: RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES]

Another hearty companion was Bryan Waller Procter, who, for literary
uses, anagrammed his name into Barry Cornwall, and made it famous, fifty
years ago, as that of the best song-writer in contemporary England. But
he had made a literary reputation before the epoch of his songs; there
were four or five dramatic and narrative poems to his credit published
during the first quarter of the last century. Procter was, indeed,
already a veteran in 1854, having been born in 1787, and bred to the
bar, to which he was admitted in 1831. But he spent the active thirty
years of his life in the discharge of that function which seems often
sought by respectable Englishmen-commissioner of lunacy. He sent my
father a small volume containing the Songs, and some fragments; they
fully deserved their reputation. The fragments were mostly scraps of
dramatic dialogue, of which one at least sticks in my memory:

"She was a princess; but she fell; and now Her shame goes blushing down
a line of kings."

As I recollect him, he may have looked like a commissioner of lunacy,
but he did not look like a poet; he was rather undersized, with a
compact head and a solemn face, and the quietest, most unobtrusive
bearing imaginable. He was a well-made little man, and he lived to a
great age, dying some time in the seventies, at the age of eighty-seven.
He told my father that after leaving Harrow School he was distinguished
in athletics, and for a time sparred in public with some professional
bruiser. He had been a school-mate of Byron and Sir Robert Peel, and had
known Lamb, Kean, and the other lights of that generation. He was a most
likeable and remunerative companion. His wife, who survived him (living,
I think, to be over ninety), was a woman of intellect and charm, and she
retained her attractiveness to the end of her life. There are poets who
are consumed early by their own fires, and others who are gently warmed
by them beyond the common span of human existence, and Barry Cornwall
was one of these, and transmitted his faculty, through sympathetic
affection, to his wife.

Of renown not less than the song-writer's was the metaphysical
theologian, James Martineau, then in the Liverpool epoch of his career.
He was a clean-cut, cold, gentle, dry character, with a somewhat
Emersonian cast of countenance, but with the Emersonian humanity and
humility left out. Like Emerson, he had ascended a Unitarian pulpit,
but, unlike Emer