Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3

g around him a small literary company when his health broke, and he died on the 22nd of November 1895 at Ryde, in his sixty-first year. He was buried at Little Peover in Cheshire. Although his reputation will live almost exclusively as that of a poet, De Tabley was a man of many studious tastes. He was at one time an authority on numismatics; he wrote two novels; published A Guide to the Study of Book Plates (1880); and the fruit of his careful researches in botany was printed posthumously in his elaborate Flora of Cheshire (1899). Poetry, however, was his first and last passion, and to that he devoted the best energies of his life. De Tabley's first impulse towards poetry came from his friend George Fortescue, with whom he shared a close companionship during his Oxford days, and whom he lost, as Tennyson lost Hallam, within a few years of their taking their degrees. Fortescue was killed by falling from the mast of Lord Drogheda's yacht in November 1859, and this gloomy event plunged De Tabl