The  name  of  Madox-Brown,  rendered  illustrious  by
a  painter  of  genius  whose  influence  has  renewed  the
artistic  atmosphere  of  England,  appeared  at  one
moment  destined  to  surround  itself  with  a  second
aureole.  The  son  of  Eord  Madox-Brown,  Oliver,  a
painter  by  heredity,  a  poet  by  vocation,  promised  a
great  artist  and  a  great  writer  to  the  future.  'Twas
but  the  gleam  of  an  instant  ;  all  their  visions  of
glory  were  extinguished  for  ever  in  his  twentieth
year.  Oliver  Madox-Brown  died  a  mere  child  ;  but
he  had  lived  long  enough  to  leave  behind  him  a
cherished  memory,  and  in  the  hearts  of  those  who
had  loved  him — even  among  the  greatest  of  them —
an  ineffaceable  impression  of  strength,  of  power,  of
gift,  of  something  more  than  promise.  Nine  years
after  his  death  the  poor  lad  found  still  a  poet  to
bewail  him,  and  a  biographer  to  recount  his  brief
and  brilliant  story.
{■5?


154  ENGLISH   STUDIES.
Mr.  John  Ingram,  to  whom  we  owe  the  life  of
OHver  Brown,  is  also  the  biographer  of  Edgar  Allan
Poe.  It  was  no  mere  hazard  of  friendship,  but  a
real  intellectual  sympathy  which  induced  him  to
seek,  in  his  second  subject,  as  it  were,  an  echo  of  the
past.  The  name  of  Edgar  Allan  Poc  rises  involun-
tarily to  the  lips  of  the  reader  of  young  Oliver's
"  Reliquiae."  Nor  was  this  the  first  apparition,  in
the  family  history  of  the  Madox-Browns,  of  a  like
spirit  of  fantasy  and  strangeness.  Oliver's  great-
grandfather was  Dr.  John  Brown,  the  celebrated
Edinburgh  physician,  the  precursor  of  Broussais,
who  found  in  excitability  the  last  secret  of  our  vital
forces,  as  certainly  it  was  the  first  and  last  explana-
tion of  his  own  ardent  and  disordered  destiny.
