The Ingoldsby Legends by The Rev. Richard H. Barham.

The Ingoldsby Legends

By

The Rev. Richard H. Barham.

MEMOIR OF THE REV. RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM

(Abridged from the memoir by his son)

RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM was born on December 6, 1788, in
Canterbury, were his family had for many generations resided.
His father, dying in 1795, bequeathed a moderate estate to his
only son, then about five or six years of age. A portion of
this property consisted of the manor known as Tappington, or
Tapton Wood, so often alluded to in The Ingoldsby Legends. The
boy was sent to St. Paul's School, of which he was for two
years 'captain.' He then entered at nineteen as a gentleman
commoner at Brazenose College, and was speedily elected a
member of the well-known Phoenix Common Room, at that time one
of the 'crack' university clubs. Here he found a kindred spirit
in the gay and gifted Lord George Grenville (afterwards Lord
Nugent). Here, too, be was again thrown into contact with one
whom he had known in earlier days, Cecil Tattersall, the friend
of Shelley and Lord Byron, and, like most of that misguided
party, but too well known by his abused talents and melancholy
end. And here also his intimacy with Theodore Hook took rise.

College life, more especially at that day, was likely to
present numerous and sore temptations to one who was
overflowing with good-nature and high spirits, and whose early
loss had not only placed a perilous abundance of funds at his
disposal, but also left him utterly unchecked by parental
counsel and authority. His reply to Mr. Hodson, his tutor,
afterwards principal of Brazenose, will convey some notion of
the hours he was wont to keep. This gentleman, on one occasion,
demanded an explanation of his continued absence from morning
chapel.

'The fact is, sir,' urged his pupil, 'you are too late for
me,'

'Too late!' repeated the tutor, in astonishment.

'Yes, sir. I cannot sit up till seven o'clock in the
morning: I am a man of regular habits; and unless I get to bed
by four or five at latest, I am really fit for nothing next
day.'

The habit was one for 'time to strengthen, not efface.' No
one might have quoted the old Scotch ballad with greater
feeling and sincerity:

'Up in the morning's nae for me,
Up in the morning airly:
I'd rather watch a winter's night
Than up in the morning airly.'

With him a strong natural bent supplied the place of
caprice or love of singularity, and he sat up because he found,
as the morning advanced, his ideas flowed more freely, and his
mental energies became in every way more active than at any
other period of the twenty-four hours. It could hardly fail of
exciting a considerable degree of astonishment, to mark how,
after a day spent without one moment's rest or relaxation, in
the intricacies of business, often of a harassing and momentous
nature, his eye would light up and his spirits overflow as the
chimes of midnight were approaching; an entirely new set of
faculties seemed to come into play, and if there was no one at
hand to benefit by his conversation --to listen to his
inexhaustible fund of anecdote and observation, he would devote
himself to the investigation of some obscure genealogical
point, or the perusal of some treasured volume in black letter,
with a freshness and vigour not to be surpassed by the most
orderly of mortals. At these times, too, his powers of
composition reached their culminating point, and he wrote with
a facility which not only surprised himself, but which he
actually viewed with distrust; and he would not unfrequently
lay down his pen, from an apprehension that what was so fluent
must of necessity be feeble also. Indeed, he was no adept in
the art of cudgelling the brain, and, in respect of poetry at
all events, he wrote easily or not at all. The slightest check
would often delay the publication of an article of this kind
for months, and numbers of manuscripts remained at his death,
whose unfinished state could be attributed only to some
trifling stumbling-block, which a little labour might have
levelled or avoided.

It was during the course of a short but severe illness,
that Mr. Barham first entertained the notion of becoming a
candidate for holy orders; and, though he so far prosecuted his
original design of preparing for the bar as to become a pupil
of an eminent conveyancer, he soon relinquished the profession
of law. Having passed his examination with sufficient credit to