HEADLEY, the Rev.HENRY, an English poet and critic, whose highly promising talents were unfortunately lost to the world at the early age of 23, was the son of a clergy man in Norfolk, and was born at Irstead in that county in 1766. He was educated at the grammar school of Nor wich under Dr Parr, and was admitted a commoner, and elected a scholar of Trinity College, Oxford. At the uni versity, the living example of Thomas \Varton, then the Senior Fellow of Trinity College, seems to have commu nicated to Headley an enthusiasm for the elder school of English poetry. While combining this pursuit with his classical studies, he published his poems and other pieces in the year 1786; and in the following year, at the age of 22, he published Select Beauties of Ancient English Poets, with Remarks. In his poems, though marked by elegance and sensibility, there was no promise of transcendent genius ; but his Remarks on the Elder Poets displayed an extent of reading, a comprehensiveness of views, and a perspi cuity of taste, which were justly regarded with wonder in so young a writer. He cannot, indeed, be said to be whol ly free from partiality and exaggeration, in estimating the elder writers, whose beauties he complains of being ne glectccl; but still, as a critic, he deserves to be remember ed in English literature. Mrs Cooper, in her neat Biogra
phies and Selections, led the way in preserving the memo ry of our early poets ; Warton contributed immense in dustry in illustrating our literary history ; Percy restored to us our ballad poetry ; but in the selections and criti cisms of Headley, there is a classical taste and condensa tion of materials, more elegant than what we meet with in any of his fellow labourers in the same pursuit. His cri tiques are like the portraits of a master, flattered indeed, but done with general truth and animation. His life was too short to have many events. Some months after leav ing Oxford, he married, and retired to Matlock in Derby shire, in a spot where the wild scenery accorded with his romantic turn of mind. But the symptoms of a consump tive tendency, which had before appeared in his delicate