Procter, BRYAN WALLER ('Barry Cornwall'), was born in London, 21st November 1787. Educated at Harrow, with Byron and Peel for schoolfellows, he was artied to a solicitor at Calne, about 1807 came to London to live, and in 1815 began to contribute poetry to the Literary Gazette. In 1816 he succeeded by his father's death to about £500 a year, and in 1823 married Basil Montagu's step-daughter, Anne Benson Skepper (1799-1888). He had meanwhile published four volumes of poems, and produced a tragedy at Covent Garden, whose success was largely due to the acting of Macready and Kemble. He was called to the bar in 1831, from 1832 to 1861 was a metropolitan commissioner of lunacy, and died 4th October 1874.
His works, issued under the pseudonym 'Barry Cornwall' (a faulty anagram of his real name), comprise Dramatic Scenes (1819), A Sicilian Story and Marcian Colonna (1820), The Flood of Thessaly (1823), and English Songs (1832), besides memoirs of Keane (1835) and Charles Lamb (1866). The last is always worth reading; but his poems may be safely neglected by the student of poetry, for they rarely are more than studied if graceful exercises, harmonious echoes of bygone and contemporary singers; in Mr Gosse's words, 'his lyrics do not possess passion or real pathos or any very deep magic of melody, but he has written more songs that deserve the comparative praise of good than any other modern writer except Shelley and Tennyson.' Yet 'Barry Cornwall' will be remembered as the man whom every one loved—that every one including a hundred of the greatest of the century: Lamb, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Keats, Landor, Scott, Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, Hazlitt, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens, and Thackeray were only a few of his numberless friends and acquaintances.
See Bryan Waller Procter: an Autobiographical Fragment (1877), edited by Coventry Patmore; an article thereon in the Edinburgh Review for April 1878; the critical introduction by Mr Gosse in Ward's English Poets (2d ed. 1883); and a long obituary of Mrs Procter in the Academy for 17th March 1888.
ADELAIDE ANNE PROCTER, Barry Cornwall's daughter, was born in London, 30th October 1825, and died there 3d February 1864, having in 1851 become a Roman Catholic. By her Legends and Lyrics (1858-60), first written some of them for
Household Words, she won no small poetical renown.