in Essex and Hampshire said to be worth considerably over a million a year. She died on 12 Sept. 1825. Her husband was generally charged with having run through this property, but this he was unable to do, having only a life interest. In 1828, three years after the death of his first wife, he married his mistress, Helena, daughter of Colonel Thomas Paterson, and widow of Captain Thomas Bligh of the Coldstream guards. He led a very dissipated life, and was deprived of the custody of his children by the court of chancery, and in July 1831 committed to the Fleet by Lord Brougham for contempt of court. The matter was brought before the committee of privileges of the House of Commons (Greville Memoirs, new edit. ii. 169 n.) Long-Wellesley sat for Wiltshire from 1818 to 1820, St. Ives 1830–1, and Essex 1831–2. He was one of the recalcitrant tories who on 15 Nov. 1830 succeeded in defeating the Wellington ministry (Walpole, Hist. of England from 1815, iii. 191). In his last days he subsisted upon the bounty of his uncle, the Duke of Wellington, and died in lodgings in Mayer Street, Manchester Square, on 1 July 1857.
The obituary notice in the ‘Morning Chronicle’ says that he was redeemed by no single virtue, adorned by no single grace. A portrait by John Hoppner is in the possession of the Duke of Wellington.
His eldest son by the first wife, William Richard Arthur, fifth earl of Mornington (1813–1863), died unmarried at Paris on 25 July 1863, when the Irish earldom of Mornington passed to the Duke of Wellington and the English barony of Maryborough became extinct.
[Burke's Peerage; G. E. C[okayne]'s Peerage; Ann. Reg. 1845, App. to Chron., pp. 252–4; S. Walpole's Life of Perceval, ii. 248–54, 255 n., 270; Lord Colchester's Diary, ii. 234, 398, iii. 390; Diary of R. P. Ward (Phipps's Memoirs); Yonge's Life of Liverpool, i. 425, ii. 173, iii. 392; Courts and Cabinets of the Regency and of George IV, passim; Wellington Corresp. vol. iv.; Haydn's Book of Dignities; Gent. Mag. 1857, ii. 215, from ‘Morning Chronicle;’ authorities cited; Evans's Cat. Engr. Portraits.]
WELLS. [See also Welles.]
WELLS, CHARLES JEREMIAH (1799?–1879), poet, was born, probably in or near London, of parents of whom nothing is recorded except that they belonged to the middle class. According to his statement in writing, the year of his birth was 1800, but he spoke of himself at the close of his life as an octogenarian, and when it is considered that he was old enough in 1816 to send Keats a present of roses and receive a sonnet in return, which seems to imply an acquaintance of some duration, it can hardly be doubted that he was somewhat older than he afterwards represented himself. He had been the schoolfellow of Keats's younger brother Tom at Cowden Clarke's school at Edmonton, where Keats himself was educated, and where Richard Henry Horne [q. v.] was a pupil in Wells's time. He thus obtained introduction to the literary circle in London, of which Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Hazlitt were members. He appears to have been especially intimate with Hazlitt, and was on friendly terms with Keats until their acquaintance was dissolved by a practical joke thoughtlessly and cruelly played off by Wells upon Keats's invalid brother Tom, of which Keats speaks with bitter resentment. Wells meanwhile had entered a solicitor's office, and, after serving his articles, commenced practice somewhere about 1820. He had been considered backward and inattentive at school, but he attended Hazlitt's lectures, and his first book shows that he must have been proficient in Italian. Wells's ‘Stories after Nature,’ published anonymously in 1822 (London, 12mo), are the nearest approach to the Italian novelette that our literature can show. Simple in plot, yet generally founded on some striking idea, impressive in their conciseness, and highly imaginative, they are advantageously distinguished from their models by a larger infusion of the poetical element, but fall short of them in artistic structure and narrative power, and the style is occasionally florid. They would have been highly appreciated in the Elizabethan age, but the great subsequent enrichment and expansion of the novel left little room for them in Wells's day. They passed without remark, and, except for a notice in the ‘Monthly Repository’ by R. H. Horne in 1836, were absolutely forgotten until in 1845 W. J. Linton reprinted a few in his ‘Illuminated Magazine’ from ‘the only copy I ever saw,’ picked off a bookstall in 1842. The ‘Stories’ were reissued by Linton in a limited edition in 1891.
Similar neglect attended Wells's next and much more ambitious performance, the now celebrated dramatic poem ‘Joseph and his Brethren,’ written, according to his own improbable statement, at twenty, and published under the pseudonym of ‘H. L. Howard,’ in December 1823, with a title-page dated 1824. This fine work, though pronounced by Hazlitt ‘not only original but aboriginal,’
