Barry Cornwall

Charles Lamb: a Memoir (Dodo Press) Barry Cornwall

Bryan Waller Procter (1787-1874) who also wrote under the pseudonym Barry Cornwall, was an English poet. Born at Leeds, Yorkshire, he was educated at Harrow School, where he had for contemporaries Lord Byron and Robert Peel. On leaving school he was placed in the office of a solicitor at Calne, Wiltshire, remaining there until about 1807, when he returned to London to study law. After his marriage in 1824 to Miss Skepper, he returned to his profession as a conveyancer, and was called to the bar in 1831. Most of his verse was composed between 1815, when he began to contribute to the Literary Gazette, and 1823, or at latest 1832. His principal poetical works were: Dramatic Scenes and Other Poems (1819), A Sicilian Story (1820), Marcian Colonna (1820), Mirandola (1821), The Flood of Thessaly (1823) and English Songs (1832). He was also the author of Effigies Poetica (1824), Life of Edmund Kean (1835), Essays and Tales in Prose (1851), Charles Lamb: A Memoir (1866), and of memoirs of Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare for editions of their works.