“Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
    And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
    Round many Western islands have I been
    Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. 
    Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
    That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
    Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
    Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: 
    Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
    When a new planet swims into his ken,
    Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
    He stared at the Pacific—­and all his men
    Looked at each other with a wild surmise—­
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

I sat gazing at the man who had looked on Keats in the flush of his young genius, and wondered at my good fortune.  As the living poet folded up again the faded manuscript of the illustrious dead one, and laid it reverently in its place, I felt grateful for the honor thus vouchsafed to a wandering stranger in a foreign land, and wished that other and worthier votaries of English letters might have been present to share with me the boon of such an interview.  Presently my hospitable friend, still rummaging among the past, drew out a letter, which was the one, he said, he had been looking after.  “Cram it into your pocket,” he cried, “for I hear ——­ coming down stairs, and perhaps she won’t let you carry it off!” The letter is addressed to B.W.  Procter, Esq., 10 Lincoln’s Inn, New Square.  I give the entire epistle here just as it stands in the original which Procter handed me that memorable May morning.  He told me that the law question raised in this epistle was a sheer fabrication of Lamb’s, gotten up by him to puzzle his young correspondent, the conveyancer.  The coolness referred to between himself and Robinson and Talfourd, Procter said, was also a fiction invented by Lamb to carry out his legal mystification.

    “Jan’y 19, 1829.

“My Dear Procter,—­I am ashamed to have not taken the drift of your pleasant letter, which I find to have been pure invention.  But jokes are not suspected in Boeotian Enfield.  We are plain people, and our talk is of corn, and cattle, and Waltham markets.  Besides I was a little out of sorts when I received it.  The fact is, I am involved in a case which has fretted me to death, and I have no reliance except on you to extricate me.  I am sure you will give me your best legal advice, having no professional friend besides but Robinson and Talfourd, with neither of whom at present I am on the best terms.  My brother’s widow left a will, made during the lifetime of my brother, in which I am named sole Executor, by which she bequeaths forty acres of arable property, which it seems she held under Covert Baron, unknown to my Brother, to the heirs of the body of Elizabeth Dowden, her married daughter by her first husband, in fee simple, recoverable by fine—­invested property, mind, for there is the difficulty—­subject to leet and