Not that he was free from vagaries; but his prejudices and perversities even now are "excellently intelligible," and a certain proud integrity of soul forbids us to separate the poet from the man. Together then, as one single entity, should the life record and the art record be studied.
Coventry Kersey Dighton Pattnore was born at Woodford, in Essex, 23 July, 1823. From his mother, an austere woman of Scottish descent, he seems to have received little save the gift of life; in his father he found not only the inseparable companion but almost the sole instructor of his youth. Peter George Patmore was himself a literary man of versatile parts, exemplifying that not unusual combination of strong individuality and feeble character. From very childhood, Coventry spent hours in his father's library; together the two read Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and selections from all the great English classics; while at night this not unliberal education was supplemented by visits to the best playhouses, or to the homes of "Barry Cornwall" and others of the so-called Cockney School. It was doubtless a desultory method, yet it proved more effective than might many a wiser one. And when, between his twelfth and fifteenth years, the boy manifested keen interest in mathematics and experimental science, his father—with customary indulgence and apparently at some pecuniary inconvenience—fitted for his use a little laboratory. To the end of his life, our poet was wont to refer with zest to his investigations there, even asserting that he had in those early years discovered a new chloride of bromine.
But in the life of so transcendent a thinker, it is the spiritual experiences, however youthful and fugitive, which retain permanent interest. The elder Patmore seems to have been what is now
