passed eight more interesting days, for by the very novelty and strangeness of everything—­sleeping out every night but one, and then in the house of the chief of our band; dining under trees at noon; living on a footing of perfect equality and good-fellowship with people who are liable every day to be shot or hanged by the laws of their country; indeed, leading for a week as much of a vagabond life as if I were an Arab or a Mameluke,—­I came soon to have some of the gay recklessness that marked the character of my companions.”  This certainly would be a curious episode in the life of any law-abiding citizen, and in Mr. Ticknor’s case it was peculiarly astonishing, for his life, this week excepted, could certainly never be called, with any show of justice, “vagabond.”

Before returning to America he revisited London and Paris, in this last-named city seeing Talleyrand, of whom an interesting anecdote is recorded.  In London he met Sydney Smith, Brougham, Frere; in Scotland, where he made a short tour, he visited Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford; on his way back to London he visited Southey and Wordsworth; and once again in that city he saw Hazlitt, living in Milton’s house, and Godwin, who, he said, “is as far removed from everything feverish and exciting as if his head had never been filled with anything but geometry,...  When I looked at [him], and saw with what cool obstinacy he adhered to everything he had once assumed, and what a cold selfishness lay at the bottom of his character, I felt a satisfaction in the thought that he had a wife who must sometimes give a start to his blood and a stir to his nervous system.”  The feeling which betrays itself in this passage makes a still bolder and more amusing exhibit in one that follows:  “The true way to see these people was to meet them all together, as I did once at dinner at Godwin’s, and once at a convocation or ‘Saturday Night Club’ at Hunt’s, when they felt themselves bound to show off and produce an effect; for there Lamb’s gentle humor, Hunt’s passion and Curran’s volubility, Hazlitt’s sharpness and point and Godwin’s great head full of cold brains, all coming into contact and agreeing in nothing but their common hatred of everything that has been more successful than their own works, made one of the most curious and amusing olla podridas I ever met.  The contrast between these persons ... and the class I was at the same time in the habit of meeting at Sir Joseph Banks’s on Sunday evening, at Gifford’s, at Murray’s Literary Exchange, and especially at Lord Holland’s, was striking enough.”  In regard to the last statement we can feel no doubt, nor is it surprising that Mr. Ticknor found the society of Gifford and his friends more congenial than that of “persons” like Lamb and Hunt.