one or two slight sketches later, but several tragedies and a great deal of miscellaneous verse belonging to these years are lost. Wells stated in a letter to Horne (November 1877) that he had composed eight or ten volumes of poetry during his life, but that, having failed to find a publisher for any of them, he burned the manuscripts at his wife's death. The only work he had retained was a revised form of Joseph and his Brethren, which was praised in 1838 by Thomas Wade, and again, with great warmth, by Horne, in his New Spirit of the Age, in 1844. The drama was then once more forgotten, until in 1863 it was read and praised by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The tide turned at last; Joseph and his Brethren became a kind of shibboleth—a rite of initiation into poetic culture. Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote a study of it in the Fortnightly Review in 1875, and the drama itself was reprinted in 1876. Between 1876 and 1878 Wells added various scenes, which came in the possession of Buxton Fornian, who published one of them in 1895. After leaving Quimper, Wells went to reside at Marseilles, where he held a professorial chair. Swinburne said that there are lines in Wells "which might more naturally be mistaken, even by an expert, for the work of the young Shakespeare, than any to be gathered elsewhere in the fields of English poetry." In 1909 a reprint was published of Joseph and his Brethren, with Swinburne's essay, and reminiscences by Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton. Notes References Tatchell, Molly: Charles Jeremiah Wells (1800–1879). In The Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, No. XXII, 1971, pp. 7–17. External links 1799 births 1879 deaths English male poets 19th-century English poets 19th-century English male writers