spoke of his guileless nature at the festal monthly board of the magazine, and no one dreamed that this gay and mock-smiling London cavalier was about to begin a career so foul and monstrous that the annals of crime for centuries have no blacker pages inscribed on them.  To secure the means of luxurious living without labor, and to pamper his dandy tastes, this lounging, lazy litterateur resolved to become a murderer on a large scale, and accompany his cruel poisonings with forgeries whenever they were most convenient.  His custom for years was to effect policies of insurance on the lives of his relations, and then at the proper time administer strychnine to his victims.  The heart sickens at the recital of his brutal crimes.  On the life of a beautiful young girl named Abercrombie this fiendish wretch effected an insurance at various offices for L18,000 before he sent her to her account with the rest of his poisoned too-confiding relatives.  So many heavily insured ladies dying in violent convulsions drew attention to the gentleman who always called to collect the money.  But why this consummate criminal was not brought to justice and hung, my Lord Abinger never satisfactorily divulged.  At last this polished Sybarite, who boasted that he always drank the richest Montepulciano, who could not sit long in a room that was not garlanded with flowers, who said he felt lonely in an apartment without a fine cast of the Venus de’ Medici in it,—­this self-indulgent voluptuary at last committed several forgeries on the Bank of England, and the Old Bailey sessions of July, 1837, sentenced him to transportation for life.  While he was lying in Newgate prior to his departure, with other convicts, to New South Wales, where he died, Dickens went with a former acquaintance of the prisoner to see him.  They found him still possessed with a morbid self-esteem and a poor and empty vanity.  All other feelings and interests were overwhelmed by an excessive idolatry of self, and he claimed (I now quote his own words to Dickens) a soul whose nutriment is love, and its offspring art, music, divine song, and still holier philosophy.  To the last this super-refined creature seemed undisturbed by remorse.  What place can we fancy for such a reptile, and what do we learn from such a career?  Talfourd has so wisely summed up the whole case for us that I leave the dark tragedy with the recital of this solemn sentence from a paper on the culprit in the “Final Memorials of Charles Lamb”:  “Wainwright’s vanity, nurtured by selfishness and unchecked by religion, became a disease, amounting perhaps to monomania, and yielding one lesson to repay the world for his existence, viz. that there is no state of the soul so dangerous as that in which the vices of the sensualist are envenomed by the grovelling intellect of the scorner.”

One of the men best worth meeting in London, under any circumstances, was Leigh Hunt, but it was a special boon to find him and Procter together.  I remember a day in the summer of 1859 when Procter had a party of friends at dinner to meet Hawthorne, who was then on a brief visit to London.  Among the guests were the Countess of ——­, Kinglake, the author of “Eothen,” Charles Sumner, then on his way to Paris, and Leigh Hunt, the mercurial qualities of whose blood were even then perceptible in his manner.