Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/94

 made of the fine quality of his familiar letters, many of which appear in the memoir prefixed to his Collected Poems (1916). But his main reputation will rest on the two small books of verse. Of the pieces in the earlier volume, many were written under the ‘ninetyish’ influence already mentioned, and were condemned by the author himself for ‘unimportant prettiness’; a few, which at the time attracted disproportionate attention, were studies in ugliness and the bravado of precocious disillusionment; but the best, such as Dining-room Tea and The Fish, had the qualities of ‘adventurousness, curiosity, and life-giving youthfulness’, of ‘sharpness and distinctness’ of vision, which led Walter de la Mare to class him as a poet of the intellectual imagination. These qualities, together with a peculiar power of combining humour with poetic beauty and tenderness of feeling, as in The Old Vicarage and Tiare Tahiti, are still more marked in the second volume, which also showed ever-increasing technical ability, for instance in an easy mastery over the octosyllabic couplet, and in certain slight and subtle novelties in the construction of the sonnet. It remained for the few fragments written on the way to the Dardanelles to show that his instrument had fallen from his hands at the moment when he had brought it to perfection.  BROOKE, STOPFORD AUGUSTUS (1832-1916), divine and man of letters, the eldest son of the Rev. Richard Sinclair Brooke, incumbent of the Mariners’ church, Kingstown, Ireland, by his wife, Anna, daughter of the Rev. T. Stopford, D.D., was born at Glendoen, near Letterkenny, co. Donegal, 14 November 1832. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he took prizes in English verse, and graduated in 1856. In 1857 he was ordained, and appointed to a curacy at St. Matthew’s, Marylebone. In the following year he married Emma Diana, daughter of Thomas Wentworth Beaumont, M.P., of Bretton Park, Yorkshire; by her he had two sons and six daughters. His wife died in 1874. Shortly after his marriage he resolved to give up his curacy and search for a field of larger opportunity. But though his reputation as a preacher was already considerable, his religious views, judged by the standard of the day, were dangerously broad, and for a short time he was without employment. In the autumn of 1859, however, he was appointed to the curacy of St. Mary Abbots, Kensington, of which Archdeacon [q.v.] was then vicar. Here he remained four years, and it was during this period that he began work on his Life of Frederick William Robertson. His power and influence as a preacher grew rapidly; but he chafed under ecclesiastical authority—though at the time he had no idea of secession from the Church of England—and this drove him to look for a position of greater independence.

After the marriage of the Princess Royal to Prince Frederick (afterwards Crown Prince) of Prussia in 1858, it was decided to appoint an Anglican chaplain who should be attached both to their court and to the British embassy in Berlin. Brooke applied for the post, his application was accepted, and he went out to Berlin in 1868. His position there, however, was not what he had been led to expect; there was friction with the English church already established in Berlin; and he did not care for his surroundings. At the end of 1864 he resigned and returned to London to seek further clerical work and arrange for the publication of the Life of Robertson which he had completed while in Berlin. His Life and Letters of the late Frederick W. Robertson, published in 1865, two years after Essays and Reviews, was at once recognized as a work of exceptional power, and of great importance as a broad church document. It was bitterly attacked by the evangelical party.

In 1866 Brooke became minister of the proprietary chapel of St. James, York Street, a position which gave him a greater independence and freedom than he had enjoyed hitherto. The congregation, small at first, within a year filled the place to overflowing. After preaching several times before Queen Victoria, he was appointed a chaplain-in-ordinary in 1867. He remained at St. James’s chapel for nine years, during the last of which he wrote his Primer of English Literature (1876), of which Matthew Arnold said to him, ‘You have made a delightful book, and one which may have a wide action—the thing which one ought to desire for a good product almost as much as its production.’ Half a million copies of this book had been sold by 1917. On the expiration of the lease of St. James’s chapel, Brooke’s friends presented him 68