BRIDGES, ROBERT (1844-1930), English Poet Laureate, born at Walmer Oct. 23, 1844. Educated at Eton and Corpus Christi College, Oxford he afterwards studied medicine and became Consulting Physician at the Children's Hospital, Great Ormond Street, and assistant Physician at the Great Northern Hospital. In 1882, at the age of 38, he abandoned medicine. Prometheus the Fire-Giver, published in 1883, could appeal to few but scholars. Eight plays, Nero (part I), Palicio, Ulysses, The Christian Captives, Achilles in Scyros, Humours of the Court, The Feast of Bacchus, Nero (part II) were issued between 1885 and 1894. Demeter, a mask, was written for the undergraduates at Somerville College, Oxford, and acted by them in 1904. Dr. Bridges is to be found in a still more experimental vein in the poems in classical metre which he began to publish in 1903. There has never been an English poet, indeed, who has been more interested in prosody. In the lyrics collected in Shorter Poems (1890) he had fortunately shown that poetry was for him some thing more than a prosodist's laboratory. Here the artist takes control of the scholar, and genius makes use of new measures, not for their own sake, but in order to pour into them the pure treasures of inspiration. In lyric after lyric—"A Passer-by," "Lon don Snow," and "On a Dead Child,"—the novelty of the form, remarkable though it is, does not distract us from the vision that it reveals. Many of the lyrics of Dr. Bridges express a joy in the lovely things of life so pure and unclouded that, as we read, it seems never to have been expressed before. Even though the shadow of death and sorrow falls at times on his verse, the general impression his work leaves on us is one of serene delight. In 1913 Mr. Asquith appointed him to the Poet Laureateship. Probably his anthology, The Spirit of Man, compiled during the War (1916), achieved wide popularity. His critical writings on poetry, language and pronunciation are both valuable and original, and he has written in the spirit of a reformer as a founder of the Society for Pure English. But his chief writings in prose are the two essays, Milton's Prosody (188 7) and John Keats, a Critical Essay (1895), and The Necessity of Poetry, an Address (1918). In New Verse (1925) he tried new metres. He was awarded the O.M., June 3, 1929. In 1929, at the age of 85, Bridges published his last great poem, The Testament of Beauty, an ardent confes sion of philosophical faith, written in "loose Alexandrine" metre, in which he aimed at reconciling scientific knowledge with tra ditional belief. Bridges died April 21, 1930.