Born (Charles Stuart Blayds), at Martley, Worcestershire, 22 Dec. 1831. Father assumed name of Calverley, 1852. Educated by private tutors; then at Marlborough. At Harrow, Sept. 1846 to July 1850. To Balliol Coll., Oxford, as scholar, Nov. 1850; Chancellor’s Prize, 1851. Resumed family name of Calverley, 1852. Removed to Christ’s Coll., Camb., Oct. 1852; Craven Scholarship, 1854; Camden Medal, 1853 and 1855; Browne Medal, 1855; Latin Essay Prize, 1856; B.A., 1856; M.A., 1859; Fellow of Christ’s Coll., 14 Dec. 1857 to 24 June, 1863. Married Ellen Calverley, 1863. Called to Bar at Inner Temple, 1 May 1865. Severe accident, winter of 1866; obliged to relinquish profession. Died at Folkestone, 17 Feb. 1884; buried there. Works: “Verses and Translations” (under initials: C. S. C), 1862; “Translations into English and Latin,” 1866; “Theocritus, translated into English Verse,” 1869; “Fly Leaves” (under initials: C. S. C), 1872. Collected Works: “Literary Remains,” with memoir by W. J. Sendall, 1885.

Personal

  He was the best runner and jumper I ever knew…. Whenever I think of Calverley I think of fun and good-fellowship; of the “wild joys of living; the leaping from rock up to rock; the cool silver shock of the plunge in the pool’s living water;” of health and youth and strength. Alas, alas!

  Most of Blayds’ Harrow contemporaries who went to Cambridge entered at Trinity, and there was in those days but little communications between Trinity and Christ’s. At Christ’s he was cock of the roost, and a true Bohemian, he liked to take his ease at his inn, and had a horror of general society. Only some admirable skit like his Tripos verses, some practical joke worthy of Theodore Hook, or some brilliant success like the Craven Scholarship, kept his name alive with Harrow men.

  A bright, sunny boyhood, fearless and careless; a youth full of brilliant promise, and studded with intellectual triumphs; a manhood marked by no striking incidents, no ambitious struggles, no alternations of failure and success—darkened, alas! in later years, and brought to an untimely close by the ravages of a fatal and insidious malady—such are, in brief, the outlines of a career which in itself would seem to possess but scanty claims upon the attention of the general observer. But if the incidents of Calverley’s life were thus trite even to commonplace, yet his own bearing amongst them, and the physical and intellectual personality which marked each successive stage, would be found, if accurately and adequately portrayed, to present a striking and an interesting picture. From childhood up there never was a time when he failed to impress in some enduring manner those amongst whom he moved.

  On the testimony of those who knew him best, Calverley’s published writings convey only a very imperfect idea of his powers. At Oxford and at Cambridge he was justly regarded as a prodigy of versatility and intellectual brilliance. He excelled in scholarship and athletics; his wit, his sunny humour, his musical talents, his gifts as a conversationalist, a caricaturist and a comic rhymer, the ease with which he carried off University honours as if in play made him the idol and delight of his fellows. At Cambridge his jests went the round of the University. The Latin poem with which he won the Chancellor’s Prize at Oxford is said to have been composed so rapidly that it might almost be termed an improvisation. His appearance in his college days is thus described by Mr. Sendall; “Short of stature, with a powerful head of the Greek type, covered thickly with crisp curling masses of dark hair, and closely set upon a frame whose supple joints and well-built proportions betokened both speed and endurance—he presented a picture of health, strength, and activity.” He was a fascinating companion from his sparkling gaiety, his modesty and kindness. He was the most loyal and generous of friends; he was a favourite everywhere;—when he visited Cumberland he won the hearts of the dalesmen as readily as he had captivated the Cambridge undergraduates. But he seems to have had no ambition.

  Charles Stuart Calverley is by common consent the king of metrical parodists. All who went before merely adumbrated him and led up to him; all who have come since are descended from him and reflect him. Of course he was infinitely more than a mere imitator of rhymes and rhythms. He was a true poet; he was one of the most graceful scholars that Cambridge ever produced; and all his exuberant fun was based on a broad and strong foundation of Greek, Latin, and English literature.

  Among these men—I mean of my own time—incomparably the most brilliant, the finest scholar, the most remarkable man from every point of view, was Calverley. He was the hero of a hundred tales; all the audacious things, all the witty things, all the clever things, were fathered upon him. It is forty years since his time, and no doubt the same audacities, repartees, and things of unexpectedness which never die have been fathered upon others, his successors in brilliant talk and scholarship. But consider, to a lad like myself, the delight of knowing a man who was not only the finest scholar of his year—writing Latin verses which even to eyes like mine were charming—but a man who could play and sing with a grace and sweetness quite divine as it seemed to me; who could make parodies the most ridiculous and burlesques the most absurd; who kept a kind of open-house for his intimates, with abundance of port and claret—he was the only man in college who kept claret; whose English verses were as delightful as his Latin; who was always sympathetic, always helpful, always considerate.

General

  Calverley and Dobson are the best of the new farceurs. “Fly-Leaves,” by the former, contains several burlesques and seriocomic translations that are excellent in their way, with most agreeable qualities of fancy and thought.

  Assuming that all competent judges are agreed as to the the superlative goodness of his classical compositions and translations, I will only observe in this place, that in all such work his professed aim and object were faithfully to represent, not the sense merely of his author, but also the form and expression. It is not sufficient, in his view, that the thoughts and ideas of the original should be reproduced, in language of itself however appropriate and idiomatic, by the copy; this is indeed indispensable, but this is not enough; there must in addition to a wholly faithful sense-rendering, be also to some extent a word-rendering, and even if possible a form-rendering…. Calverley’s own measure of success in translating upon his own method is, I venture to think, almost if not quite unrivalled, and constitutes the distinctive mark of his performances in this department…. His own clearness and, so to speak, point-blank directness of mental vision, rendered him especially impatient of all the crooked and nebulous antics and vagaries of thought or speech in which writers of the modern transcendental school are pleased to indulge; and his parodies of this class must be regarded as a genuine and out-spoken expression of resentment that so much genius should seem to take so much pains to be unintelligible.

  Calverley wrote a small amount of verse that, merely as verse, is absolutely faultless. To compare great things with little, you might as well try to alter a line of Virgil’s as one of Calverley’s. Forget a single epithet and substitute another, and the result is certain disaster. He has the perfection of the phrase,—and there it ends. I cannot remember a single line of Calverley’s that contains a spark of human feeling.

  The monstrously overrated and preposterously overpraised C. S. Calverley: a jester, graduate or undergraduate, may be fit enough to hop, skip and tumble before university audiences, without capacity to claim an enduring or even a passing station among even the humblest of English humourists.

  He was, like Yorick, “a fellow of infinite jest, a most excellent fancy,” gifted with an extraordinary ingenuity in producing and manipulating his little tricks of verse and scholarly jeux d’esprit, which, together with the wild pranks that he played when an undergraduate, have secured him an undying memory at both universities. Those who were at Harrow, or at Oxford, or Cambridge with him, still regard with some of the wondering admiration of old days the extraordinary powers which seemed to make any degree of future fame possible to the brilliant young writer. But the hopes thus aroused were never destined to be fulfilled. Perhaps he never could have done anything greater than the graceful and witty trifles, of which we are sometimes tempted to say in the midst of our admiration that this man was doing for work what others do—not so well, certainly,—for play…. His translations from the classics and his Greek and Latin verse have deservedly given him a place among scholars quite as high as the immortal “Ode to Beer” or any other of the great little efforts of his youth entitled him to.

  Calverley had a wonderful sense of rhythm and of the power and beauty of words. He was a student of style from his boyhood. With his imagination and deep human sympathy, his sensitiveness, his exquisite appreciation of verbal music, and his mastery of poetic technique, he seemed to possess in unusual completeness the equipment of a serious lyrical artist; but his powers, by a charming perversity of genius, were enlisted in the service of an elvish irrepressible humour and a satiric wit equally whimsical and keen. His satire was guided by severe good taste. He derided outworn rhymes, and sham sentiment, obscure and contorted phrases, and lackadaisical refrains. His humour gains a peculiar pungency from the classic terseness and finish of his clear-cut verse. In certain of his pieces the air of mock gravity is so well maintained that the lines when first read might be taken for serious poetry, until a sharp deft change from the florid to the familiar, from the sentimental to the burlesque, an ingeniously incongruous phrase, a rhyme of ludricrous felicity, betrays their satiric intent. His exquisite literary sense enabled him to produce broadly humorous effects by subtle and singularly terse conjunctions of ornate with prosaic diction. And the succinctness of the expression, the severity of the literary form never embarrassed the play of his wit nor retarded the current of his humour.

  So far is Calverley superior in this and other particulars to all the servile herd who have followed him, that, according to the principles we have laid down, the “cream” of “Fly-leaves” should have occupied a third of our volume.

  Partly from indifference, partly because of the accident which made great effort in his later years impossible, he never wrote anything worthy of his talents. What he has left however is the very best of its kind. He is one of the most skilful of translators; and his parodies and satiric verse are excellent.