Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 55.djvu/351

 the remains of Hazlitt in 1836, and contributed a valuable essay. An article on Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell in the ‘Quarterly Review,’ December 1844, is perhaps the best specimen of his prose. ‘Vacation Rambles’ (London 1845, 2 vols. 8vo; with a ‘Supplement’ dated 1846) is a pleasant record of tours in France, Germany, and Switzerland.

Talfourd was, however, best known as a man of letters by his tragedies, especially ‘Ion,’ which, produced on 26 May 1836, the author's birthday, obtained a brilliant success from its own merits and the great acting of Macready. Circulated privately in 1835, and again issued privately with the addition of a few sonnets, ‘Ion, a Tragedy in Five Acts,’ was first published in 1836 (the British Museum has Southey's presentation copy of the second issue). In an interesting preface to the fourth edition Talfourd tells his history as a dramatic author: how his inborn taste for the drama was repressed in his boyhood, when Shakespeare was denied him, and he had to content himself with the ‘Sacred Dramas’ of Hannah More; how it burst forth on witnessing Kemble's performance of Cato; how he wrought upon his tragedy in the intervals of legal work, and finished it hurriedly under the stimulus of his election to parliament; how, completed at the end of 1834 and printed privately in the following April, it was on the point of publication when Macready, attracted by a favourable notice in the ‘Quarterly’ of September 1835, insisted that it should first make trial of the public on the boards. ‘The Athenian Captive’ (1838) and ‘Glencoe’ (1840) were less successful. Macready thought ‘Glencoe’ superior to ‘Ion’ in dramatic construction but inferior in poetry, and the ‘Athenian Captive’ inferior in every respect. He consented, nevertheless, to produce both. ‘The Castilian,’ a tragedy on the history of Padilla, was printed privately in 1853. To Talfourd as author of ‘Ion’ was dedicated in 1839 Bulwer's ‘Lady of Lyons.’

Talfourd was returned to parliament for his native town of Reading in 1835, and again in 1837, lost his seat in 1841, but regained it in 1847. He introduced and carried a useful and humane measure, the custody of infants bill. His style of oratory, so effective at the bar, was too rhetorical for the House of Commons, but he gained great applause by his speech on the copyright bill which he introduced in 1837, as well as the additional honour of the dedication of ‘Pickwick’ to him on account of it. Rejected for a time, the copyright bill, as remodelled successively by Lord Mahon and Macaulay, eventually passed in 1842, when Talfourd was no longer in parliament [see, fifth ]. His most celebrated speech outside the commons and the courts was the very eloquent oration delivered at the soirée of the Manchester Athenæum, October 1845.

Talfourd filled the office of justice of the common pleas with perfect efficiency, if not with conspicuous brilliancy, for nearly five years, dying suddenly of apoplexy at Stafford on 13 March 1854, while delivering a charge to the grand jury, in which he commented strongly on the mutual estrangement of classes in English society. The last word that he uttered was ‘sympathy.’ He was buried in Norwood cemetery. His eldest son Frank [q. v.] is noticed separately.

Talfourd's head, according to Miss Mitford, was quite turned by vanity upon the success of ‘Ion,’ and his biographer in the ‘North British Review’ asserts that he became extremely jealous of rival dramatists. Except for such slight foibles, few characters have been depicted in a more amiable light. His principal literary characteristic was eloquence, genuine and impassioned both in prose and verse, but in both too florid to satisfy a correct taste. Apart from his work on Charles Lamb, his name will be chiefly preserved by his ‘Ion.’ The subject—the devotion of a youth who first dedicates himself to slay a tyrant fated to destruction, and, after the king has perished by another's hand, discovers that his foe was his father, and that the hereditary doom has fallen upon himself—is impressive and skilfully handled. The diction, though often highly poetical, is less praiseworthy on the whole; much of it is unduly loquacious and declamatory.

Talfourd's tragedies have gone through many editions. His prose essays have not been collected in this country, but have been reprinted in vol. vii. of the Philadelphia edition of the ‘Modern British Essayists,’ 1848 and 1850.

In addition to a portrait in the council chamber at Reading, a clever character drawing is included in Bates's ‘Maclise Portrait Gallery’ (1883, p. 378). A bust of Talfourd, by Lough, was in 1855 placed in the crown court at Stafford. A portrait by Pickersgill is in the National Portrait Gallery, London; another was painted by Lucas (Cat. Third Loan Exhib. No. 616).

[Brain's An Evening with Thomas Noon Talfourd, Reading, 1888; A Memoir of Mr. Justice Talfourd, by a member of the Oxford Circuit, reprinted from No. 103 of the Law Mag.; Foss's Lives of the Judges; Miles's Poets and Poetry of the Century; North British Review, May 1856; Gent. Mag. 1854, i. 525, ii. 53;