It was my good fortune, through the friendship of Procter, to make the acquaintance, at Rogers’s table, of Leslie, the artist,—­a warm friend of the old poet,—­and to be taken round by him and shown all the principal private galleries in London.  He first drew my attention to the pictures by Constable, and pointed out their quiet beauty to my uneducated eye, thus instructing me to hate all those intemperate landscapes and lurid compositions which abound in the shambles of modern art.  In the company of Leslie I saw my first Titians and Vandycks, and felt, as Northcote says, on my good behavior in the presence of portraits so lifelike and inspiring.  It was Leslie who inoculated me with a love of Gainsborough, before whose perfect pictures a spectator involuntarily raises his hat and stands uncovered. (And just here let me advise every art lover who goes to England to visit the little Dulwich Gallery, only a few miles from London, and there to spend an hour or two among the exquisite Gainsboroughs.  No small collection in Europe is better worth a visit, and the place itself in summer-time is enchanting with greenery.)

As Rogers’s dining-room abounded in only first-rate works of art, Leslie used to take round the guests and make us admire the Raphaels and Correggios.  Inserted in the walls on each side of the mantel-piece, like tiles, were several of Turner’s original oil and water-color drawings, which that supreme artist had designed to illustrate Rogers’s “Poems” and “Italy.”  Long before Ruskin made those sketches world-famous in his “Modern Painters,” I have heard Leslie point out their beauties with as fine an enthusiasm.  He used to say that they purified the whole atmosphere round St. James Place!

Procter had a genuine regard for Count d’Orsay, and he pointed him out to me one day sitting in the window of his club, near Gore House, looking out on Piccadilly.  The count seemed a little past his prime, but was still the handsomest man in London.  Procter described him as a brilliant person, of special ability, and by no means a mere dandy.

I first saw Procter’s friend, John Forster, the biographer of Goldsmith and Dickens, in his pleasant rooms, No. 58 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.  He was then in his prime, and looked brimful of energy.  His age might have been forty, or a trifle onward from that mile-stone, and his whole manner announced a determination to assert that nobody need prompt him.  His voice rang loud and clear, up stairs and down, everywhere throughout his premises.  When he walked over the uncarpeted floor, you heard him walk, and he meant you should.  When he spoke, nobody required an ear-trumpet; the deaf never lost a syllable of his manly utterances.  Procter and he were in the same Commission, and were on excellent terms, the younger officer always regarding the elder with a kind of leonine deference.

It was to John Forster these charming lines were addressed by Barry Cornwall, when the poet sent his old friend a present of Shakespeare’s Works.  A more exquisite compliment was never conveyed in verse so modest and so perfect in simple grace:—­