description of his Mentor’s manner, as well as behavior, that evening, I cannot but believe it to have been one of the usual ebullitions of the egoism, not to say of the uneasiness, known to those who were accustomed to hear the great moral philosopher discourse upon his own productions and descant upon those of a contemporary.  During this same visit, he was dilating upon some question in poetry, when, upon Keats’s insinuating a confirmatory suggestion to his argument, Mrs. Wordsworth put her hand upon his arm, saying,—­“Mr. Wordsworth is never interrupted.”  Again, during the same interview, some one had said that the next Waverley novel was to be “Rob Roy”; when Mr. Wordsworth took down his volume of Ballads, and read to the company “Rob Roy’s Grave,”—­then, returning it to the shelf, observed, “I do not know what more Mr. Scott can have to say upon the subject.”  When Leigh Hunt had his first interview with Wordsworth, the latter lectured to him—­finely, indeed—­upon his own writings; and repeated the entire sonnet,

  “Great men have been among us,”—­

which Hunt said he did “in a grand and earnest tone.”  Some one in a company quoting the passage from “Henry V.,”—­

  “So work the honey-bees,”

and each “picking out his pet plum” from that perfect piece of natural history, Wordsworth objected to the line,

  “The singing masons building roofs of gold,”

because, he said, of the unpleasant repetition of the “ing” in it!  Where were his ears and judgment on that occasion?  But I have more than once heard it said that Wordsworth had not a genuine love of Shakspeare,—­that, when he could, he always accompanied a “pro” with his “con,” and, Atticus-like, would “just hint a fault and hesitate dislike.”  Truly, indeed, we are all of “a mingled yarn, good and ill together.”

I can scarcely conceive of anything more unjust than the account which that ill-ordered being, Haydon, left behind him in his “Diary,” respecting the idolized object of his former intimacy, John Keats.  At his own eager request, after reading the manuscript specimens I had left with Leigh Hunt, I had introduced their author to him; and for some time subsequently I had frequent opportunities of seeing them together, and can testify to the laudations that Haydon trowelled on to the young poet.  Before I left London, however, it had been said that things and opinions had changed,—­and, in short, that Haydon had abjured all acquaintance with, and had even ignored, such a person as the author of the sonnet to him, and those “On the Elgin Marbles.”  I say nothing of the grounds of their separation; but, knowing the two men, and knowing, I believe, to the core, the humane principle of the poet, I have such faith in his steadfastness of friendship, that I am sure he would never have left behind him an unfavorable truth, while nothing could have induced him to utter a calumny of one who had received pledges of his former regard