Author: Merry, Robert
Biography:
MERRY, Robert (1755-99: ODNB)
pseudonym Della Crusca
He belonged to a prosperous and well connected family but died in straitened circumstances in America at the age of 43. His father was a governor of the Hudson's Bay Company; his mother, whose first name is not recorded, was the eldest daughter of Lord Chief Justice John Willes. Merry attended Harrow School and Cambridge but left the university without a degree. He registered at Lincoln's Inn to study law but, freed by the death of his father, instead bought a commission in the Horse Guards which he had to sell later to pay his debts. He travelled on the Continent, settling from 1784 to 1787 in Florence, where he continued to enjoy fashionable society and joined a group of British and Italian poets in the Florence Miscellany. Back in London, he contributed poems to the periodical The World under the name "Della Crusca." Pro-Revolution sympathies took him to France and inspired some overtly political poetry. He had both successes and failures as a dramatist. In 1791 he married Ann Brunton, the leading actress in his tragedy Lorenzo. It seems to have been a happy marriage (though childless) but impecunious, so when his wife was offered an engagement at a Philadelphia theatre, Merry agreed to let her return to the stage. They landed in New York in 1796. Merry died in Baltimore two years later, it is said from "lack of exercise." The most durable of his poems was The Pains of Memory, partly because it was regularly reprinted with the Pleasures of Memory of Samuel Rogers (q.v.). Merry's wife stayed on in America, where she was widely admired as an actress, and remarried twice before her death in 1808. (ODNB 9 Apr. 2020)
Other Names:
- R. M.
- R. Merry