TUPPER, MARTIN FAnqurtAn., D.C.L., P.R.S., a poet rather popular than great, was b. on July 17, 1810. His father, Martin Tupper, was a well-known London surgeon, of a family originally German, which had long been settled in Guernsey. Martin Tupper was educated at the Charter-house, and afterward at Christ Church, Oxford. On leaving college, he entered himself as a student at Lincoln's inn, and was called to the bar in 1835;, but literature had more charms for him• than the law, which he never seriously prosecuted. In 1832 he published anonymously a small volume of poems, which. attracted little attention. For this lack of success, he was, however, amply repaid on the appearance, in 1839, of his Proverbial Philosophy. The popularity of this work in England, and still more in America, has ever since been immense, and almost unprec edented. The critics have indeed been less kind to it than the reading public; and the fame of Mr. Tupper has long been a topic of mirth to the wits of the literary guild; but from the serene height of his fortieth edition an author can perhaps afford to smile at the attacks of the envious generation below. A fair criticism would probably adjudge that,
while there is nothing in Mr.Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy to justify its enormous success —so far as mere circulation is success—the book is yet something better than the mere conglomer, 'ion of stupid platitudes, which its detractors so confidently proclaim it to be. Besides this work, on which his reputation—such as it may be—rests, Mr. Tupper has published The Crock of Gold, a tale; Geraldine, a sufficiently ludicrous attempt to complete Coleridge's inimitable fragment Christabel; with various other works in prose and verse, which it is quite unnecessary to enumerate, inasmuch as no one of them has succeeded in making the least impression on the public.