A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature/Barham, Richard Harris

[ 25 ] Barham, Richard Harris (1788-1845). -- Novelist and humorous poet, s. of a country gentleman, was b. at Canterbury, ed. at St. Paul's School and Oxford, entered the church, held various incumbencies, and was Divinity Lecturer, and minor canon of St. Paul's. It is not, however, as a churchman that he is remembered, but as the author of the Ingoldsby Legends, a series of comic and serio-comic pieces in verse, sparkling with wit, and full of striking and often grotesque turns of expression, which appeared first in Bentley's Miscellany. He also wrote, in Blackwood's Magazine, a novel, My Cousin Nicholas.