George Brimley was born at Cambridge on 29 December 1819, and from the age of eleven to that of sixteen was educated at a school in Totteridge, Hertfordshire.
[1] He was reading with good hopes for classical honours, and was a private pupil of Dr. Vaughan; but even at that early age he was suffering from the disease to which he eventually succumbed.
Physical weakness prevented the sustained effort necessary for the production of any important work; but for the last six years of his life he contributed to the press.
This volume contains notices of a large number of the writers who were contemporary with Brimley himself, and is of considerable value as representing the contemporary judgment by a man of cultivation and acuteness on the writers of the middle of the nineteenth century, most of whom are now being judged by posterity.
Sir Arthur Helps said of him, 'He was certainly, as it appeared to me, one of the finest critics of the present day.'