by a book.”  It was inspiring to hear him dilate over “Plutarch’s Morals,” and quote passages from that delightful essay on “The Tranquillity of the Soul.”  He had such reverence for the wisdom folded up on his library shelves, he declared that the very perusal of the backs of his books was “a discipline of humanity.”  Whenever and wherever I met this charming person, I learned a lesson of gentleness and patience; for, steeped to the lips in poverty as he was, he was ever the most cheerful, the most genial companion and friend.  He never left his good-nature outside the family circle, as a Mussulman leaves his slippers outside a mosque, but he always brought a smiling face into the house with him.  T——­ A——­, whose fine floating wit has never yet quite condensed itself into a star, said one day of a Boston man that he was “east-wind made flesh.”  Leigh Hunt was exactly the opposite of this; he was compact of all the spicy breezes that blow.  In his bare cottage at Hammersmith the temperament of his fine spirit heaped up such riches of fancy that kings, if wise ones, might envy his magic power.

    “Onward in faith, and leave the rest to Heaven,”

was a line he often quoted.  There was about him such a modest fortitude in want and poverty, such an inborn mental superiority to low and uncomfortable circumstances, that he rose without effort into a region encompassed with felicities, untroubled by a care or sorrow.  He always reminded me of that favorite child of the genii who carried an amulet in his bosom by which all the gold and jewels of the Sultan’s halls were no sooner beheld than they became his own.  If he sat down companionless to a solitary chop, his imagination transformed it straightway into a fine shoulder of mutton.  When he looked out of his dingy old windows on the four bleak elms in front of his dwelling, he saw, or thought he saw, a vast forest, and he could hear in the note of one poor sparrow even the silvery voices of a hundred nightingales.  Such a man might often be cold and hungry, but he had the wit never to be aware of it.

Hunt’s love for Procter was deep and tender, and in one of his notes to me he says, referring to the meeting my memory has been trying to describe, “I have reasons for liking our dear friend Procter’s wine beyond what you saw when we dined together at his table the other day.”  Procter prefixed a memoir of the life and writings of Ben Jonson to the great dramatist’s works printed by Moxon in 1838.  I happen to be the lucky owner of a copy of this edition that once belonged to Leigh Hunt, who has enriched it and perfumed the pages, as it were, by his annotations.  The memoir abounds in felicities of expression, and is the best brief chronicle yet made of rare Ben and his poetry.  Leigh Hunt has filled the margins with his own neat handwriting, and as I turn over the leaves, thus companioned, I seem to meet those two loving brothers in modern song, and have again the benefit of their sweet society,—­a society redolent of