in Florence, where he remained some few years; then he settled at Plymouth, and there brought out a work entitled, “Shakespeare’s Autobiographical Poems.  Being his Sonnets clearly developed; with his Character, drawn chiefly from his Works.”  It cannot be said that in this work the author has clearly educed his theory; but, in the face of his failure upon that main point, the book is interesting, for the heart-whole zeal and homage with which he has gone into his subject.  Brown was no half-measure man; “whatsoever his hand found to do, he did it with his might.”  His last stage-scene in life was passed in New Zealand, whither he emigrated with his son, having purchased some land,—­or, as his own letter stated, having been thoroughly defrauded in the transaction.  Brown accompanied Keats in his tour in the Hebrides, a worthy event in the poet’s career, seeing that it led to the production of that magnificent sonnet to “Ailsa Rock.”  As a passing observation, and to show how the minutest circumstance did not escape him, he told me, that, when he first came upon the view of Loch Lomond, the sun was setting; the lake was in shade, and of a deep blue; and at the farther end was “a slash across it, of deep orange.”  The description of the traceried window in the “Eve of St. Agnes” gives proof of the intensity of his feeling for color.

It was during his abode in Wentworth Place that the savage and vulgar attacks upon the “Endymion” appeared in the “Quarterly Review,” and in “Blackwood’s Magazine.”  There was, indeed, ruffian, low-lived work,—­especially in the latter publication, which had reached a pitch of blackguardism, (it used to be called “Blackguard’s Magazine,”) with personal abuse,—­ABUSE,—­the only word,—­that would damage the sale of any review at this day.  The very reverse of its present management.  There would not now be the inclination for such rascal bush-fighting; and even then, or indeed at any period of the Magazine’s career, the stalwart and noble mind of John Wilson would never have made itself editorially responsible for such trash.  As to him of the “Quarterly,” a thimble would have been “a mansion, a court,” for his whole soul.  The style of the articles directed against the Radical writers, and those especially whom the party had nicknamed the “Cockney school” of poetry, may be conceived by its provoking the following observation from Hazlitt to me:—­“To pay those fellows, Sir, in their own coin, the way would be, to begin with Walter Scott, and have at his clump-foot.”  “Verily, the former times were not better than these.”