Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Wright, Waller Rodwell
WRIGHT, WALLER RODWELL (d. 1826), author of ‘Horæ Ionicæ,’ was British consul-general for the republic of the Seven Islands (Ionian Islands) from 1800 to 1804. On his return to England he became recorder for Bury St. Edmunds. Subsequently he was president of the court of appeals at Malta, where he died in 1826. Wright's library at Zante was rifled by the French in 1804, and the materials which he had collected for a work upon the Greek islands were scattered or destroyed. His reminiscences took the form of ‘Horæ Ionicæ: a Poem descriptive of the Ionian Islands and part of the adjacent coast of Greece’ (London, 1809, 8vo). There are some charming lines among its heroic couplets, the work throughout of an ardent disciple of Pope. A ‘Postscript’ contains a few remarks upon the Modern Greek spoken in the Ionian Islands. To the third edition (London, 1816, 12mo) were appended ‘Orestes, a Tragedy: from the Italian of Count Vittor Alfieri’ (this was in blank verse, for which Wright showed little aptitude), and two odes. One of these odes, on the Duke of Gloucester's installation at Cambridge, had been printed in 1811 and forwarded in September by Dallas to Byron, who wrote: ‘It is evidently the production of a man of taste and a poet, though I should not be willing to say it was fully equal to what might be expected from the author of “Horæ Ionicæ.”’ In reference to this poem Byron had previously written in ‘English Bards:’
Blest is the man who dare approach the bower
Where dwelt the Muses in their natal hour …
Wright, 'twas thy happy lot at once to view
Those shores of Glory, and to sing them too.
[Wright's Horæ (three editions) in Brit. Mus. Libr.; Byron's Letters, ed. Henley, i. 375; Moore's Life and Letters of Byron, 1854, p. 136; Monthly Review, 1809, iii. 98; Biographical Dict. of Living Authors, 1816, p. 401.]