White, HENRY KIRKE

White, HENRY KIRKE, minor poet, was born son of a butcher at Nottingham, March 21, 1785. At fifteen he was apprenticed to an attorney, and here he gave his leisure hours to study with intense zeal. He also became a member of a literary society in Nottingham, and sent contributions to the Monthly Mirror. These soon attracted the attention of Mr Hill, its proprietor, and Mr Capel Loft, on whose recommendation he published in 1803 a small volume of poems, which was received by the critics with a lack of enthusiasm into which his sensitive mind read malignity and hatred. But the book secured him the friendship of the kind-hearted Southey and the evangelical pontiff, the Rev. Charles Simeon, through whose influence a sizarship in St John's College, Cambridge, was procured for him. He gave himself to his studies with a zeal that consumed the energies of a constitution always delicate; consumption rapidly developed, and he sank into the grave, October 19, 1806. Southey edited his Remains (2 vols. 1807), with a sympathetic memoir, which does justice to his character, and more than justice to his poetry.