I have, as usual, been long in your debt, which I am pretty sure you will excuse as heretofore.  It gave me much pleasure to have a glimpse of your brother under circumstances which no doubt he will have described to you.  He spoke of his health as improved, and I hope it will continue to do so.  I understood from him that it was probable he should call at Rydal before his return to his own country.  I need not say to you I shall be glad, truly glad, to see him both for his own sake, and as so nearly connected with you.  My absence from home lately was not of more than three weeks.  I took the journey to London solely to pay my respects to the Queen upon my appointment to the Laureateship upon the decease of my friend Mr. Southey.  The weather was very cold, and I caught an inflammation in one of my eyes, which rendered my stay in the south very uncomfortable.  I nevertheless did, in respect to the object of my journey, all that was required.  The reception given me by the Queen at her ball was most gracious.  Mrs. Everett, the wife of your minister, among many others, was a witness to it, without knowing who I was.  It moved her to the shedding of tears.  This effect was in part produced, I suppose, by American habits of feeling, as pertaining to a republican government.  To see a grey-haired man of seventy-five years of age, kneeling down in a large assembly to kiss the hand of a young woman, is a sight for which institutions essentially democratic do not prepare a spectator of either sex, and must naturally place the opinions upon which a republic is founded, and the sentiments which support it, in strong contrast with a government based and upheld as ours is.  I am not, therefore, surprised that Mrs. Everett was moved, as she herself described to persons of my acquaintance, among others to Mr. Rogers the poet.  By the by, of this gentleman, now I believe in his eighty-third year, I saw more than of any other person except my host, Mr. Moxon, while I was in London.  He is singularly fresh and strong for his years, and his mental faculties (with the exception of his memory a little) not at all impaired.  It is remarkable that he and the Rev. W. Bowles were both distinguished as poets when I was a school-boy, and they have survived almost all their eminent contemporaries, several of whom came into notice long after them.  Since they became known, Burns, Cowper, Mason the author of ‘Caractacus’ and friend of Gray, have died.  Thomas Warton, Laureate, then Byron, Shelley, Keats, and a good deal later[208] Scott, Coleridge, Crabbe, Southey, Lamb, the Ettrick Shepherd, Cary the translator of Dante, Crowe the author of ‘Lewesdon Hill,’ and others of more or less distinction, have disappeared.  And now of English poets, advanced in life, I cannot recall any but James Montgomery, Thomas Moore, and myself, who are living, except the octogenarian with whom I began.

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Walter Scott died 21st Sept. 1832.  S.T.  Coleridge " 25th July 1834.  Charles Lamb " 27th Dec. 1834.  Geo. Crabbe " 3rd Feb. 1832.  Felicia Hemans " 16th May 1835.  Robert Southey " 21st March 1843.