ich or poor, feeble or vigorous in health, a man of
the world or a recluse, ardent or cold in emotions, his figure is
strangely wanting in light and shade. As a poet and a thinker his
character is equally evasive. His verse can rarely be pronounced
decidedly feeble or commonplace, and never lofty or thrilling. He will
be remembered by two or three short poems tender in fancy and soft in
finish. Inquirers who are tempted by these to explore the rest of his
productions will find them readable, but not memorable, and will wonder
at learning that a tragedy of Procter's attained a success on the London
stage denied to either of Tennyson's.

The poet will go down to posterity under an assumed name, that under
which he was almost exclusively known to readers of his own day. Thus
buried under an anonym, and gravitating at all points toward mediocrity,
it is odd that so much interest should centre in his life and works as
we actually find to exist. This interest may be mainly ascribed to his
surroundings. Like Rogers, he shines by reflected light. He numbered
among his friends or acquaintances, in varied shades of intimacy, almost
every celebrity in British literature during two generations. To these
were added leading representatives of the fine arts, music and the
drama--Mendelssohn, Lawrence, Landseer, Turner, the Kembles, Edmund
Kean. It was a notable visiting-list that embraced all the Lake school,
Byron, Dickens, Thackeray, the two Lyttons, Scott, Sydney Smith and a
number of others as incongruous in time and tenets. Good taste,
amiability, the means and disposition to entertain, would have sufficed,
with the aid of less of intellectual and imaginative power than Procter
possessed, to keep him in good companionship with men like these, who
felt the need of a common professional rallying-point in the metropolis.
He avoided collision with any of their crotchets and idiosyncrasies. His
antipathies were few, and what he had he was generally successful in
repressing. De Quincey seems to have been lowest in his estimation. The
genial Elia and the fiery Hazlitt divided his especial and lasting
attachment.

Procter was always haunted by the very natural impression that he owed
to the world some use of the opportunities afforded him for the study of
mind and character by such a concourse of leading men. But he failed to
make even a move toward the discharge of that task until a short time
before the close of his life. The results,