BARON (1835-1895)  , English poet, eldest son of George Fleming Leicester (afterwards Warren), and Baron De Tabley, was born on the 26th of April 1835 . He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he took his degree in 1856 with second classes in classics and in law and modern history . In the autumn of 1858 he went to Turkey as unpaid attache to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, and two years later was called to the bar . He became an officer in theCheshireYeomanry,and unsuccessfullycontestedMid-Cheshire in 1868 as a Liberal . After his father's second marriage in 1871 he remoyed to London, where he became a close friend of Tennyson for several years . From 1877 till his succession to the title in 1887 he was lost to his friends, assuming the life of a recluse . It was not till 1892 that he returned to London life, and enjoyed a sort of renaissance of reputation and friendship . During the later years of his life Lord De Tabley made many new friends, besides reopening old associations, and he almost seemed to he gathering around him a small literary company when his health broke, and he died on the 22nd of November 1895 at Hyde, in his sixty-first year . He was buried at Little Peover in Cheshire . Although his reputation will live almost exclusively as that of a poet, De Tabley was a man of many studious tastes . He was at one time an authority on numismatics; he wrote two novels; published A Guide to the Study of Book Plates (188o); and the fruit of his careful researches in botany was printed posthumously in his elaborate Flora of Cheshire (1899) . Poetry, however, was his first and last passion, and to that he devoted the best energies of his life .

De Tabley's first impulse towards poetry came from his friend George

Fortescue, with whom he shared a close companionship during his Oxford days, and whom he lost, as Tennyson lost Hallam, within a few years of their taking their degrees . Fortescue was killed by falling from the mast of Lord Drogheda's yacht in November 1859, and this gloomy event plunged De Tabley into deep depression . Between 1859 and 1862 De Tabley issued four little volumes of pseudonymous verse (by G . F . Preston), in the production of which he had been greatly stimulated by the sympathy of Fortescue . Once more he assumed a pseudonym—his Praeterita (1863) bearing the name of William Lancaster . In the next year he published Eclogues and Mono- dramas, followed in 1865 by Studies in Verse . These volumes all displayed technical grace and much natural beauty; but it was not till the publication of Philoctetes in 1866 that De Tabley met with any wide recognition . Philoctetes bore the initials " M.A.," which, to the author's dismay, were interpreted as meaning Matthew Arnold . He at once disclosed his identity, and received the congratulations of his friends, among whom were Tennyson, Browning and Gladstone . In 1867 he published Orestes, in 187o Rehearsals and in 1873 Searching the Net . These last two bore his own name, John Leicester Warren .

He was somewhat disappointed by their lukewarm reception, and when in 1876 The Soldier of

Fortune, a drama on which he had bestowed much careful labour, proved a complete failure, he retired altogether from the literary arena . It was not until 1893, that he was persuaded to return, and the immediate success in that year of his Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical, encouraged him to publish a second series in 1895, the year of his death . The genuine interest with which these volumes were welcomed did much to lighten the last years of a somewhat sombre and solitary life . His posthumous poems were collected in 1902 . The characteristics of De Tabley's poetry are pre-eminently magnificence of style, derived from close study of Milton, sonority, dignity, weight and colour . His passion for detail was both a strength and a weakness: it lent a loving fidelity to his description of natural objects, but it sometimes' involved him in a loss of simple effect from over-elaboration of treatment . He was always a student of the classic poets, and drew much of his inspiration directly from them . He was a true and a whole-hearted artist, who, as a brother poet well said, " still climbed the clear cold altitudes of song." His ambition was always for the heights, a region naturally ice-bound at periods, but always a country of clear atmosphere and bright, vivid outlines . See an excellent sketch by E . Gosse in his Critical Kit-Kats (1896) .