On leaving school he was placed in the office of a solicitor at Calne, Wiltshire, remaining there until about 1807, when he returned to London to study law.

After his marriage in 1824 to Miss Skepper, daughter of Mrs Basil Montague, he returned to his profession as a conveyancer, and was called to the bar in 1831.

His principal poetical works were: Dramatic Scenes and other Poems (1819), A Sicilian Story (1820), Marcian Colonna (1820), Mirandola, a tragedy performed at Covent Garden with Macready, Charles Kemble and Miss Foote in the leading parts (1821), The Flood of Thessaly (1823) and English Songs (1832).

A posthumous autobiographical fragment with notes of his literary friends, of whom he had a wide range from William Lisle Bowles to Robert Browning, was published in 1877, with some additions by Coventry Patmore.

I lost my heart to your heartless sire ('T was melted away by his looks of fire), Forgot my God, and my father's ire, All for the sake of a man's desire; But now we'll go Where the waters flow, And make us a bed where none shall know.

From the base of the wave to the billow’s crown, And amidst the flashing and feathery foam The stormy petrel finds a home, - A home, if such a place may be For her who lives on the wide, wide sea, On the craggy ice, in the frozen air, And only seeketh her rocky lair To warm her young, and to teach them spring At once o’er the waves on their stormy wing!

Where the whale and the shark and the sword-fish sleep, - Outflying the blast and the driving rain, The petrel telleth her tale — in vain; For the mariner curseth the warning bird Which bringeth him news of the storm unheard!

"Barry Cornwall's" songs have caught some notes from the Elizabethan and Cavalier lyrics, and blended them with others from the leading poets of his own time; and his dramatic fragments show a similar infusion of the early Victorian spirit into pre-Restoration forms and cadences.