Marston

Marston, JAMES WESTLAND, LL.D., dramatic poet, was born at Boston, Lincolnshire, on 30th January 1820. He was articulated to his uncle, a London solicitor, but soon gave up law for literature; and in 1842 his Patrician's Daughter, a blank-verse tragedy of the day, was brought out at Drury Lane by Macready. It was the first, and also the most successful, of more than a dozen plays (Strathmore, Philip of France, &c.), all Sheridan-Knowlesian, and all forgotten, though a collective edition of them and his poetic works appeared in 2 volumes in 1876. Besides these, he wrote a novel (1860), a good book on Our Recent Actors (1888), and a mass of poetic criticism. Although his house had once been the gathering-place of several of the most prominent literary men in London, Marston died there alone (wife, children, grandchildren, all dead before him) on 5th Jan. 1890.—His son, PHILIP BOURKE MARSTON, the blind poet, was born in London, 13th August 1850, and died there on 14th Feb. 1887. His life was a series of losses—of eyesight at three, and afterwards of his sister, his promised bride, and his two dear friends, Oliver Madox Brown and Rossetti. His memory will survive through his friendships—with them and with Watts-Dunton and Swinburne—rather than through his sonnets and lyrics. They are exquisite some of them, but too sad for a world that sees. Songtide, All in All, and Wind Voices were the poetry that he published in 1870–83; to a posthumous collection of his stories is prefixed a memoir by Mr William Sharp. See A Last Harvest, with memoir by Mrs Moulton (1891).