Bryan Waller Procter was an aspiring writer of moderate abilities who was accepted into London literary circles. His career in the legal profession provided him with an income sufficient to support his chosen lifestyle. William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb were Procter's friends of an earlier generation; Lamb provided him with a subject for a biography that is, perhaps, the work by which Procter's place in literature is primarily established. John Forster, Charles Dickens, and Robert Browning were members of a later generation with whom he enjoyed personal friendships and shared literary interests. Although such well-known contemporaries obscure his visibility today, his experiments in a variety of genres--drama, lyric poetry, biography, the familiar essay, articles, and reviews--indicate the scope of his talent. Possessing a congenial disposition, an open mind, and a substantial, if self-schooled, knowledge of William Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists, he had a secure position...