Background
By the death of his father in 1816 he became possessed of a small property, and soon after entered into partnership with a solicitor. But in 1820 the partnership was dissolved, and he began to write under the pseudonym of "Barry Cornwall". After his marriage in 1824 to Mission Skepper, daughter of Mrs Basil Montague, he returned to his profession as a conveyancer, and was called to the bar in 1831.
Education
Born at Leeds, Yorkshire, he was educated at Harrow School, where he had for contemporaries Lord Byron and Robert Peel.
Career
On leaving school he was placed in the office of a solicitor at Calne, Wiltshire, remaining there until about 1807, when he returned to London to study law. In the following year he was appointed metropolitan commissioner of lunacy—an appointment annually renewed until his election as one of the Commissioners in Lunacy constituted by the Lunacy Acting 1845. He resigned in 1861. Most of his verse was composed between 1815, when he began to contribute to the Literary Gazette, and 1823, or at latest 1832.
His principal poetical works were: Dramatic Scenes and other Poems (1819), A Sicilian Story (1820), Marcian Colonna (1820), Mirandola, a tragedy performed at Covent Garden with Macready, Charles Kemble and Mission Foote in the leading parts (1821), The Flood of Thessaly (1823). and English Songs (1832).
He was also the author of Effigies poetica (1824), Life of Edmund Kean (1835), Essays and Tales in Prose (1851), Charles Lamb. A Memoir (1866), and of memoirs of Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare for editions of their works.
He was perhaps not an impartial critic. "Barry Cornwall"s" songs have caught some notes from the Elizabethan and Cavalier lyrics, and blended them with others from the leading poets of his own time.
And his dramatic fragments show a similar infusion of the early Victorian spirit into pre-Restoration forms and cadences.
The results are varied, and lack unity, but they abound in pleasant touches, with here and there the flash of a higher, though casual, inspiration. Rather unknown outside Britain in his times and largely considered to be imitator of greater romantic authors, Barry Cornwall however inspired Alexander Pushkin to some translations and imitations in 1830. Just hours before his last duel in 1837 Pushkin sent a collection by Cornwall to a fellow author, Mistress
Ishimova, suggesting that she should translate some poems selected by him.
William Makepeace Thackeray dedicated Vanity Fair to B.W. Procter. Wilkie Collins dedicated The Woman In White to B.W.Procter.