to “Professor Stowe.”  “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is at once referred to, and the talk goes on in that direction for some time.  At last both Dickens and Felton fell into such a paroxysm of laughter at Forster’s dogged determination to be complimentary to the world-renowned novel, that they could no longer hold out; and Forster, becoming almost insane with wonder at the hilarious conduct of his two visitors, Dickens revealed their wickedness, and a right jolty day the happy trio made of it.

Talfourd informs us that Forster had become to Charles Lamb as one of his oldest companions, and that Mary also cherished a strong regard for him.  It is surely a proof of his admirable qualities that the love of so many of England’s best and greatest was secured to him by so lasting a tenure.  To have the friendship of Landor, Dickens, and Procter through long years; to have Carlyle for a constant votary, and to be mourned by him with an abiding sorrow,—­these are no slight tributes to purity of purpose.

Forster had that genuine sympathy with men of letters which entitled him to be their biographer, and all his works in that department have a special charm, habitually gained only by a subtle and earnest intellect.

It is a singular coincidence that the writers of two of the most brilliant records of travel of their time should have been law students in Barry Cornwall’s office.  Kinglake, the author of “Eothen,” and Warburton, the author of “The Crescent and the Cross,” were at one period both engaged as pupils in their profession under the guidance of Mr. Procter.  He frequently spoke with pride of his two law students, and when Warburton perished at sea, his grief for his brilliant friend was deep and abiding.  Kinglake’s later literary fame was always a pleasure to the historian’s old master, and no one in England loved better to point out the fine passages in the “History of the Invasion of the Crimea” than the old poet in Weymouth Street.

“Blackwood” and the “Quarterly Review” railed at Procter and his author friends for a long period; but how true is the saying of Macaulay, “that the place of books in the public estimation is fixed, not by what is written about them, but by what is written in them!” No man was more decried in his day than Procter’s friend, William Hazlitt.  The poet had for the critic a genuine admiration; and I have heard him dilate with a kind of rapture over the critic’s fine sayings, quoting abundant passages from the essays.  Procter would never hear any disparagement of his friend’s ability and keenness.  I recall his earnest but restrained indignation one day, when some person compared Hazlitt with a diffusive modern writer of notes on the theatre, and I remember with what contempt, in his sweet forgivable way, the old man spoke of much that passes nowadays for criticism.  He said Hazlitt was exactly the opposite of Lord Chesterfield, who advised his son, if he could not get at a thing in a straight line,