BUCHANAN, ROBERT (1841-1901)

—Poet and novelist, b. at Cavers wall, Staff ords hire, the s. of a Scottish schoolmaster and socialist, and ed. at Glasgow, was the friend of David Gray ( q.v. ), and with him went to London in search of fame, but had a long period of discouragement. His first work, a collection of poems, Undertones (1863), had, however, some succe , and was followed by Idylls of In ver burn (1865), London Poems (1866), and others, which gave him a growing reputation, and raised high hopes of his future. Thereafter he took up prose fiction and the drama, not always with succe , and got into trouble owing to some drastic criticism of his contemporaries, culminating in his famous article on the Fleshly School of Poetry , which appeared in the Contemporary Review (Oct. 1871), and evoked replies from Ro etti ( The Stealthy School of Criticism ), and Swinburne ( Under the Microscope ). Among his novels are A Child of Nature (1879), God and the Man (1881), and among his dramas A Nine Days' Queen , A Madcap Prince , and Alone in London . His latest poems, The Outcast and The Wandering Jew , were directed against certain aspects of Christianity. B. was unfortunate in his latter years; a speculation turned out ruinously; he had to sell his copyrights, and he sustained a paralytic seizure, from the effects of which he d. in a few months. He ultimately admitted that his criticism of Ro etti was unjustifiable.