project. These included John Goodwyn Barmby, Newton Crosland, Horne, Henry Mansel, and James Elishama Smith. Drama activism A series of public lectures by the Syncretic Association started early in 1841. Bayle Bernard was one of the speakers, and the talks took place in the Suffolk Street Gallery, London. A circumstantial account, "Damned" Tragedies, was given in the July 1842 Fraser's Magazine. Bernard's talk was light-hearted chat about actors, but Heraud and Frederick Guest Tomlins addressed more serious aspects and limitations of current British theatre, before the weekly series outstayed its welcome at the Gallery. The Syncretics, who included also George Stephens, became active in agitation to have unperformed drama staged. The context was the restriction in London to three theatres with patents, and an absence of new verse drama productions. Not short of ambition, the Dramatic Committee of the Association, through Heraud, pressed for a reformed and poetic theatre, an actors' joint stock company, and the performance of new work, as well as drama schools to elevate taste. A failed demonstration, Martinuzzi of 1841, written by Stephens, led to Heraud in particular being lampooned in Punch, by William Makepeace Thackeray. The existing theatrical monopoly was, however, abolished by the Theatres Act 1843. Heraud himself wrote dramas and persisted. The tragedy of Videna, based on Geoffrey of Monmouth, was acted at the Marylebone Theatre in 1854, with James William Wallack; and Wife or No Wife and a version of Ernest Legouvé's Medea were staged later. Heraud as poet Harper's Cyclopædia of British and American poetry noted that as a poet, Heraud had been snubbed by the critics, "and not always unjustly". It also repeated the story attributed to Douglas Jerrold, asked by Heraud whether he had seen "his Descent into Hell", and replying that he'd like to. Heraud made two attempts at epic grandeur in his poems The Descent into Hell, 1830, and The Judgment of the Flood, 1834. The view of Chambers's Cyclopædia of English Literature was that he attempted in poetry what John Martin did in art: the vast, the remote, and the terrible. It found his Descent and Judgment to be "psychological curiosities" of "misplaced power". George Saintsbury put Heraud on a level with Edwin Atherstone, and above Robert Pollok. Herbert Tucker regards the Judgement of the Flood as "deranged", but has more time for the Descent into Hell. He places it with other, earlier attempts to dramatise