John Abraham Heraud

John Abraham, the son, was privately educated, and originally destined for business, but in 1818 began writing for the magazines.

[1] Heraud had a large circle of literary acquaintances, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and John Gibson Lockhart.

[1] Southey was a correspondent, who thought Heraud capable of learning anything, except "how to check his own exuberance in verse", as he wrote to Robert Gooch.

[1] In 1869 he used that position to call for censorship of Formosa, Dion Boucicault's "courtesan play", prompting William Bodham Donne of the Lord Chamberlain's Office to tighten up licensing of drama with sexual overtones.

[7][8] On 21 July 1873, on the nomination of William Gladstone, he was appointed a brother of the London Charterhouse, where he died on 20 April 1887.

A biographer of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who initially took a great interest, has called Heraud in particular a "general failure".

[13][14] Camilla Toulmin gained the impression in 1841, visiting Horne, that there was a group of younger and ambitious men in the Syncretics, besides the better-known names.

[19] Writing in The Dial in 1842, Emerson in his article English Reformers praised Heraud as an interpreter of Jakob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg; and referenced his papers Foreign Aids to Self Intelligence, which had been announced as a three-volume work.

These included John Goodwyn Barmby, Newton Crosland, Horne, Henry Mansel, and James Elishama Smith.

Bernard's talk was light-hearted chat about actors, but Heraud and Frederick Guest Tomlins addressed more serious aspects and limitations of current British theatre, before the weekly series outstayed its welcome at the Gallery.

[26] Not short of ambition, the Dramatic Committee of the Association, through Heraud, pressed for a reformed and poetic theatre, an actors' joint stock company, and the performance of new work, as well as drama schools to elevate taste.

[27] A failed demonstration, Martinuzzi of 1841, written by Stephens, led to Heraud in particular being lampooned in Punch, by William Makepeace Thackeray.

[1][30][31] Harper's Cyclopædia of British and American poetry noted that as a poet, Heraud had been snubbed by the critics, "and not always unjustly".

The view of Chambers's Cyclopædia of English Literature was that he attempted in poetry what John Martin did in art: the vast, the remote, and the terrible.

He places it with other, earlier attempts to dramatise Christian typology, such as those of William Gilbank and Elizabeth Smith of Birmingham.