, which was truly his patria, in the Italian sense,
that it must have hurt him to be unknown to any one in it; he said, a
little dryly, that he should not have thought I would have so much
difficulty; but he added, forgivingly, that this was not his own house,
which he was out of for the time. Then he spoke to me of Heine, and when
I showed my ardor for him, he sought to temper it with some judicious
criticisms, and told me that he had kept the first poem I sent him, for
the long time it had been unacknowledged, to make sure that it was not a
translation. He asked me about myself, and my name, and its Welsh
origin, and seemed to find the vanity I had in this harmless enough. When
I said I had tried hard to believe that I was at least the literary
descendant of Sir James Howels, he corrected me gently with "James
Howel," and took down a volume of the 'Familiar Letters' from the shelves
behind him to prove me wrong. This was always his habit, as I found
afterwards when he quoted anything from a book he liked to get it and
read the passage over, as if he tasted a kind of hoarded sweetness in the
words. It visibly vexed him if they showed him in the least mistaken;
but

"The love he bore to learning was at fault"

for this foible, and that other of setting people right if he thought
them wrong. I could not assert myself against his version of Howels's
name, for my edition of his letters was far away in Ohio, and I was
obliged to own that the name was spelt in several different ways in it.
He perceived, no doubt, why I had chosen the form liked my own, with the
title which the pleasant old turncoat ought to have had from the many
masters he served according to their many minds, but never had except
from that erring edition. He did not afflict me for it, though; probably
it amused him too much; he asked me about the West, and when he found
that I was as proud of the West as I was of Wales, he seemed even better
pleased, and said he had always fancied that human nature was laid out on
rather a larger scale there than in the East, but he had seen very little
of the West. In my heart I did not think this then, and I do not think
it now; human nature has had more ground to spread over in the West; that
is all; but "it was not for me to bandy words with my sovereign." He
said he liked to hear of the differences between the different sections,
for what we had most to fear in our country was a wearisome sameness of
type.