Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 59.djvu/421

 some notes on his residence at Cambridge. See also James's Naval History, the author of which shows himself uniformly and, in the present writer's opinion, unjustly hostile to Warren; and Troude's Batailles Navales de la France.]



WARREN, JOHN BYRNE LEICESTER, third and last (1835–1895), poet, the eldest son of George Warren, second baron de Tabley (1811–1887), was born at Tabley House, Cheshire, on 26 April 1835. Sir, first baron [q. v.], was his grandfather. His mother was Catherina Barbara, daughter of Jerome, count de Salis-Soglio, by his third wife, Henrietta, daughter of William Foster, bishop of Kilmore. From her he appears to have inherited the sensitive melancholy of his temperament, augmented by long sojourn with her in Italy and Germany during his childhood. Returning to England, he received his education at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford (matriculating on 20 Oct. 1852, and graduating B.A. in 1859 and M.A. the next year), where he formed an intimate friendship with a fellow-collegian, George Fortescue, whose death by an accident in 1859 produced an ineffaceable impression upon his mind. A short time before this event the friends had jointly published a small volume of ‘Poems’ under the pseudonym of George F. Preston. It contained nothing remarkable, but several of Warren's poems were afterwards remodelled by the author and treated with more effect. ‘Ballads and Metrical Sketches’ (1860), ‘The Threshold of Atrides’ (1861), and ‘Glimpses of Antiquity’ (1862) followed under the same pseudonym, and all fell dead from the press. More power was evinced in ‘Præterita’ (1863), ‘Eclogues and Monodramas’ (1864), and ‘Studies in Verse’ (1865), all published under the pseudonym of ‘William Lancaster.’ The blank-verse poems of which these volumes chiefly consist are Tennysonian in style and substance, but the freshness of the natural descriptions reveals a man who had looked on nature with his own eyes. Upon leaving Oxford, where he had gained a second class in classics and history, Warren, after a brief interlude of diplomacy under Lord Stratford de Redcliffe at Constantinople, was in 1860 called to the bar from Lincoln's Inn; but probably had no serious intention of following the law, for which he laboured under every imaginable disqualification. He manifested some interest in country life, became and long continued to be an officer of the Cheshire yeomanry, and in 1868 unsuccessfully contested Mid-Cheshire in the liberal interest. Upon his father's second marriage, in 1871, he took up his residence in London.

The interval had been distinguished by three considerable efforts in verse. ‘Philoctetes,’ a tragedy, published anonymously in 1866, is the most powerful of Lord de Tabley's works. It departs from the Greek model in the introduction of a female character and in its gloomy pessimism, as remote as possible from the reconciling effect which Greek art aimed at producing. But these divergencies at all events preserve it from being a mere copy of Sophocles; nor is the influence of either Tennyson or Browning very apparent. The principal character seems in not a few respects a portrait of the author himself. ‘Orestes,’ a tragedy, published anonymously in 1868, was hardly less powerful than ‘Philoctetes,’ but attracted little attention. The volume of poems modestly entitled ‘Rehearsals,’ and also published under the pseudonym of ‘William Lancaster,’ indicates that the influence of Tennyson, though still strong, was yielding to that of Browning and Swinburne. ‘The Strange Parable,’ however, and ‘Nimrod,’ blank-verse poems very finely conceived, strike an original note, and ‘Misrepresentation’ is intensely individual. In another miscellaneous collection, entitled with equal modesty ‘Searching the Net’ (1873), the author for the first time placed his name upon the title-page. Here the poet's power, his dramatic efforts apart, culminates in the grandiose ‘Jael,’ the singularly intense ‘Count of Senlis,’ and the pathetic ‘Ocean Grave;’ and as the volume is mainly concerned with the description of nature and the expression of subjective feeling—departments in which he was entirely at home—he is less indebted than formerly to his predecessors. Had he now done what he did when, twenty years afterwards, he published a carefully winnowed selection of his poems, he must have taken a high place; but he unfortunately gave his time to the most hopeless of all poetical undertakings—the composition of a very long and entirely undramatic tragedy. Not one copy of ‘The Soldier's Fortune’ (1876) was sold, and Warren's disappointment, aggravated by private causes of sorrow, for a long time paralysed his activity as a poet. ‘Seized,’ as Mr. Watts-Dunton expresses it, ‘with a deep dislike of the literary world and its doings,’ he became almost a hermit in London, though retaining his regard for many old friends, and for some, such as W. Bell Scott and Sir A. W. Franks, to whom he was united by a community of tastes. His pursuits were many and interesting; he was a skilled