Theo Marzials

He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School[4] His brother, Frank Marzials, was a prolific author of poetry, essays, and biographies and an accountant general in the army; he was knighted in 1904.

[1] The poem has been chosen as the worst ever by Ross and Kathryn Petras in the 1997 book Very Bad Poetry and by the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain along with many other writers and critics.

"[3] Marzials later spent much of his time as a composer and in 1883 released Pan Pipes, which coupled his music with the work of Christina Rossetti and the illustrations of Walter Crane.

The most successful of his songs was 1878's "Twickenham Ferry", which was well received in both England and America, and a musical version of Algernon Charles Swinburne's poem "Ask Nothing More of Me, Sweet", which became one of the most popular ballads of the 1880s.

Around the same time, Marzials collaborated with Alberto Randegger as a librettist on Arthur Goring Thomas' Esmeralda, an opera based on the character of the same name from Victor Hugo's 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.