Ivi MEMOIR 



was called to the bar when past thirty. A Commission of 

 Enquiry into the state of the poor in Dorsetshire gave him an 

 opportunity of proving his true talents ; and he was appointed 

 a Poor Law Inspector, first at Worcester, next at Manchester, 

 where he had to deal with the potato famine and the Irish im- 

 migration of the 'forties, and finally in London, where he again 

 distinguished himself during an epidemic of cholera. He was 

 then advanced to the Permanent Secretaryship of Her Majesty's 

 Office of Works and Public Buildings ; a position which he filled 

 with perfect competence, but with an extreme of modesty ; and on 

 his retirement, in 1868, he was made a Companion of the Bath. 

 While apprentice to a Norwich attorney, Alfred Austin was a 

 frequent visitor in the house of Mr. Barren, a rallying place in 

 those days of intellectual society. Edward Barron, the son of a 

 rich saddler or leather merchant in the Borough, was a man 

 typical of the time. When he was a child, he had once been 

 patted on the head in his father's shop by no less a man than 

 Samuel Johnson, as the Doctor went round the Borough can- 

 vassing for Mr. Thrale ; and the child was true to this early 

 consecration. 'A life of lettered ease spent in provincial retire- 

 ment,' it is thus that the biographer of that remarkable man, 

 William Taylor announces his subject ; and the phrase is equally 

 descriptive of the life of Edward Barron. The pair were close 

 friends : l W. T. and a pipe render everything agreeable,' writes 

 Barron in his diary in 1828; and in 1833, after Barron had 

 moved to London and Taylor had tasted the first public failure 

 of his powers, the latter wrote : i To my ever dearest Mr. Barron 

 say, if you please, that I miss him more than I regret him 

 that I acquiesce in his retirement from Norwich, because I 

 could ill brook his observation of my increasing debility of mind.' 

 This chosen companion of William Taylor must himself have 

 been no ordinary man ; and he was the friend besides of Borrow, 

 whom I find him helping in his Latin. But he had no desire 

 for popular distinction, lived privately, married a daughter of 

 Dr. Enfield of Enfield's Speaker, and devoted his time to the 

 education of his family, in a deliberate and scholarly fashion, 

 and with certain traits of stoicism, that would surprise a mo- 



