There is an old saying that the workman may be known by his chips: surely from these chips we may gather a high opinion of that artificer who left such fragments to testify for him. For imaginative power of a very high order, for the true tragic spirit, for exquisitely melodious versification, for that faculty of song which is the flower of the lyric genius, Beddoes was pre-eminently distinguished. Nor for these alone. His style is based upon the rich vocabulary of the old dramatists, and is terse, pregnant and quaint, without any trace of affectation. There was a sturdy genuineness about the man that forbade him to assume, and his phraseology was the natural outgrowth of his mind and his early education. He has not gone to work, like so many of our modern pre-Raphaelite painters, to imitate crudeness of form in the vain hope of acquiring thereby earnestness and innocence of spirit; but he has studied the best tragic models in a reverent spirit, and allowed his muse to work out her own salvation. That grim ironical humor which infuses such bitter strength into the speeches of Isbrand was always scoffing at his own verses, and nipping the blossoms of his genius in the bud. "I believe I might have met with some success as a retailer of small coal," he writes to Mr. Kelsall, "or a writer of long-bottomed tracts, but doubt of my aptitude for any higher literary or commercial occupation." His greatest weakness as a writer of tragedy has already been mentioned as one of which he was himself but too well aware--his inability to create characters that should have any more individual existence than as the mouthpieces of various sentiments. While holding that the proper aim of the dramatic writer should be to write for the stage, his dramas are nevertheless fitted only for the closet. "If it were possible," said George Darley (in the _London Magazine_, December, 1823), "speaking of a work of this kind (_The Brides' Tragedy_), to make a distinction between the _vis tragica_ and the _vis dramatica_, I should say that he possessed much of the former, but little of the latter." As the beauties of his style--and they are many--recall to us the Shakespearian writers and the matchless riches of their verse, so do its faults--which are few--reflection that the author was unsuccessful because the critic was great. All critics, however, do not aspire to create, but all poets sooner or later attempt to criticise. Baudelaire, "the illustrious poet, the faultless critic," as Swinburne calls him, went still further. He said: "Tous les grands poetes deviennent naturellement, fatalement, critiques. Je plains les poetes que guide le seul instinct; je les crois incomplets. Il serait prodigieux qu'un critique devint poete, et il est impossible qu'un poete ne contienne pas un critique." Yet a man cannot serve two masters, and Art is a jealous mistress who will not brook a rival. Even Beddoes found that his ideal of the physiologist-poet was