his collected _Sketches_, both first and
second series; which he desired me to receive "as a very small testimony
of the donor's regard and obligations, as well as of his desire to
cultivate and avail himself of a friendship which has been so pleasantly
thrown in his way. . . . In short, if you will receive them for my sake and
not for their own, you will very greatly oblige me." I had met him in
the interval at the house of our common friend Mr. Ainsworth, and I
remember vividly the impression then made upon me.

Very different was his face in those days from that which photography
has made familiar to the present generation. A look of youthfulness
first attracted you, and then a candor and openness of expression which
made you sure of the qualities within. The features were very good. He
had a capital forehead, a firm nose with full wide nostril, eyes
wonderfully beaming with intellect and running over with humor and
cheerfulness, and a rather prominent mouth strongly marked with
sensibility. The head was altogether well formed and symmetrical, and
the air and carriage of it were extremely spirited. The hair so scant
and grizzled in later days was then of a rich brown and most luxuriant
abundance, and the bearded face of his last two decades had hardly a
vestige of hair or whisker; but there was that in the face as I first
recollect it which no time could change, and which remained implanted on
it unalterably to the last. This was the quickness, keenness, and
practical power, the eager, restless, energetic outlook on each several
feature, that seemed to tell so little of a student or writer of books,
and so much of a man of action and business in the world. Light and
motion flashed from every part of it. _It was as if made of steel_, was
said of it, four or five years after the time to which I am referring,
by a most original and delicate observer, the late Mrs. Carlyle. "What
a face is his to meet in a drawing-room!" wrote Leigh Hunt to me, the
morning after I made them known to each other. "It has the life and soul
in it of fifty human beings." In such sayings are expressed not alone
the restless and resistless vivacity and force of which I have spoken,
but that also which lay beneath them of steadiness and hard endurance.

Several unsuccessful efforts were made by each to get the other to his
house before the door of either was opened at last. A son had been born
to him on Twelfth-day (the 6th January, 1837), and