Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 47.djvu/110

 friendly offices of [q. v.], and all parties became good friends. In the same year Quillinan retired from the army, and settled at Spring Cottage, between Rydal and Ambleside, and thus in the immediate neighbourhood of Wordsworth, whose poetry he had long devotedly admired. Scarcely was he established there when a tragic fate overtook his wife, who died from the effects of burns, 25 May 1822, leaving two daughters. Wordsworth was godfather of the younger daughter, and he wrote an epitaph on Mrs. Quillinan. Distracted with grief, Quillinan fled to the continent, and afterwards lived alternately in London, Paris, Portugal, and Canterbury, until 1841, when he married Wordsworth's daughter, Dorothy (see below). The union encountered strong opposition on Wordsworth's part, not from dislike of Quillinan, but from dread of losing his daughter's society. He eventually submitted with a good grace, and became fully reconciled to Quillinan, who proved an excellent husband and son-in-law. In 1841 Quillinan published ‘The Conspirators,’ a three-volume novel, embodying his recollections of military service in Spain and Portugal. In 1843 he appeared in ‘Blackwood’ as the defender of Wordsworth against Landor, who had attacked his poetry in an imaginary conversation with Porson, published in the magazine. Quillinan's reply was a cento of all the harsh dicta of the erratic critic respecting great poets, and the effect was to invalidate in the mass an indictment whose counts it might not have been easy to answer seriatim. Landor dismissed his remarks as ‘Quill-inanities;’ Wordsworth himself is said to have regarded the defence as indiscreet.

In 1845 the delicate health of his wife induced Quillinan to travel with her for a year in Portugal and Spain, and the excursion produced a charming book from her pen (see below). In 1846 he contributed an extremely valuable article to the ‘Quarterly’ on Gil Vicente, the Portuguese dramatic poet. In 1847 his second wife died, and four years later (8 July 1851) Quillinan himself died (at Loughrig Holme, Ambleside) of inflammation, occasioned by taking cold upon a fishing excursion; he was buried in Grasmere churchyard. His latter years had been chiefly employed in translations of Camoens's ‘Lusiad,’ five books of which were completed, and of Herculano's ‘History of Portugal.’ The latter, also left imperfect, was never printed; the 'Lusiad' was published in 1853 by [q. v.], another translator of Camoens. A selection from Quillinan's original poems, principally lyrical, with a memoir, was published in the same year by William Johnston, the editor of Wordsworth.

Quillinan was a sensitive, irritable, but most estimable man. ‘All who know him,’ says Southey, writing in 1830, ‘are very much attached to him.’ ‘Nowhere,’ says Johnston, speaking of his correspondence during his wife's hopeless illness, ‘has the writer of this memoir ever seen letters more distinctly marked by manly sense, combined with almost feminine tenderness.’ Matthew Arnold in his ‘Stanzas in Memory of Edward Quillinan,’ speaks of him as ‘a man unspoil'd, sweet, generous, and humane.’ As an original poet his claims are of the slenderest; his poems would hardly have been preserved but for the regard due to his personal character and his relationship to Wordsworth. His version of the 'Lusiad,' nevertheless, though wanting his final corrections, has considerable merit, and he might have rendered important service to two countries if he had devoted his life to the translation and illustration of Portuguese literature.

His wife, (1804−1847), the second child of William Wordsworth, was born on Aug. 1804. She was named after Dorothy Wordsworth, her father's sister. By way of distinguishing her from her aunt, Crabb Robinson used to call her ‘Dorina.’ The same writer calls her the ‘joy and sunshine’ of the poet, who saw in her an harmonious blending of the characteristics and lineaments of his wife and sister. ‘Dora,’ he wrote in 1829, ‘is my housekeeper, and did she not hold the pen it would run wild in her praises.’ She published in 1847 (2 vols. 8vo, Moxon) ‘A Journal of a Few Months' Residence in Portugal, and Glimpses of the South of Spain,’ dedicated to her father and mother. Wordsworth's later poems contain several allusions to Dora, and she is celebrated in particular along with Edith Southey and Sara Coleridge in ‘The Triad.’ She died at Rydal Mount on 9 July 1847, and was buried in Grasmere churchyard (Gent. Mag. 1847, ii. 222;, Dorothy Wordsworth, 1886, p. 144; , Diary, iii. 193, 294−6).