How often have I seen Kenyon and Procter chirping together over an old quarto that had floated down from an early century, or rejoicing together over a well-worn letter in a family portfolio of treasures!  They were a pair of veteran brothers, and there was never a flaw in their long and loving intercourse.  In a letter which Procter wrote to me in March, 1857, he thus refers to his old friend, then lately dead:  “Everybody seems to be dying hereabouts,—­one of my colleagues, one of my relations, one of my servants, three of them in one week, the last one in my own house.  And now I seem fit for little else myself.  My dear old friend Kenyon is dead.  There never was a man, take him for all in all, with more amiable, attractive qualities.  A kind friend, a good master, a generous and judicious dispenser of his wealth, honorable, sweet-tempered, and serene, and genial as a summer’s day.  It is true that he has left me a solid mark of his friendship.  I did not expect anything; but if to like a man sincerely deserved such a mark of his regard, I deserved it.  I doubt if he has left one person who really liked him more than I did.  Yes, one—­I think one—­a woman....  I get old and weak and stupid.  That pleasant journey to Niagara, that dip into your Indian summer, all such thoughts are over.  I shall never see Italy; I shall never see Paris.  My future is before me,—­a very limited landscape, with scarcely one old friend left in it.  I see a smallish room, with a bow-window looking south, a bookcase full of books, three or four drawings, and a library chair and table (once the property of my old friend Kenyon—­I am writing on the table now), and you have the greater part of the vision before you.  Is this the end of all things?  I believe it is pretty much like most scenes in the fifth act, when the green (or black) curtain is about to drop and tell you that the play of Hamlet or of John Smith is over.  But wait a little.  There will be another piece, in which John Smith the younger will figure, and quite eclipse his old, stupid, wrinkled, useless, time-slaughtered parent.  The king is dead,—­long live the king!”

Kenyon was very fond of Americans, Professor Ticknor and Mr. George S. Hillard being especially dear to him.  I remember hearing him say one day that the “best prepared” young foreigner he had ever met, who had come to see Europe, was Mr. Hillard.  One day at his dinner-table, in the presence of Mrs. Jameson, Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle, Walter Savage Landor, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Browning, and the Procters, I heard him declare that one of the best talkers on any subject that might be started at the social board was the author of “Six Months in Italy.”  It was at a breakfast in Kenyon’s house that I first met Walter Savage Landor, whose writings are full of verbal legacies to posterity.  As I entered the room with Procter, Landor was in the midst of an eloquent harangue on the high art of portraiture.  Procter had been lately sitting