Injuries sustained in a skating accident prevented him from following a professional career, and during the last years of his life he was an invalid.

[3] Nowadays he is best-known (at least in Cambridge, his adoptive home) as the author of the "Ode to Tobacco" (1862) which is to be found on a bronze plaque in Rose Crescent, on the wall of what used to be Bacon's the tobacconist.

It concludes: His poem Beer is also notable, for its light mocking of Greek gods who, surprisingly, did not drink beer, and continues to extol: His Translations into English and Latin appeared in 1866; his Theocritus translated into English Verse in 1869; Fly Leaves in 1872; and Literary Remains in 1885.

[1] His Complete Works, with a biographical notice by Walter Joseph Sendall, a contemporary at Christ's and his brother-in-law,[4] appeared in 1901.

[1] George W. E. Russell said of him:He was a true poet; he was one of the most graceful scholars that Cambridge ever produced; and all his exuberant fun was based on a broad and strong foundation of Greek, Latin and English literature.