in life to the recent close of it on the bench, was in keeping—uniformly entitled to the admiration of all thinking and good men. Talfourd, seeking eminence in his profession, distinction in literature, renown in his judicial capacity, was always true to the interests of humanity and of literature. He had strong sympathies with his fellow-men—with poverty and suffering. He had a sound taste in matters appertaining to art and letters, and kindly feeling toward those who cultivated those pursuits.
Retaining, no doubt, to the last the peculiar ideas of the school in literature to which he belonged, consistent in all actions, just in feeling, and in morals correct, it is still impossible to recall him as he was more than forty years ago, and to follow up his career to the last, and not to pronounce an eulogy upon a most virtuous and excellent man of talent, of undoubted integrity, by whose loss there seemed a gap made in a class of the social body, which time, to those who knew him, can never fill up. My only purpose here is to record a few fleeting recollections of men and their doings, which I either knew of at the time, or with which I was in some degree connected.
Those who knew him will never forget his kindly, genial face, the happiness radiating from it when imparting pleasure to others, and his generous hospitality extended in no niggard spirit.
Ion, 1835
I do not much like Talfourd’s “Ion;” but I mean to read it again. It contains pretty lines; but, to my thinking, it is neither fish nor flesh. There is too much, and too little, of the antique about it. Nothing but the most strictly classical costume can reconcile me to a mythological plot; and Ion is a modern philanthropist whose politics and morals have been learned from the publications of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
This remarkable poem has justly called to itself more attention than any other work of the times…. “Ion” is evidently the work of many years. It is constructed on the principles of the Grecian drama, and is, on the whole, the most successful reproduction of the antique spirit with which we are acquainted…. Mr. Talfourd has been remarkably successful in two respects. His tragedy is at once true to the antique models, and deeply interesting to the mere modern reader. The classical scholar, as he reads its exquisite pages, can hardly escape the delusive impression that he has found a long-lost work of Sophocles. Its harmonious lines, to his ear, sound like the old Greek iambics, into which they fall so readily that at times he hardly knows whether he is reading Greek or English. The reader, whose knowledge is bounded by the literature of his mother tongue, finds in it such clear conceptions of character, such a polished and melodious versification, such rich and enchanting imagery, that he yields his spirit to the master’s spell. “He knows not why, and cares not wherefore.” He rises from its perusal with a pervading sense of beauty, which no other late poem can give him. It is all high thought, nobly expressed. It is heroic sentiment and sublime action, tempered and subdued with the softest and most delicate humanity.
Of the concentration and passion of the Shaksperean drama, Mr. Talfourd’s first dramatic production does not, as we have assumed, partake. The appeal of this tragedy is to the conscientiousness of its audience; and it purifies less by pity and terror, than by admiration and exultation. Its power is less an intellectual and poetical than a moral power; and the peculiarity of its sublime lies significantly in the excellence of its virtue…. The mixture of the pure Christian principle of faith and love with the Greek principle of inexorable fate, produces an incongruity in the tragedy which raises a conflict in the mind…. To the language may be attributed appropriateness and eloquence, with some occasional redundance, and a certain deficiency in strength: the images are rather elegant than bold or original; and the versification flows gracefully and copiously within the limits of the school. The effect of the whole is such as would be created were it possible to restore the ground-plan of an Athenian temple in its majestic and simple proportions, and decorated it with the elegant statues of Canova.
When Talfourd’s “Ion” was published, it appeared to myself (as it still appears) to be the most noble, highly-finished, and picturesque modern classical tragedy existing on the English stage.
General
Whose criticism I think masterly.
His style is richly laden with ornament, and almost monotonously musical in its flow. His thoughts are more often seen in the imperial robes of rhetoric than in its suit of “homely russet brown.” The rich flush of imagination colors his whole diction. At times, he is fastidiously nice in his choice of language, and a fondness for dainty and delicate epithets too often gives to his style an appearance of prettiness and enfeebling affectation. He luxuriates too much in the “nectared sweets” of language and imagery, and is apt to impair the manliness and vigor of his diction by redundant fancies and sugared words. When his own stores of sweetness fail him, he avails himself of those belonging to others. His diction is studded with apt quotations, teeming with richness of sentiment and style. But still he shares in all the essential characteristics of the school of Wordsworth, and gives evidences on every page of that “quiet eye, which sleeps and broods on his own heart.”… In kindly feeling, in genial sympathy with his race, in that running over of the heart in the worship of all that is great and good in character and life, in all those qualities which mark the musing and imaginative poet, he is perhaps not excelled by any contemporary.
“Talfourd’s greatest literary efforts were in the line of the drama; and if his plays seldom reached to the heights of sublimity, they never descended to the level of the commonplace, and have been uniformly successful upon the stage. His tragedy is a mild-complexioned muse, impressing us more by its gentleness, sweetness, and free play of the affections than by those grand or sublime, or terrible situations and doings, or those violent and startling mutations which make tragedy tragical: while they often draw tears of pity or compassion, they rarely vehemently move the sterner feelings or stir the passions. His friend Macready correctly described ‘Ion,’ his dramatic masterpiece, when he styled it a ‘sweet tragic poem;’ and the characterization is not an inapt one for all his dramatic performances. His sonnets are fair exponents of the average style of the most of those by recent writers—clever, correct, dignified, garrulous rather than full, and temperately cold.”
Of his dramatic works “Ion” was the most, and “The Massacro of Glencoe” the least, successful. It was in the treatment of classical subjects that he produced his best results. “Ion” is characterised by the simplicity and dignity belonging to its Greek theme.
The cold dignity of Talfourd’s style hardly atones for the commonplace character of his thought.
