John Stuart Blackie
(1809-1895).
John Stuart Blackie, for many years Professor of Greek in Edinburgh University, was a very vigorous miscellaneous writer. He translated Æschylus, the Iliad and Faust. He was very successful in the lighter lyrical strain, and appears at his best in his rollicking and amusing university songs.
Robert Barnabas Brough
(1828-1860).
Robert Barnabas Brough was the author of Songs of the Governing Classes (1859), a small collection of pieces, chiefly satirical, and remarkable for their vigour, point and sincerity. Strength of feeling, clearness of intellect and wit are his characteristics. Brough was generally very much in earnest, but in his Neighbour Nellie he showed that he could touch lighter themes very charmingly.
Charles Stuart Calverley
(1831-1884).
Charles Stuart Calverley, the scholarly and witty author of Verses and Translations (1862) and Fly Leaves (1872), had a faculty for more serious things, but, partly from indifference, partly because of the accident which made great effort in his later years impossible, he never wrote anything worthy of his talents. What he has left however is the very best of its kind. He is one of the most skilful of translators; and his parodies and satiric verse are excellent.
Mortimer Collins
(1827-1876).
Mortimer Collins, poet and novelist, had a very happy knack for the lighter kinds of lyrical verse, half playful and half serious. Under pressure of circumstances he wrote too much, and the failure to ‘polish and refine’ tells against a great deal of his work.
William Cory
(1823-1892).
William Cory, originally Johnson, for many years one of the masters of Eton, was the author of a small volume of Poems entitled Ionica (1858), which, after long neglect, won, in its third edition of 1891, the attention due to thoughtfulness and scholarly expression. Cory’s best pieces, such as Mimnermus in Church, soar beyond the range of the minor poet, and show that it only needed quantity to insure him a considerable place in literature. But he wrote few such pieces, and indeed little verse of any kind after Ionica.