slight as they are, form
perhaps the most interesting section of the book before us. It embraces
short notices of Byron, Rogers, Crabbe, the three chief Lakers, Leigh
Hunt, Hazlitt, Carlyle, Haydon, Campbell, Moore and a few others.
Coleridge, we are told, had a "prodigious amount of miscellaneous
reading" always at command, and forgot everything in the pleasure of
hearing himself talk when he could secure an audience. Wordsworth's
poverty at one period of his life is illustrated by his having been met
emerging from a wood with a quantity of hazelnuts which he had gathered
to eke out the scanty dinner of his family. Doubtless he had collected
finer things than nuts, if less available for material sustenance.
Wordsworth, breakfasting with Rogers, excused his being late by saying
he had been detained by one of Coleridge's long monologues. He had
called so early on Coleridge, he explained, because he was to dine with
him that evening. "And," said Rogers, "you wanted to draw the sting out
of him beforehand." Campbell was in society cautious, stiff and precise,
like much of his verse, but was subject to occasional outbreaks,
analogous to the "Battle of the Baltic" and "Ye Mariners of England."
Crabbe resembled Moore in his passion for lords. Walter Scott was big,
broad, easy and self-poised, like one of his own historical novels. He
impressed Procter more than any of the rest as great, and consciously
great. Leigh Hunt was "essentially a gentleman;" he "treated all people
fairly, yet seldom or never looked up to any one with much respect;" and
"his mind was feminine rather than manly, without intending to speak
disrespectfully of his intellect."

Part IV. of the book is devoted to selections from letters written to
Procter. Jeffrey, Byron, Carlyle and Beddoes are the chief
correspondents quoted. Those from Byron are strongly Byronesque, but
give us no new points, unless in the high moral tone he assumes in
defending _Don Juan_. That poem does, he avers, no injustice to the
English aristocracy, which he maintains to have been at that time the
most profligate in Europe. The prominent details of the queen's trial
and others like it would "in no other country have been _publicly_
tolerated a moment." Was it Byron's theory, then, that all kinds of
morality are merely relative, and the outgrowth of local conditions?

The materials at the command of the editor of this book were obviously
very meagre. Yet it has undoubted value. I