decent women for asking me to write in Albums.  There be ‘dark jests’ abroad, Master Cornwall, and some riddles may live to be clear’d up.  And ’tisn’t every saddle is put on the right steed.  And forgeries and false Gospels are not peculiar to the age following the Apostles.  And some tubs don’t stand on their right bottom.  Which is all I wish to say in these ticklish Times ——­ and so your servant,

    CHS.  LAMB.”

At the age of seventy-seven Procter was invited to print his recollections of Charles Lamb, and his volume was welcomed in both hemispheres as a pleasant addition to “Eliana.”  During the last eighteen years of Lamb’s life Procter knew him most intimately, and his chronicles of visits to the little gamboge-colored house in Enfield are charming pencillings of memory.  When Lamb and his sister, tired of housekeeping, went into lodging and boarding with T——­ W——­, their sometime next-door neighbor,—­who, Lamb said, had one joke and forty pounds a year, upon which he retired in a green old age,—­Procter still kept up his friendly visits to his old associate.  And after the brother and sister moved to their last earthly retreat in Edmonton, where Charles died in 1834, Procter still paid them regular visits of love and kindness.  And after Charles’s death, when Mary went to live at a house in St. John’s Wood, her unfailing friend kept up his cheering calls there till she set out “for that unknown and silent shore,” on the 20th of May, in 1847.

Procter’s conversation was full of endless delight to his friends.  His “asides” were sometimes full of exquisite touches.  I remember one evening when Carlyle was present and rattling on against American institutions, half comic and half serious, Procter, who sat near me, kept up a constant underbreath of commentary, taking exactly the other side.  Carlyle was full of horse-play over the character of George Washington, whom he never vouchsafed to call anything but George.  He said our first President was a good surveyor, and knew how to measure timber, and that was about all.  Procter kept whispering to me all the while Carlyle was discoursing, and going over Washington’s fine traits to the disparagement of everything Carlyle was laying down as gospel.  I was listening to both these distinguished men at the same time, and it was one of the most curious experiences in conversation I ever happened to enjoy.

I was once present when a loud-voiced person of quality, ignorant and supercilious, was inveighing against the want of taste commonly exhibited by artists when they chose their wives, saying they almost always selected inferior women.  Procter, sitting next to me, put his hand on my shoulder, and, with a look expressive of ludicrous pity and contempt for the idiotic speaker, whispered, “And yet Vandyck married the daughter of Earl Gower, poor fellow!” The mock solemnity of Procter’s manner was irresistible.  It had a wink in it that really embodied the genius of fun and sarcasm.