Thomas Lovell Beddoes was born in Clifton in 1803, and died at Bale in Switzerland in 1849. His mother was a sister of Maria Edgeworth, and his father a distinguished physician and an intimate friend of Sir Humphry Davy. In the father's character we may trace the principal traits of the son: a strong scientific bent, a fondness for poetic dreams, an invincible independence, were predominant in both. The character of Lovell Beddoes' poetry was the natural outgrowth of his early studies. His schoolfellows at the Charterhouse speak of him at the age of fourteen as already thoroughly versed in the best English literature and a close student of the dramatists, from the Elizabethan to those of his own day. He was always ready to invent and carry out any acts of insubordination, which he informed with so much wit and spirit that the very authorities were often subdued by their own irresistible laughter. It was one phase of his dramatic genius, that seemed to be constantly impelling him to get up some striking situation wherein he might pose as a youthful Ajax defying the lightnings. At Oxford his restless independence was continually prompting him to affront his tutors. He was always in opposition to the spirit of the occasion, whatever it might be. This spirit of rebellion inspired him with an intense interest in German literature and German politics, as representing the ultra-liberal tendencies of the day. Shelley, too, the rejected of Oxford, whose name was scarcely to be mentioned to the British Philistine of the moment, was one of Beddoes' idols, and he joined with two other gentlemen in the expense of printing the first edition of the poet's posthumous works in 1824, afterward withdrawn by Mrs. Shelley. Byron was the popular poet then, and universal Young England was turning down its shirt-collars in a mockery of woe. But this boy of twenty, with his sturdy independence, would judge for himself, and wrote to a friend: "I saw ---- (the greatest fool within the walls of my acquaintance) the other night at Oxford, repeating the whole of the _Deformed_ in raptures. God forgive him!"